Your App Should Do One Thing And Do It Well
Your app should do one thing and do it really well. More than anything, this is the advice that would have helped me when years ago I started my own app business. Do one thing and do it well. Since then I’ve spent a huge chunk of my working life trying to stop my own clients falling in the same trap: figure out only one thing your app does and be the best at it. But how, and why does this work?
Stand out among 5 million
There are about 3 million Android apps on Google Play, and about 2 million iOS apps. That means that whatever your app does, the vast probability is that there’s an app which more-or-less contains the functionality of your own.
But, you will say, my app does it better, or more cost effectively, or at better scale.
If it’s been designed and written intelligently, then yes, you may well be right. But the hard truth is that your audience isn’t immediately going to understand that benefit, so from the perspective of a person browsing the app store your advantage is a lot slimmer than you think.
So how do you stand out among so many competitor apps, many of which have the same functionality to an untrained eye?
The answer: go niche.
It’s a saturated market, and niche is better
The core of the “do one thing and do it well” principle is to pick something small enough that you can really excel at it.
For example, say you’re creating a new yoga app. At best guess there are over 10,000 existing yoga-related apps. The trouble with that much competition is that it’s almost impossible to be seen, regardless of how good your app is.
So don’t compete with yoga apps in general. It’s better to have a large slice of something smaller than it is to have a near-zero slice of a much larger subject. (For the entrepreneurs out there, this advice appears to contradict some business principles, so it might sit a little uneasily. But it’s absolutely true in the context of app stores, I promise.)
Be more specific. What can you focus on that none of the other apps do?
This is a really healthy question to ask, because it forces you to think in terms that your target audience will understand, about your product and business proposition. Why offer a yoga app? What’s the benefit to the user?
Answering the question carefully enough should take you on a journey of discovery about what your place is in the industry, and how best to market yourself.
Perhaps in the context of a yoga app, you’ll stop to consider all the benefits of yoga. One way to be more specific is to say, “well, if one of the benefits is relaxation, then let’s work on how to be the best yoga for relaxation app”. And suddenly your app has a much clearer focus, and sits in a world where there is much less competition. Yoga for relaxation.
Ditch features that don’t support your niche
In the phrase “Do one thing and do it well”, figuring out your niche is the “do one thing” part. Once that is clear in your mind, you need to figure out how to “do it well”.
The first step is to sharpen your app’s focus by reviewing its features. Now that you’re focusing on yoga for relaxation, strike out the functionality which doesn’t support the “for relaxation” part.
Why strike out features? Isn’t it at least neutral, and potentially even beneficial, to your target audience to have a slightly unrelated feature at their fingertips?
As I’ve outlined previously, the answer is no. Success on the app stores is so dependent on absolute crystal clear focus on what your app does.
Clarity of focus in your app store listing
Let’s say you add a stopwatch feature to your yoga for relaxation app. That’s not on the surface unhelpful — you could perfectly reasonably envisage a situation where a yoga participant might need a stopwatch, even if it’s slightly tangential.
But obviously there’s no point in adding that feature without mentioning it in your app store listing. So you add a quick screenshot of the stopwatch and mention it briefly in the description. Unfortunately that has the effect of softening your app’s focus in the eyes of the user browsing the app store. Every screenshot or sentence in the description which doesn’t perfectly match your mission statement doesn’t add to your app’s appeal, it dilutes it. That’s because, to a greater or lesser degree, it confuses the user.
To put it simply, it makes them see fewer examples of what they are looking for, rather than more.
Clarity of focus in development
And there’s the additional question of development focus. If you added a stopwatch feature to your yoga for relaxation app, that costs development time. That’s time that could have been spent reinforcing your message rather than softening it.
Your developers — if you’ve been lucky enough to find a really great development partners— should intimately understand your app’s mission statement and work with you in planning the product’s future direction. Being the custodians of your product, they also make hundreds of micro-decisions you’re likely unaware of, and it’s your job to make sure they “get it” so the right decisions are made. Maintaining a clear focus will help both of you work in synergy.
So what should you do?
Don’t fall into the trap of just adding more features. Good apps don’t need lots of features, they just need to get the basics right.
In the yoga for relaxation example, that probably means investing in the quality of your videos and making sure your user experience is really slick. Make it useful and usable. The basics.
It’s easy to convince yourself that a feature you’ve added is essential. I see this again and again with my clients. In reality it probably isn’t, but you can only see that by refocusing your mind on what your “one thing” is.
Often clients come to us simply wanting to earn a larger userbase (and by extension, earn more money). The most effective way of achieving this is to pare down the app to its most basic features, and invest in making those better. Everything will run smoother: your development team, your marketing, your organics.
Less, as the saying goes, is more.
Tom Colvin is the co-founder and CTO of Apptaura — a mobile app development agency based in Hampshire.
