With the extensive usage of Social media apps – influencer marketing has become the go-to marketing strategy for promoting your mobile app businesses.

If you are reading this blog, we assume that you have already developed an app for your startup and shifting your focus from production to promotion mode. Your app may be brilliant and work like a Swiss clock, but without pursuing several methods of marketing, it can languish in the app stores, and your business will languish with it.

We’ve addressed several ways to market a new app in other posts:  app store optimization, word of mouth, advertising, and strategic partnerships. Another way to make a big splash is to have celebrities and social media influencers to help bring awareness to your product and brand.

Why influencers are valuable for your app promotion?

Celebrities and other influencers have the power to promote your app based on their exposure, popularity, mission, and values. Whether or not people like them, they get attention, and so your app will, too. They often have a variety of avenues to get their message out, from TV interviews to blogs and Twitter feeds. For better or worse, many people trust celebrities, and the products they promote benefit from the generalized trust.

Keep in mind that these people do not necessarily have to be globally known or have millions of followers and fans on Instagram or Twitter. Someone with thousands of followers can still add great value to your app promotion.

How to identify influencers?

Google Alerts is a great tool. You can set up alerts on topics relevant to your product, and see who’s talking about them, and where.

To find authorities and influencers in your industry, AuthoritySpy is a great tool. To find people who are popular in social media in your industry, try Klout. Klout even ranks them based on their social influence.

There are many other online tools to help you identify influencers. Use the mother of all online tools, Google, and search “tools to find influencers”. ☺

Why would a celebrity help me?

You may wonder why a celebrity might want to endorse your app/product. It might simply be because they get paid, or get a commission from the sale of the products they talk about. But often, it’s because they want to share useful and cool stuff with their fans and followers.

How to secure an Influencer endorsement?

If your app startup is well funded, you may have the budget to hire a professional celebrity broker company to make a deal happen for you. But for self-funded bootstrap app startups, there are more creative ways. It does not have to be a formal, proper endorsement of your app; a quick mention of your app in their blog or social media can get you incredible exposure.

Work out a deal.

Offer an upfront payment or small equity in your app business in exchange for endorsing your app, or some commission or royalty in your product sales. Stamped, an app for reviewing businesses and restaurants has investors like Ellen DeGeneres, Ryan Seacrest, and Justin Bieber.  

Justin Bieber also took an equity stake in Shots, a selfie-sharing app for which he led a $1,100,000 seed round. Shots’ popularity spiked when Bieber started using it to post personal photos. 

There are also influencer marketplaces like Tribe where you can find and pay influencers to promote your brand.

Find a common cause

Many celebrities are passionate about some social causes close to their heart—or just like to burnish their reputation. Even if your app doesn’t directly contribute to a social cause, you can associate yourself with a charity or non-profit.  For example, you may decide to contribute a certain percentage of your profits to educating kids in underdeveloped countries. Then you can identify and approach celebrities who are already involved in some charities that improve the conditions of kids in underdeveloped countries.

Ask them.

Simply ask your targeted celebrities and influencers to use your product and spread the word if they like it. Educate them on how it would help their fans and followers. It is usually difficult to approach celebrities directly; focus on building relationships with their close associations, like personal assistants, PR managers, hairdressers, and personal trainers. Get those people to use your product and introduce it to the celebrity. Give them free access before the product is even publically launched.

For example, Instagram had Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, using the app before it launched. When the app launched, he tweeted about the app to his million-plus followers.

Don’t procrastinate. Be bold.

Before you approach celebrities, you have to believe in yourself and your product. Many people self-sabotage by procrastinating. They find excuses, like ‘My app is not looking good enough yet; it’s not 100% free of bugs yet; if I lose them, I lose them forever;’ etc.  Don’t be one of them. Ask for help. There are thousands of people you can approach.

Many celebrities, like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay Z, Aston Kutcher, Tom Hanks, and Jessica Alba, have all invested into tech startups. It’s certainly becoming a trend for celebrities to get involved in the tech space, and many are inspired and looking for good opportunities.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) means building a product with basic yet necessary features that allows you to release it to the market immediately. Below are the reasons why MVP is Key to your product success.

