Hello everyone my name is Angela and I'm an iOS 1
and WatchOS developer. 2
And I'm also one of the co-founders of the App Brewery. 3
And today I'm going to take you through the entire journey of building an app from beginning to end. 4
Now through my time working as an iOS developer I've worked in teams large and small and also been 5
at the helm as a CTO for one of my own app based companies. And I'm very fortunate to have been recognized 6
for some of the work that I've done throughout the years. 7
Today I'm going to teaching how to make an app from beginning to end. 8
Going from idea validation through to how you would design the app, through it how you would monetize 9
your app as well as development and marketing your app in order to get downloads on the App Store. 10
So it's going to be a whirlwind tour of the entire process and I hope you're ready because we're going 11
to get started. 12
So it doesn't matter if you have an idea already or if you're still in the process of brewing one. 13
This is one of the most important parts of your app development journey. 14
How do you figure out if your app idea is a good one? 15
How do you know if it's worth spending your time and your money and your energy to build this app? 16
How do you know if it's going to be a good one? 17
So one of the first pieces of advice that I give to students is to talk to absolutely everybody. If you 18
are on a plane 19
talk to your air hostess about your app idea. If you're in a supermarket 20
talk to your checkout cashier about your idea. 21
Everybody has a valid opinion. 22
And by doing this you might just come across somebody who has a unique insight or who might be one of your 23
apps customers in the future. 24
And people who will give you advice along the way. 25
Now whenever I tell people this the first question I always get is should I ask for an NDA or what's 26
known as a non-disclosure agreement? 27
Now this, for those of you guys who don't know, is basically a piece of legal paper that sort of prevents anybody 28
from stealing your idea. 29
But of course you would need the legal counsel to be able to back up that piece of paper. 30
And it's rarely done. 31
And one of my friends who works on Sand Hill Road 32
so where a lot of the venture capitalists are based in Silicon Valley. 33
You know he said that if a founder comes to him and the first thing they do is to slide an NDA across 34
the table then he knows almost instantly that this guy is a newbie because anybody who's built anything 35
worthwhile will know that the idea is only such a small part of the success of the product. And there's 36
so much more to it including a lot of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of hard work. 37
So my answer to this question is emphatically no. 38
Try and get advice from as many people as you can without putting them off by having to sign an NDA. 39
In most cases if it's a really good idea you can bet that probably five or six people across the world 40
already have the same idea. 41
And some of them are working on it and some of them are trying to get people to sign NDAs. 42
Now the next thing that you need to do is a little bit of market research. 43
So go onto Google go onto the App Store search for variations of your idea and see if anybody's already 44
created it. 45
Now the important thing to remember is that if somebody has already created your idea, that doesn't necessarily 46
mean that you can't make it because you might have unique domain knowledge, you might know more about 47
the topic than the other people who are making it. 48
But there are also other things like you might create an app with a better user experience, you might 49
create one that's far better designed than the existing products. 50
There are unique angles that you can approach in every single idea. 51
And remember that Facebook wasn't the first social network and Google wasn't the first search engine. 52
So don't let it put you off, but let it inform you. 53
You need to be aware of who your competitors are, what stage they are at and what is their development 54
process and you can do a little bit of online sleuthing to find out all of this. 55
Now if you don't yet have an app idea that you want to work on then I want you to keep in mind this phrase. 56
Now I first came across this phrase when I was at Stanford and I came across this talk by Guy Kawasaki. 57
Now for those guys who don't know who he is, he's probably one of the first employees at Apple and his 58
official title was something like Chief Evangelist. Whatever 59
that means right? 60
But he said something that really stuck with me. And he said that as a startup founder or as any sort 61
of product maker when you're going about your day to day life, you should always keep this phrase in 62
mind. 63
And it's "If this then what...". Now 64
what does that mean? 65
Let me illustrate this with an example. 66
Now back in 2016 there was this article in The New York Times and it had a title of something like "How 67
to make anybody fall in love with you" or something like that. 68
And it was an article that described the research of a sociologist who found that if you get two strangers 69
to ask each other intimate questions that you might not ask a stranger or tell a stranger, you know there 70
were questions like "If your mom and dad were both drowning in the sea, 71
who would you say first?" And really intimate questions that you probably wouldn't ask a Tinder date 72
right? 73
But he found that if you got strangers to do this, it would accelerate their feelings of intimacy towards 74
each other. 75
And I found the article completely fascinating. 76
And I remember seeing it all over my social media. 77
It came up on Twitter and Facebook again and again. People were sharing it they were liking it and there 78
was a lot of interest around it. 79
So I thought to myself, if this then what? And I thought if people were interested in it, then they probably 80
want to give it a go 81
right? 82
Maybe on their next Tinder date. 83
But looking at a dense article on a phone is a terrible user experience. 84
You would have to zoom in, zoom out, pan around to try and find the right questions. 85
It's really not that fun. 86
So I thought what if I spent two hours building an app that made the process a lot easier? 87
So I created an app that would split the screen into two and you could lay your phone onto the table 88
and both people can read the questions the right way round and the app would tell them whose turn it 89
