5 Common Mistakes while developing your start up app

The momentum is on with Start-ups and Apps. Looks like there is a new start-up at every corner you look at. Expect the best and be prepared for the worst. Here are some tips to keep in mind while you build your first App.
1) Not knowing your product.
Trying to develop your App without knowing your product in & out can result in a failure. Focus on what value your product brings to your customer and how you can amplify that usability with your App. Questions such how the product is built, how it works, Marketing, Competition, ROI & Profitability come later. It is better to stick to a small area and over deliver than to try and please everybody. Define your market first. You can reverse engineer the App from the perspective of one user. Who is the ideal user of the App? What is his/her life like? What use is the App to them? How is the App making their life better? Will they recommend the App to their friends and why? These questions need to be answered. Remember, it is better to do well in a small demographic than fail at pleasing a larger market segment.

2) Going for the cheapest developer you find.
They say that the best things in life are free. It is true for air, love and the sun it is not so for App developers. Hiring an inexperienced App developer can cause your code to be “not of great quality”. While this code may pass through the scrutiny of the first few evaluations and may even work at the beginning, you may face a hurdle when you scale up. Foresight is developed by hands on experience. Bugs, errors, incompatibility with future versions, scaling issues & data management; all can ruin your time, finances and market reputation as you have the entire App recoded.

3) Looking at too many apps as inspiration.
Too much inspiration is as bad as no inspiration at all; for too much inspiration can be confusing to the best of minds. Looking at too many Apps as a reference and trying to cumulate them into your own App rarely works. This is because there are different types of UI and then there are sub-types of each type of UI; each with a different substructure and flow of data. What may work for one type may not work well with another type. Hence, trying to take a function from here & another from there will only lead to confusion and wasted time.

4) Not knowing the right UI for your product.
Design  UI. Design is how it works, UI is how it looks. Make your wireframe UI first (i.e. how the finished App will look) & then reverse engineer the design from there. This is because you won’t have to rework the entire design if it does not fit with your UI.

5) Waiting for the product to be perfect! Done is better than perfect! Always
It will never be the perfect time to launch. The fear of what reception your App may receive may keep you from launching. It is best to overcome this fear and launch. The 80-20 rule states that 80% of your work takes 20% of your time and the rest 20% takes 80% of your time. It is better to work out that 80% first and release the other 20% later. Never compromise on functionality, design or UI. You can however compromise on features and release them with subsequent updates.