Recently I was talking to a friend at one of the kid’s sports games. As we were standing there talking about the game and then business, he turns to me and asks “What exactly does your company do?” I simply said to him that the company I started develops apps that run on browsers, either running on laptops or mobile devices. Some of the apps I develop are for my company (Forever Memorial is one), but I also develop apps for other people (sorry, can’t share examples as they’re either used internally at companies for business process automation or still in development).
As we were talking, he was curious how I started working with clients. I told him that most of them have a basic idea and maybe some concepts on the proverbial “paper napkin”. I’ll ask questions about their idea to not only help me get a better understanding of what problem their app is trying to solve but also to have them think thru in more details how their app should work. As a sidenote, having detailed use-case discussions helps with the data structure design.
Eventually some mockups are created and then iterated based on client feedback (and sometimes end-user feedback). Once a client gives the “thumbs-up”, then it’s off to start work on an MVP, creating it and iterating on it (an app design is never “done”)
At this point my friend says to me – “You do all of that?” to which I said, “Yes I do”. This is the power of using bubble.is for developing web-apps that can behave very similar to native mobile apps. I gave a quick explanation how advances in technology have provided tools, such as bubble, to quickly and easily go from concept to launching an app with a team of one. A single person can now develop apps offering similar functionality to Uber, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Powerful technology and shockingly easy to use.
So he tells me about this challenge at work where his team needs to coordinate activities with people from other teams. And getting everyone on the same page takes forever. He asks if we can get together and brainstorm more on an app to help fix this activity coordination problem. Yes, yes we can…
