The Best-to-Market Advantage for Apps
It’s genuinely exciting to be in a world where inventors and entrepreneurs share their visions with us. Many of their ideas are brilliant. Some of them aren’t. We give our honest feedback.
But almost everyone we speak to is desperate to be first to market. There are maybe a few competitors in their space, but none of them have yet hit their idea bang on. So don’t we need to move quickly before one of them does…?
I always think this mode of thinking is wrong-headed. Because in the app world, there’s very little benefit to being first to market. What matters is being best-to-market.
What’s best-to-market?
It doesn’t matter if you are the first to execute your idea or not. It matters if you have the best app.
I’ve written in detail on other posts about what makes a good app. Is it engaging? Does it do exactly and precisely what it says? Will people keep coming back to use it?
And most importantly, does it cut back on unnecessary features which would distract the user, and therefore cause them to answer “no” to any of the above? This is the “do one thing and do it well” principle.
If your app is better — and I’m talking about ‘better’ in the specific, measurable ways that Google and Apple each use, to which the questions above are an approximation — then that’s all that matters. It will eventually reach its audience.
No respect for tradition
Because this is the truly brilliant thing about the app stores; Google Play in particular but Apple’s App Store too. You can go head-to-head with the big guys, the established performers, and win.
Neither Google nor Apple pay much respect to the status quo. If they think that your app is better for a particular search term than an established alternative from, say, Microsoft, then they will rank yours above theirs.
In my experience, this even applies to Google’s own apps on the Play Store, which are subject to the exact same ranking system as yours or mine.
But it takes some time
The only fly in the ointment is that neither app store moves particularly fast. Your better app won’t be recognised overnight; it can take months before you’ve built up enough data to demonstrate the fact. The only shortcut is to pay for installs, or work on your marketing outside of the app stores, so you can quickly build up the data.
Competition is actually positive
The best thing you can have is a successful, but flawed, competitor. That’s even better than having no competition at all. Their success demonstrates that your idea can gain market traction, and the fact that they aren’t particularly good at what they do will allow you to take over that market pretty easily.
A competitor — or even better, a moneyed competitor — will do you the favour of marketing your idea and getting people interested in its potential. You can ride on their coat-tails.
A cycling app with a vast marketing budget will spend much of it convincing people that, if you want to cycle like a boss, you really need an app to help you. Of course the rest of their marketing will direct people to their own app, but if you also have a cycling app with similar features they’ve done a lot of the hard work for you. Getting people to understand they need an app for cycling is the biggest part of the fight.
Learn from competitors’ research
A well-researched competitor is a wonderful resource. It’s easy to look at the competition and see only their mistakes, which is to say all the differences between your app and theirs.
I think that kind of negative analysis has its place, but in my experience people focus too strongly on it. It can be a bit of a comfort blanket, because it gives you a reason to easily dismiss the competition. That’s a little dangerous, and it’s healthier to look at the whole picture as objectively as you can. From the perspective of a potential customer, will your unique features really sell your app over your competitors’?
But it’s more helpful to look at what your competitors are doing right. Learn from how they present potentially complex ideas to the end user. See their pricing models. What do they do better than you? Asking these questions will help you improve very quickly — much more quickly than if you were learning over time through analysis of your own app and its users.
The better researched your competitor is, the more you can trust things like their layout, pricing or featureset. They’ve done all the analysis already.
Brand searches
Despite all the above, the one thing it’s very hard to compete with is branded searches. Luckily these only occur in very specific cases — but they are hard to beat, and it’s worth looking around before you invest in app development to see if it applies to your market.
Take office software for example. People don’t search for a word processor, they specifically want Microsoft Word, or Google Docs, or whatever they are used to. They will search for the brand and install it, even if better is available.
Luckily examples of this are few and far between. Only a tiny, tiny proportion of apps are their own recognised brand. And in any case if you’re looking to build a new Facebook for example, then you are breaking the cardinal rule of “do one thing and do it well”. Given the breadth of Facebook’s features your marketing would be near impossible to sharpen, even if you did have the vast development capacity to reproduce it all.
To conclude, don’t rush an app to the store just to gain a first-to-market advantage: you’re better off taking it slowly and ensuring you do a good job. Don’t be scared by competition, it can really help. And have faith in the fact that if you’re better, you’ll naturally bubble up to the top.
Tom Colvin is CTO at Apptaura. He’s been coding since his early teens and is a highly experienced mobile technology expert, commercially focused, energetic and with proven entrepreneurial capabilities. He’s pretty handy at crosswords too.
