For Starters #29: Nine Alternatives to Building an iPhone App
What can you offer your customers, by Friday, that will help them?
“I’m so energized, I can do this right now, I can start selling this right now” - A founder I spoke with last week.
Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek is one of my all-time favorite books. The 1971 book asserts;
good design is a catalyst for social change as such, designers have a moral and societal responsibility to consider the impacts of their decisions,
well designed solutions are both economical to maintain and accessible to all people of every shape and size.
Solutions look very different with these requirements than without.
A dozen years ago, I commissioned the amazing Anna Love and the stoked team to facilitate an afternoon design thinking session for my employees and a half dozen or so of my favorite people. It wasn’t for a client project, I just thought it would be a fun afternoon of exercising the creative muscles of all my favorite people.
Anna warned me every idea at the end of the day would be expressed as an iPhone app as it had so sufficiently captured everyone’s imagination.
I laughed disbelievingly.
Of the multitude of ways to express a value proposition, of all the different kinds of products and services in the world, at the end of the day it’s only iPhone apps?
Yep. She was 100% right.
Fast forward a dozen years to this past week, I spoke with two non-technical founders both in search of a technical co-founder and/or a pile of money to build their iPhone app ideas.
Why an app…because, despite having no software development experience, they hadn’t considered any other manifestation of their solution.
I know this because they told me.
As I’ve mentioned before, every custom software development is a $100K 12-month investment with a pile of decisions we don’t yet have enough information to confidently make and no guarantee of wild success at the end. Independent of the money required and all the guessing, independent of believing the target customers want an iPhone app for this solution (it’s still an ill fit in many domains), it’s a long time for your customers to wait for help - and that’s irresponsible.
After the founder shared their pitch, I said:
“I’m pretty sure you have everything you need to help your customers right now”
Over the next few minutes we refocused on the core problem being solved. Not surprisingly found the Figma mockups were at best orthogonal and at worst completely missed the mark.
If you’re envisioning a massively successful iPhone app, but are stuck on how to get it built, stop and consider you may be stuck because an app is the wrong way to solve the intended problem.
Take a moment and consider if one of the following can help you get a foothold on your market with the skills and resources you have right now.
9 Alternatives to An App You Can Launch Today:
Professional service manually doing the thing
An event or event series (live in-person, live online)
A video or short video series
A podcast series
An email newsletter
A self-serve online course
An (e)Book
A Slack/Discord/Reddit community
A wall poster or infographic
Sure, like the Papanek’s tin can radio, these may not be as flashy as the version in your head, but they provide relief and they provide the cycles needed learn and improve far faster than a custom software build.
Plus, they all the same demand-side pre-requisites as an app.
What do I mean by demand-side pre-requisites?
I mean customers.
Customers that 1) want help, and 2) can find you, and 3) are clamoring for a better solution - no matter how rudimentary.
An app may be down the road.
Or something better might be.