At Appomate we’re often asked to build Apps to supplement or complement an existing product, potentially to improve app business processes or create a new revenue stream. In such cases, building an MVP is advantageous because it involves less effort enabling the appreneurs to test their app idea with potential customers/users.

Most of appreneurs approach us with App projects which is in the “idea” phase. At this phase the apprenuers have typically done some market or user research to validate their idea, but when it comes to the budget that’s another story.

We deal with Appreneurs who often only have very little money raised, potentially have investors ready to go when the idea is further along or they are yet to start raising funds, it’s at this point we ask them the below question:

“Have you heard the concept of MVP?”

Based on how many prospective clients haven’t, I’d like to explain what MVP means and why the concept of MVP is very important.

What is “Minimum Viable Product”?

Now, if you haven’t read the Lean Startup yet, add it to your list. It’s the foundation for many processes that companies use.

Minimum Viable Product or MVP is more of a concept or philosophy than a specific process or technique. The idea is to get something to market as soon as possible, get real people using it and then iterate or add features based on user feedback instead of assumptions.

It’s very tricky to actually execute a minimum viable product launch, however. No one wants to put anything but their best foot forward, so why would anyone put something out into the world that’s… unfinished? (Gasp!).

To note, there’s a misconception that an MVP is unpolished or unfinished. That’s not the case. It may not have all the features you dreamed of, but it has all the functionality you need.

An additional factor is that app businesses shouldn’t waste valuable time and resources on anything that isn’t essential to their business.

The only way to really know what your app needs is to see how people are using it.

The core methodology is “Build. Measure. Learn.” The point is to learn quickly and iterate.

Here’s an Example

Think back to the first time you used Facebook.

Did Facebook look like it does today?

Do you think that Mark Zuckerberg, in his Harvard dorm room, envisioned the Facebook that exists now?

Of course not.

How could he? In fact, some technology that Facebook relies on wasn’t even available back then.

Then, how did Facebook turn to be a social giant now? Initially, Facebook rolled out an MVP to Harvard students and the prototype was tested for user feedback. In fact, some technology that Facebook relies on wasn’t even available back then.

One of the reasons Facebook is especially successful is that they’re constantly assessing, iterating and evolving. In order for Facebook to be successful, they weren’t able to build a product, “take it to market” it and then sit back while the dollars rolled in.

To this day, Facebook develop the code on all of its platforms (website, iOS, Android, etc.) twice a day, every day!

Can you remember about using Twitter for the first time?

Twitter didn’t start out with a “retweet” button, but after the company realized that many people were copying other user’s tweets and pasting them into their Twitter feeds manually they incorporated this into their app.

Instagram? Remember when Instagram had no video? But then Vine came along and everyone was talking about it. So the decision was made to incorporate video to continue to gain the marketplace. Remember when there was no Instagram website? Or no Android version? I do, and my nieces and nephews all had Instagram before I did so I was certainly not an “early adopter” the app.

Instagram’s concept was that they could do better by getting to market, and they’d build an Android version and a web version while iOS users started using the product. They were out there, even though they weren’t finished.

What does MVP mean for your business/app idea?

The term MVP in itself is quite broad. For an app where do you start? Where do you stop? What functions should you include and which can you do without for your launch? Which features are essential?

Below are some guidelines you can use to guide you through that process.