is and who should go next. And to complete the experiment 90
the sociologist made these two strangers stare into each other's eyes four minutes straight. 91
So I implemented that as well into the app. Even though it seemed kind of creepy 92
I was trying to stay true to the original research. 93
So then I uploaded it to the App Store, 94
didn't really think anything of it, 95
went to sleep and then a few days later the app went viral. 96
It was shared on Product Hunt and there were thousands upon thousands of downloads all because of this 97
one phrase. 98
If this 99
then what... 100
So I urge you as you go about your day when you come across something that's slightly strange or makes 101
you think, 102
then keep this phrase in mind and you might just stumble across some really good app ideas or even business 103
ideas. 104
Now the next thing that works really well for app ideas is when you scratch your own itch. 105
So when you come across a problem during your day to day life it could be during your commute, 106
it could be at your workplace, 107
it could be when you're studying something that just completely frustrates you and you think why? 108
Why does this problem exist? 109
Well, those problems, if you come up with a good solution tend to be really good app ideas because you know 110
as much as we like to think that we're unique, 111
if you have a problem you can bet that somebody else across the world probably experiences the same 112
pain with the same problem. 113
And if you can create an app that addresses that problem and create a solution that you love, then you 114
can be sure that other people would love it as well. 115
So the next time you come across a problem don't just resolve to complaining about it. 116
Think if you come up with an idea that might solve that problem for yourself and others. 117
Now the next type of app ideas are what you might call "duh" app ideas. 118
So this is when you go to your supermarket cashier or you go to your air hostess and you tell them about your 119
app idea and they say, "Well duh. Of course it should exist. 120
It should have existed yesterday. 121
Here's my money please take it from me so I can buy this app that you are going to build." 122
Well this is the duh type of app. 123
And in order to achieve this kind of reaction there's two important things in the mix. 124
One is of course having an idea that generates that kind of reaction. 125
Something so obvious something that they really see the appeal of but two also being able to express 126
your idea in a way that anybody can instantly just get it. 127
So let's look at some of these 'duh' statements from successful companies that we know and love. For example 128
Evernote. Remember everything. 129
Who wouldn't want a second brain where you can stash all the bits of knowledge that you can't remember? 130
Well duh right? Or Nest, Saving energy is a beautiful thing. 131
Who can argue with that? 132
Saving energy is a beautiful thing. 133
Or GitHub. 134
Build software better, together. 135
So, when you come up with an idea think about how you can express the core concept of it in a single 136
duh-like statement that generates interest 137
and when you talk to people it seems entirely obvious why your app should exist. 138
Now the next type of app idea I want to talk about are apps that fulfill a market vacuum. So a market 139
vacuum is when there is a customer demand or a customer need that is, as of yet, unmet by any existing 140
product or service. 141
So for example, back when the iPhone 4s came out and the S stood for Siri by the way, so the iPhone 4 with 142
Siri. 143
Apple did a really good job of marketing Siri. 144
Now we know today after you know Siri's been alive and well for many years that she is not that bright 145
and she is probably only really good for reminders and timers as far as I can tell. But people didn't 146
know that back then. They were sold on this idea of the virtual assistant, the PA who you didn't have 147
to pay and a whole bunch of really awesome sounding taglines that came from Apple and various journalists. 148
So people were really excited. 149
But the problem was that not everybody could upgrade to an iPhone 4s right? You might be on the Android 150
ecosystem or you might have just bought a brand new phone and you didn't want to upgrade. 151
So that was a market vacuum and there was a company that spotted that market vacuum and they created 152
SayHi translate. 153
And what this app does is that you could press on one of the buttons to speak to the phone as if it 154
were a real human 155
and it would talk back at you in your language of choice. And it's like as if there's a little translator 156
that lives inside your phone. And it simulates that whole Siri experience that you're lusting after. 157
And by filling that market vacuum the people who made this out went on to do really really well because 158
they filled the vacuum. 159
Now let's look at another example. 160
If you haven't heard of Flappy bird then I have to be incredibly jealous of you because I think that 161
means that you spent the last two years on a Caribbean island with low Wi-Fi signals because this was 162
an Internet sensation. 163
Everybody wanted to flap their birds. 164
Now for those guys who don't know, it's basically this game where you get a slightly chubby bird 165
who has to flap its wings to navigate through a whole bunch of pipes in order to get as far as possible. 166
And everybody got obsessed with this because of how difficult it was. 167
And you could see Twitter lights up with people angry about how infuriating this app was and yet how 168
addictive they were to it. 169
But the drama came when one day the developer released a statement and said Flappy Bird was designed 170
to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed. 171
But it happened to become an addictive product. 172
I think it's become a problem. To solve that problem 173
it's best to take down flappy bird. 174
It's gone for ever. 175
I mean life doesn't get much more dramatic than this 176
in the developed world. This was it. 177
So he pulled the app overnight off the App Store and it was gone forever literally and people couldn't 178
flap their birds anymore. 179
And you have no idea how much anxiety it created in everybody that they could no longer flap their little 180
chubby bird. 181
So, by now you might recognize that this has opened up a market vacuum literally overnight. And the developers 182
