MVP

As I talk to more and more people who dream of creating their own app so they can sell it and escape the “9-5” office job, I’m seeing some patterns.  There are a lot of people like you who have great ideas.  You all have lots of energy and passion to move forward with your idea.  You have ambitions of hitting it big and making lots of money with your app.  Cashing out and enjoying life for all your hard work.

And then you start talking with firms that do outsourced development.  You sign the NDA, give them sketches and your ideas on how the app will work.  They go off and quote the app development for you.  And only on one platform (i.e. iOS or Droid).  Then you get the quote and sticker shock; high 5-figure or low 6-figure quotes.  Ouch!

There’s a bit of frustration because the quotes you get are so high and also the dependance on someone else to develop your app.  You become concerned you’ll be trapped in the 9-5 job forever.

If this story sounds familiar to you so far, then know there is hope.

You probably already know it’s risky and tough to bring an app to market, especially if you’re working a day-job.  You want to minimize that risk and also minimize how much you spend developing your app.  Here are two “tools” which help you minimize both

1. Create a Minimal Viable Product (“MVP”)
2. Create your MVP with bubble.is

Create a Minimal Viable Product

When you have an app idea, you have a mental image or vision of what it look like.  However your potential customers don’t. So it’s important to create something as quick as possible to show potential customers and get their feedback (and more importantly, validate you have a good idea).

An MVP is not a fully functional app but it does provide enough functionality so your potential customers can interact with the app and get value from it.  You might even have parts of the app which are not functional but have visual “mockups” of the function.  Put another way, your MVP should have enough core-functionality such that your customers can get the “essence” of the app allowing them to give you the critical feedback you need.

Create your MVP with Bubble

There was a time when creating an MVP took many weeks or months with “traditional” app development tools.  Because of this, a number of “wireframe” and “mockup” tools were brought to market to help a fill the gap between a paper napkin and a functional prototype.

These tools allowed you to create visual representations of what your app would look like.  Over time with newer versions of these tools, you could add some level of interaction with the app.  But at the end of the day, the wireframes and mockups are “throwaway work” – customers won’t buy them.

I’ve personally used both types of tools in the past.  However, the beauty of technology and innovation is that app development tools get better.  And bubble is one of those game-changing tools which allows you to “compress” and “combine” all of the wireframe and mockup activities into your functional MVP.  Said another way, instead of using multiple tools and iterating on wireframes and mockups, bubble is “one-stop” shopping.  It allows you to not only do that up-front concept design but you can also implement the functional behavior.  And you can do so for effectively the same amount of time you’d spend just creating a wire frame and mockup.  Bonus – No throw-away work.  Bonus #2 –  Bubble allows you do to that for FREE!

While there is a learning curve with bubble, there are lots of training resources and a vibrant bubble community to help you.  There are even templates of popular apps so you’re not starting from a “blank sheet of paper”.

Summary

As a re-cap, lots of you have ambitions of making money by creating an app.  You want to make a better life for yourself and your family.  Get out of the 9-to-5 rat race.  Creating an MVP to get customers interacting with your app as soon as possible is critical to your success.  Using bubble to create your MVP not only saves you 75% of the time (by some estimates), you can do it for FREE.  If you were concerned with the price tag of creating an app, you now have a great alternative with bubble to help you on your journey to more success!