1. The App has to look and feel finished. This means it should be fully branded and designed, it shouldn’t have bugs, and every visible button and link should work. First impressions and trust are still immeasurably important– maybe even more so for an MVP approach
2. The App’s core functions need to work. For example, if your app is a photo-sharing service, it needs to be able to share photos. It doesn’t need to have full tagging capabilities or social media sharing options yet, but it needs to do what it’s supposed to do.
3. Anything that doesn’t absolutely require automation can begin as a manual process. Let’s face it, it’s unlikely your app will generate a million users in your first month. No doubt it would be nice to have a custom-built automated customer service platform, perhaps with live chat, but it’s probably smarter to launch phase one of your app with a simple email address or phone number that users can contact for assistance.
4. Implementing change needs to be as simple as possible, with few barriers. When businesses decide to release a “phase one”, “light” or BETA versions of their app with the intention of having it grow, The key is you need to react to how people currently using it. You have to keep improving it. If something clearly needs to be added or changed you need to do this as rapid as possible to keep your users engaged and open to recommending your app to others.
5. Owners and Investors need to keep an open mind. While the MVP process is highly successful in app development and technology circles there’s still a lot of trial and error involved. If the decision-makers are fighting the process the whole way, it will surely fail.

Understanding MVP is the key to success: Benefits

• Having a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps you to validate your App ideas
• Ready to release the simpler version of your product to the market
• Test the necessary features for your target audience.
• Helps you understand your buyer intent, persona and their preferences
• Helps you to get the user feedback immediately which you can incorporate in your product instantly

Why consider an MVP strategy?

The reality is that many app entrepreneurs should rethink what it means to launch an app.

Traditional methods of product launches are suffering as products are coming to market faster than ever. Developing your idea for 2 years in a dark room, all in preparation for the “Big Reveal” isn’t as smart of a move as it used to be, especially if your competitor launches their product while you’re constantly fine-tuning yours.

If I’ve piqued your interest (and I’m sure hope I have), please research the topic a little more. You’ll find that tonnes of people are talking about it, and a lot of really successful entrepreneurs believe strongly in it.

If you’d like to share your app idea with one of our team members who understand the concept of the MVP and discuss how you could roll out your app idea with this strategy in mind call us today on 1300 781 794

There is no other business in the world that can scale up as fast as tech startups. Given the competition to invest in startups, Investors not just evaluate startups based on the awesome startup idea that you have come up with. But they delve deep evaluating the core team, the market size, business model, your commitment etc.

When you are in the early stages, getting investors is not easy.  Once you invite an investor to consider funding your company, what criteria do they consider?

Here are the top five things Investors look when investing in Startups:

THE ‘A’ TEAM

Investors truly believe in the saying, “Bet the jockey, not the horse”. The majority of early-stage investors say that they actually invest in the people backing the idea, rather than the startup idea itself.

A skillful and passionate team with a proven track record will always have an edge over competitors who have a great idea but a sub-par team.

While investors looking to invest in small business ask these questions to themselves, “Is the founder a doer or a dreamer? Are they determined and ready to put in the necessary work to build the business? Are they trustworthy?  What is the core team’s track record?”

 MARKET SIZE

Venture capitalists and angel investors consider the size of the target market paramount. How big the company can grow depends on how big the market is for the product. To them, it doesn’t matter how mind-blowing the idea is if the market isn’t big enough. Most investors looking to invest in small businesses are on constant lookout for ideas that work across languages and cultures.

Investors ask this question to the founders, Is your idea universal? 

CLEAR BUSINESS MODEL

By looking at your business model, investors can identify how well you have thought out and planned your business.

They will look for how much and how soon the company can make returns, and what the exit strategy looks like.

Competitor analysis, revenue model, customer segments, and distribution channels are a few key things that need to be included in the business model.

RISKS

Investors take on considerable risk by investing in startups—especially early-stage startups. They want to know that the founding team or entrepreneur is aware of all the potential risks, and has developed a risk mitigation strategy to address these risks as they arise.

When they ask you, “What are the risks involved in this business?” the last thing you want to say is that there are no risks. Make sure you perform risk analysis. 

The standard SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis is one method to consider the risks and come up with mitigation plans.

SKIN IN THE GAME

Investors look for proof that you strongly believe in your idea. Have you quit your job to get this business started? How much of your personal savings have you invested?

Have you already made some progress with your idea by building a prototype of some sort? Investors are more comfortable getting on a train that is already moving, rather than one that is just an idea.  

Assess your start-up by these five criteria. If you were an investor, how interested would you be in your own company?

Considering these elements is one step towards knowing if you’re ready to start fundraising.

