Recently, I am fascinated by the feasibility analysis and deduction of new products.

Several friends who were ready to jump into the startup fire came to me and offered to help with product analysis and feasibility discussions.

I always hate the way of beating my head purely by feeling, so for the industry I do not know, I will talk about the industry background, current pain points, competition, product testing and so on. (Probably because these are the kind of questions investors like to ask, and everyone is ready to answer them.)

Then, the happy conversation usually comes to a question: “You’re going to make a standalone APP. What do you think?”

The conversation suddenly froze, and I began to hear a variety of responses:

  • Build an APP, you can get more investment.
  • Mobile Internet entrepreneurship is not supposed to do APP?
  • Uh… uh… or what?
  • Do not do APP to call what entrepreneurship ah? (And give me a look of disdain ~)

And then I said balabalabala what I thought about making an APP, the amount of ice water in a large glass, it’s exhausting. Judging from the feedback, my idea was well received.

So write out the summary, save some later spitting star child, go out and turn left here, ha ha.

There are several simple reasons why we should make APP:

1) Some products idea cannot support an independent APP worthy of starting a business.

For example, if you want to use these ideas to help you start a business and reach the top of your life, I urge you to think again:

  • Do a query Beijing school district housing APP, input village name, the output is which school district housing.
  • Do a decryption interest discussion APP, discuss encryption decryption techniques.
  • Make an APP to pick up money and return to the owner, pick up the money release -> the owner claim.
  • Do a Beijing to Tianjin bus schedule APP, to solve the official website update the problem is not timely.

All three are definitely product-worthy and can be a pain point for some users/scenarios.

However, the best way to realize this product may be a widely circulated Excel sheet, a Douban group, a finding notice on bulletin boards, a screenshot, or a wechat official account. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t be an APP.

In short, the idea of low frequency, far from money, weak interaction (human, human-machine) should be reconsidered.

2) From the perspective of lean entrepreneurship, it is not light enough to make APP at the beginning.

At the beginning of starting a business, I think the most important thing is to quickly enter the market, verify the idea and explore the product model.

Therefore, please consider a question: “If I want to demonstrate the feasibility of my idea, must I be destined to be verified by an independent APP?”

The answer I got was mostly NO.

  • If you want to create an interest community on a specific topic, you can actually start from douban, Tieba and other interest groups to try to operate.
  • If you want to be a media, you can actually start from wechat, Jianshu, etc., and see if people will fall in love with you.
  • If you want to test whether there is idle item exchange demand, do a public number, WordPress can collect user demand.

I understand that the so-called lean means exploring products through continuous small tests and overturns. In fact, it is not necessary to demonstrate most ideas and APP.

3) Most importantly, think clearly about the advantages and disadvantages of the APP approach.

“I’m starting a startup and I need to build an APP right away.” It’s a superstition. It has to be cured.

The methodology of science should look at everything in the world dialectically, and this is no exception.

What unique value can APP provide as a product form? I have three main conclusions:

  1. Support richer interaction design, better user experience. (Compared to H5 page)
  2. Greater control over equipment. (For example, to obtain the user’s position, use the camera, gyroscope, NFC, etc.)
  3. Better interaction between the product and the user. (Active push notifications, background tasks, etc.)

Other channels have their own advantages:

  1. H5 website: no installation/update, links can be accessed, super lightweight.
  2. Wechat official account: it provides basic interaction logic, sharing channels in moments of friends, and can be pushed and programmable.
  3. WordPress | discuz: basic function without development, on the day of the launch, providing complete content management background.
  4. Group post bar zhihu Simple book: target user group, easy to quickly start operation/test/draw.

So my advice is — if your product relies heavily on specific interactions, hardware, and notifications, make apps. If not, especially media or interest groups, think again.

4) Some case thinking

  1. Didi taxi positioning, taxi software is a tool, light social, so the initial value of social media is not much. However, taxi-hailing relies heavily on interactive scenes such as maps, GPS, push and payment, so we need to build an APP.

  2. In the initial stage of 020 door-to-door products such as Kungfu Bear and Ease Home, they are actually the basic process of searching list and placing orders without heavy interaction. Therefore, now a large number of such products are wechat official number + mobile website launch, and take advantage of the wechat platform to promote. After the product is running and a large number of stable orders are obtained, we can consider making APP independently.

  3. There are more than 3 million friends who love wisdom and seek truth in Luoji Thinking, which is still a video + wechat official account. In fact, for such content as the core of the product (media), it is basically meaningless to do APP. I guess unless one day, Luo Pang decided to do shopping mall, membership social, otherwise should not easily touch the APP.

In the end, I will paste this article on the face of anyone who encounters this problem in the future.




Logic thinking

update

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PS. The likes are out of proportion to the number of followers.” This article is completely original, every word is the night light rubbing eyes biting lips alone beat! Will this sentence attract more people? Ha ha:)

This article is written by Yiji Xu. Please forward it, but please keep this note. If you like my writing and have a story to share with me, you can invite me to have coffee in Wangjing.