I have an app idea. Now what?

Mobile apps are more popular today than ever before. With 5 million total apps currently available for download on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, apps are skyrocketing in number and show no signs of slowing.

It’s likely that you too have an idea for a potentially groundbreaking app. But how can you turn your idea into reality and move from concept to execution? How do you build a business around your app in today’s cluttered world?

In this article, I’ll discuss the fundamental strategies for turning your idea into an app and share some hands-on examples from appreneurs we’ve work with at Appster.

Let’s begin with the most obvious one.

1. Start with the problem

The essence of any successful product or service, including an app, resides in its ability to solve a problem. If your imagined app won’t make people’s lives better, then nobody will ever use it.

Whether you think of the matter in terms of adding something (e.g. increased pleasure, excitement, or fun) or taking something away (e.g. relief of boredom, sadness, or insecurity), your app must solve a specific problem that people want to get rid of.

Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to determine whether it’s significant enough for you to create a product to address it. How? By confirming that the problem is a “monetizable customer pain.”

Previously, I described the concept this way: “On a pain scale of one to five, a monetizable pain is a four or five (i.e. it needs to be addressed now).”

In order to test your pain hypothesis you must:

1. Find a sample of customers
2. Survey them in person or online
3. Evaluate the results
4. Do more testing to refine your understanding of your customers’ wants and needs

You’re looking to get brutally honest answers, so avoid priming your audience by not letting them know you’re working on a business idea.

Pose questions like:

• What is the most difficult aspect of X (i.e. the problem)?
• Tell me more about X. What happened the last time X occurred?
• Why was that experience so problematic or unenjoyable?
• What solutions, if any, are you currently using to address X? What do you find unsatisfactory about them? How do they need to be changed?

Use all the offline and online resources which you have access to—existing email lists, online message boards, social networking sites, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.— to find potential future customers and gather the detailed feedback you need.

Once you’ve accumulated enough feedback to confidently assert that you’ve discovered a problem that needs solving, it’s time to validate your product idea.

2. Research the market

3. Find a co-founder

4. Build and test your MVP

5. Marketing, metrics, and financials