If you are interested in finding more funding options for your startup, we have collated a list of venture capitalists, angel investors in Australia. Check out the link.

Don’t forget to share this article with your startup friends and spread the word.

If you are an App entrepreneur/developer/marketer, it is necessary for you to know the top 7 App Monetization strategies to grow your mobile app Business.

In this blog, we dive deep into the different app monetization models available. By doing this, we also discuss which app monetization models are popular among the world’s most successful apps.

1. Paid apps

• This is the basic monetization model where you sell your app for a listed price on the app store or google play store. You need to choose a price from available price tiers which are anywhere from 0.99 cents to 999 USD. Most paid apps are under 10 AUD and there are few expensive apps. Agro Ezi app is one of them at 1599 AUD.
• The model works well for game apps and utility apps. Minecraft pocket at $9 per app made $326 million dollars in 2013 from paid downloads. Shiftworker, a calendar app for shift workers at $2.99 that topped the app store charts for a few months in 2015 is a good example of a paid utility app.
• The advantage of this model is that it provides quick cash flow. You get the money as soon as someone downloads the app but at the same time, it is not easy to convince people to pay as there are many free apps. Your App has to be really unique and top quality for users to pay for it. They are shrinking part of the app store with less than 10% of the apps being paid apps. App store and google play store takes 30% of the revenue made as a transaction fee and pays you only the remaining 70%.

2. Free App with in-App advertising

• In this model, you list the app for free and build a large audience. You then sell advertising space in your app using ad network like Google Admob, flurry, Inmobi etc. These ad networks connect publishers(you, the app builder) with advertisers and manage the whole process of placing and managing advertisements. They take a cut of the money paid by the advertisers.
• If you are big enough, you can also build your own ad serving platform within the app. This gives you the flexibility to decide the price and other terms of advertisement. But the hidden costs in building your own ad server can burn a hole in your budget.
• Facebook follows this revenue model and has its own advertisement management platform. Facebook’s quarterly ad revenue crossed $4 billion in 2015.
• Works well for social network apps and gaming apps where people essentially wants to kill time. It does not work very well for utility apps. It might annoy users when they are trying to get things done.

3. Freemium

• In this model, you list the app for free and users can upgrade to a paid version or users can buy items (more features or physical goods) via in-app purchases. The premise is you engage the users, make them love your app and have them pay to get more.
• Works really well for gaming apps where users need to pay to access advanced levels or special powers. Example, Candy Crush Saga made $1.3 billion via in-app purchases in 2014 from 2% of its users. Dating apps are another example where you can browse your matches for free but need to pay to contact them. Tinder uses such a model.
• An advantage is a low barrier to entry for downloads but finding the sweet spot for paid features takes experimenting. Fewer features for free might create a high churn rate whereas too many features for free may not encourage the user to buy. App store takes 30% of in-app purchase revenue as well.
• The in-app purchase may also involve physical goods like clothes, accessories, etc. Since the app store account is used for payment, it makes the buying process really easy and quick for the buyer. Good news is at least there is no 30% transaction fee for physical goods.

4. Subscription

• In this model, the user pays a monthly or annual subscription fee to use the app. Most of the time these apps offer a 1 week or 1-month free trial to allow users to trial the app before they subscribe.
• Best suited for business/enterprise apps like CRM, invoicing apps and media/entertainment apps like music apps, news apps.
• The advantage is high lifetime value of customers due to ongoing revenue. On the other hand, users expect great customer support, 100% uptime, and bug-free app as they pay a subscription fee.
• Dropbox, Xero, Spotify uses this model.

5. Revenue split

• In this model, you create a marketplace, enable others to make money and then take a commission of the money they make. These apps are free to download and use.
• Uber and Airbnb are the 2 popular apps using this model. Uber takes a 20 to 25% commission of the money the drivers make. Airbnb charges 6% to12% of the money made by people renting out their property. This is the faster-growing revenue model because your users will do the sales for you to make themselves more money. The more money they make, the more you make.
• On the flip side, you need to ensure that the buyers are getting the service/product delivered. You can make them sign all disclaimers and protect yourself legally but if the sellers of product and service do not do the right thing, it will affect your brand. For example, Uber follows a very strict process before allowing drivers to use Uber. They check their past history, police clearance, the condition of their car, etc. to ensure the quality of the service.

6. Build and flip

• In this model, you build an app and sell it for a decent profit in marketplaces to someone who can build further on it. Flippa.com, Chupamobile are some marketplace where you can sell your app source code to other developers.
• This model allows a quick return than other models but the opportunity is very limited. Low-risk low reward. People buy it to save time and money in development.

7. Build a brand and sell to a strategic buyer

• In this model, you build a big user base and sell the app to a big company. You build your app and take it to a stage where you have a lot of active users who love your app, use it frequently and would be very disappointed without it. Big brands who can create a lot more value with your app will knock your door.

i. Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion in cash
ii. Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion
iii. Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19 billion

Knowing these 7 app monetization models, what do you think works best for your app?

Keep in mind, it does not have to be just 1 monetization model but also a combination of 1 or more monetization models.

Spotify has a free version that uses in-app advertising. But also has a subscription model for an ad-free premium version. They use the revenue to pay royalties to music artists and distributors while taking a 30% commission. A blend of 3 app monetization models.

We hope that this blog post helped you in deciding the right monetization model for your app.

The world is waiting for your Idea, if not now then when?

Schedule a FREE consultation session with our App Experts. 

1300 781 794

How should I raise funding for my mobile app startup?

This has been the question asked by most of the app entrepreneurs. A recent study by US Bank study, Jessie Hagen, says 82% of the startup fails because of the cash flow problems.

Raising capital could be the nightmare but as app entrepreneurs, if you have taken the leap to start up your business. Raising capital need not be as scary as starting up. In fact, it’s not rocket science. If your App idea has validated the product market fit, we are sure you will succeed in raising capital for your app business.

In this blog, we explain the key issues to explore before choosing your funding options, and the different options available during the life cycle of your app business.

Below are the three questions that pop up when you think about raising capital:

• Should I raise funds for my app idea, and if so, how much?
• When is the right time to get the funding for my app idea?
• What’s the best way to find money for my app?

The answer to these questions really depends on where do you see your app business in 10 years. Your decision-making becomes much easier once your vision is clear. 

TO RAISE CAPITAL OR NOT TO RAISE?

If you want the app to provide a good lifestyle with less working hours and steady cash flow for yourself, you’re better to self-fund as much as possible. It is possible to fund a successful business without external investment.

• Markus Frind founded the dating site Plentyoffish in 2003, and built it to a very profitable company without any external funding. In 2015, he sold it to the Match group for $575,000,000 U.S. in cash.
• Zoho is a very successful Enterprise software company with hundreds of thousands of users which never took any external funding, and founder Sridhar Vembu shared he has no interest in funding (or an exit strategy) in spite of getting calls from investors every day.

Of course, many people launching a tech start-up don’t have the option to fund the project themselves.

RAISING MONEY: WHEN DO YOU START?

This is a very difficult decision which weighs on the reality that the sooner you raise funds the quicker you can release your app vs. the fact that the sooner you bring an investor on board, the less you have to show them which generally5 results in them asking for a larger share of your idea.

A rule of thumb is that the best time to raise funds for an app idea is to ensure it’s there before you need it. Note that it’s a fact that getting investors on board when all you have is a great idea has its own challenges.

The best case scenario is that after you have spent a little time and money on things like an app prototype or generating data to show there is a demand for your product you can raise funds without giving away as much of your equity.

3 Main Funding Options

There are three main funding sources for tech start-ups: crowdfunding, angel investors, venture funds, and “going public,” or IPO. Let’s look at each.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a way of attaining capital from a large pool of individual investors, friends, family, etc. This funding option also leverages the networks of these individual investors, increasing your reach exponentially. There is no limit on how much money you can raise using crowdfunding.

However, most crowdfunding platforms impose a time limit within which the target has to be achieved. Therefore, it is important to be reasonable with your funding goal. Also, running a crowdfunding campaign involves a learning curve and takes a lot of time, so be realistic about that as well.

There are two types of crowdfunding options available.

• In reward-based crowdfunding, entrepreneurs offer rewards that supporters receive if the funding goal is attained, such as t-shirts, experiences, or the product itself when it’s complete.
• In equity-based crowdfunding, entrepreneurs offer equity in exchange for capital if the funding goal is attained.

 Some popular crowdfunding platforms include Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Popular crowdfunding platforms specializing in mobile apps include:

• Appsfunder
• Appbackr – Surf
• Appsplit
• Angel

Angel investors

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who invest in start-ups in exchange for equity in the start-up company. These investors generally invest in the early stages of funding, providing seed funding anywhere from $25,000 to $1,500,000.

To look for potential angel investors, do an internet search for angel investors in your city. Don’t write them a cold email; see if you have can get an introduction from a mutual contact. Use LinkedIn to find out if you have a mutual contact, and to research the angel investors that you’d like to target. Go to events they go to, network, and ask them out for a coffee.

MELBOURNE ANGEL INVESTOR GROUPS

• Australian Investment Network
• Melbourne Angels
• Melbourne Investors
• Business Angels

Venture funds

Venture capital funds typically come into play after seed funding. Venture capitalists obtain funds from a plethora of sources, such as foundations, wealthy individual groups, endowment funds, etc. They invest much larger amounts than angel investors. Venture capital firms invest in businesses, not ideas. They care about the ability to execute. So get your idea built, get customers, create revenue, and then approach VC firms.

Below are some VC firms in Australia.

• Adventure Capital 
• BlackBird Ventures
• OneVentures
• Starfish Ventures

Initial Public Offering

IPO, or Initial Public Offering, is when your company shares are sold to the general public, usually with the help of an investment bank. This is when the founders and investors monetize to get a return on their investment. A company selling common shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors. The ability to quickly raise potentially large amounts of capital from the marketplace is one reason many companies go public. The disadvantages of going public are that the founders lose a lot of control over their own business, and are subject to much higher legal and compliance requirements.

Some noteworthy Australian start-ups that went public includes:

• Started in 2002 in Sydney, Australia, with a $10,000 credit card, the founders say that the company has always been profitable. In December 2015 the company went public, selling 22,000,000 shares at $21 a piece, raking in $462,000,000 at a market valuation of nearly $4.4 billion.
• Founded in September 2011, founder Ruwan launched the platform in July 2012 and went public in just three years, in October 2014. The IPO raised $4,000,000, valuing the company at $30,000,000. It received a lot of criticism because it was too early and had only 64 paying customers at the time of IPO.

Alibaba and Facebook are two of the biggest IPO’s ever. In September 2014, Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company went public in the US NASDAQ exchange at $21.8 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever at that time. When Facebook went public in May 2012, it raised $16 billion.  

Fundraising is an essential skill for most start-ups. It isn’t enough just to build a fantastic app; you need business skills to build a sustainable company. Putting some time and research into fundraising from the start can help transform a great idea into a successful startup.

If you want to learn more about the different stages of funding an app startup, read about it here.

App Virality – Every marketer dreams that his marketing campaign goes viral. The most successful apps are the ones that spread like a virus. They leveraged their existing users to advertise the app to new users.

The concept of ‘Viral marketing’ was first popularised by Hotmail in 1995 when they put “‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail” in the footer of every user’s email.   This allowed them to reach a stage where the service was adding 270,000 new users every single day. In Dec 1997, Sabeer Bhatia sold the service to Microsoft for $400 million.

The key distinction of viral marketing is this. Traditional marketing follows the shape of a funnel, channeling from more users to fewer users.  Example 1000 users see your ad, 100 click the ad, 1 download the app. But viral marketing follows the shape of an inverted funnel, working from few to many users. 1 user download the app, that user invites 10 users, the 10 users invite 10 users each and the funnel gets wider and wider.

Viral marketing is the phenomena when people actively spread a product or service to others either voluntarily or involuntarily. In the Hotmail example, it was involuntary. Users spread the service just by using the service.  App virality is a becoming the trend, one such example is a video-sharing app, TikTok which hit 1 billion downloads in the App store within a few months of launch.

Viral marketing can also be created artificially by creating a clear need or incentive for a user to invite other users.

Create viral loops – App Virality

Some of the world’s greatest apps have been built with incentives for their users to invite more users. For example, Dropbox offers free storage when a user invites a friend to create a Dropbox account. Uber gives you taxi credit when you share your experience with your friends and invite them to use the service. AirBnB offers hosts money for introducing new hosts to AirBnB.

What feature can you build into your app to create this viral loop?

This is a very hot topic in-app marketing, and you can find plenty of books, articles, and websites on this topic if you google “viral loops”.

Build a network effect:

The network effect is a phenomenon where a product becomes more valuable and useful when more people use it. Facebook is a great example: you love it, even more, when all your friends are there participating with you. Whatsapp is more useful when all your friends and family, local and international, are using it, as it makes communication quicker and easier.

Network effect motivates users to invite their contacts to use an app because it will make the app even more valuable for them… and because it’s fun to share.

Does your app make use of network effect?

Does it have a feature that makes the app more valuable to a user when they have friends, family, a colleague using the app?

Keep in mind that all of this work only when your product is great. Creating viral loops and network effect are just two more possibilities for successful marketing that will add to your success and position you to produce that next great app idea that’s rattling around in your brain.

For other promotional techniques, see our posts on advertising, celebrity endorsement, and forming strategic partnerships.

As Startup founder or developer, we always had this question?

Which cross-platform software is right for my app/app business?

With the increasing trend in using cross-platform software, Xamarin and PhoneGap seem to top the charts.

This is definitely because of two reasons:

• The developer can create one source code for an app, which the platform then converts into the code for the native environment.
• The developer can reuse code that’s already been written, letting the platform handle the compiling. This makes it faster and more cost-effective.

Building apps in HTML5, HTML5 packaged (PhoneGap),  Xamarin or even going Native (iOS/Java) each has distinct advantages and disadvantages when building an app.

It’s up to each “app-renuer” to decide the level of look, feel and functions they desire for their app, versus the money and time they are willing to spend towards it.

While it’s obvious that there are no universal app solutions with each any app project having different requirements we have found more and more projects are being developed on Xamarin since they were acquired by Microsoft in March 2016.

We recently posted an article about Xamarin and how using it can reduce the time and budget requirements when building an app, but how does Xamarin compare to other cross-platform tools like PhoneGap?

Xamarin

Xamarin is a C# (Windows) based solution for cross-platform apps development. If you are developing using Xamarin, you are making apps in a native language which means increased reliability, flexibility, and faster performance.

Xamarin is widely used for development, testing and monitoring of cross-platform apps.

Using the capabilities of C# and wrapping all native iOS and Android libraries allow Xamarin to make changes, over the course of the project lifetime and making improvements to the application rather quickly.

The code base is shared so the main effort needs to be focused on UI implementation for different platforms. Since all the native features are supported in the end apps, they look and perform in a native way.

PhoneGap

Using PhoneGap for app development the developer will be coding in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, etc. adding the files to a local directory (similar to building a static website) and developing the app as a hybrid app.

PhoneGap can be a little easier to learn and therefore some developers can code quicker with PhoneGap than Xamarin. This sounds great to a developer. However, this ease and speed come as a result of PhoneGap not having the flexibility that Xamarin provides. This includes the inability to code natively for some components of the app.

The fact Xamarin allows the use of the native code for components like keyboards, design elements, etc. mean the native elements coded within the Xamarin app will be much faster. The look and the feel of the app natively adapt the device and the probability of facing ‘bugs’ is very less.

The native possibilities of Xamarin also allow a much greater ability to integrate with other devices.

Below we have created a table comparing the performance of applications built with PhoneGap vs. Xamarin which will help you to choose the right cross-platform software for your app.