who saw it as that, the first ones who try to fill that vacuum stood to gain the most. 183
And today you could literally flap any thing you want. 184
You can flap a troll, you could flap a chicken, 185
you could even flap a turd if you so wished. 186
And the developers who were the first to recognize this market vacuum stood to gain the most. 187
So look around you for market vacuums are opening up every day and see how you can target them and close 188
off that vacuum 189
using your app. 190
So now that you're certain that you've got a good app idea something that's going to be a real big hit. 191
It closes off a market vacuum or it scratches you own ich, whatever it may be. The next step you need to 192
take with that idea is to design it. 193
And very often you hear people ask, "Well why do I care about design? 194
Isn't it enough that it's a really good idea or that I coded up really well?" Think about this. 195
Currently there's around 2 million apps on the iOS App Store and about 2.5 million on the Android app 196
store. 197
That is a lot of apps. 198
And when you release your app to those app stores, it's literally like a drop in the ocean. 199
So in order to differentiate yourself you have to be able to appeal to people's emotions as well as 200
their logic. 201
You have to make people love your app and we know that loving an app doesn't come from how well it works 202
or how it doesn't crash or how you know it saves all your data every single time. But it comes from the 203
design. 204
Plus if you think about it, it only takes three taps for all of your blood, sweat and tears to be completely 205
wiped off their phone. 206
That's all it takes. 207
And the scary statistics are that apparently out of a hundred apps that get downloaded off the App Store 208
50 of them get deleted after the first time they're opened. 209
So you don't want that to happen to your baby 210
right? 211
So that's why we have to think about design. Now that's a good question. 212
What exactly is good design? 213
So it's a little bit like a mythical beast 214
right? 215
Like a unicorn. 216
You'll probably know it when you see it. 217
But actually, both Apple and Google provide guidance on this. 218
So Apple produces a delightful piece of bedtime reading. 219
It's a little bit thicker than what you're used to. 220
And it's got a fantastic title called iOS human interface guidelines. If any book ever flew off the shelves 221
it's not this one. But it does describe how you should lay out your app, how you should design the animations 222
or the interactions in order for it to feel like it fits in with the iOS environment. 223
And Google has something similar called the Material design principles that shows you how to make the 224
best androidy looking and feeling apps out there. 225
So these are great things to take a look at. 226
And if you have a look in the description box below I've got a whole bunch of links for you that's linked 227
toward all of these resources that I mentioned during this talk. 228
Now once you've got a good grounding of what Apple and Google think is good design, the next thing to 229
do is take a look at some of these mobile pattern websites. 230
So one is "Pttrns" without the vowels, obviously because startups don't have vowels. 231
And another one is mobile-patterns and what they do is they collect and categorize screenshots from 232
some of the best designed apps out there. 233
So that means when you're designing a particular part of your interface, for example you're looking to 234
create a news feed for your app, 235
then why not take a look at how Twitter does it, how Facebook does it. 236
And I'm not saying you know steal these ideas from these incredibly well-paid designers, but I'm seeing 237
more like be inspired by their designs. 238
So, once you know roughly what your designs are going to look like the next step is to choose a color 239
palette. 240
And one of my favorite tools is something called colorhunt.io. 241
And here you have a bunch of professional designers who have curated and collected some of their favorite 242
palettes. So you can search by hot or popular and you can copy down the hex code of some beautiful 243
palettes for your project as well. 244
Now if you're even lazier than that, then there's a website called Flat UI colors which is a 15 color 245
color palette that was specially formulated for the iOS environment. 246
So for example, you might notice that this shade of wisteria is the exact shade of purple that the Yo 247
app uses for their app icon. Or if you've ever used any of the seven minute workout apps you'll notice 248
that they've basically just taken all of these colors and used it to color their app. 249
Now if you're an Android developer then there's a Web site called www.materialpalette.com. 250
And here you can select two colors that you like and it will automatically generate an 8-color color 251
palette complete with an accent tone. 252
So once you've seen some mobile patterns and you've got your color palette, the next step is to create 253
what's called a user flow diagram. And user flow diagram maps out the journey that a user might take 254
through your app for a specific task. 255
So how would they go about checking out an item or how might they create a recipe in your app. 256
And the beauty of this is that it's drawn pencil on paper, 257
it takes maybe a few seconds to change and rubout and modify until you're happy with the flow. 258
And once you are, then the next step is to create what's called a wireframe. 259
So wireframes are low fidelity representations of your app's design. 260
So they're usually drawn pencil on paper 261
and it shouldn't take you more than half an hour to do a quick wireframe for an idea that you have. 262
And once you've created your wireframes you can even link them together using something called POP. 263
Now POP allows you to take pictures of your wireframes, link them together through interaction buttons 264
and then you end up with a working app that you've just drawn up 15 minutes ago. 265
So it was a really really cool tool and we'll teach you how to use that within the Course as well. 266
Now the next step up from why airframes are what designers call mockups. So mockups unlike wireframes 267
are high fidelity representations of your design. 268
So it's almost like you've gone into the future and you've taken a screenshot of this app that doesn't 269
yet exist and you've captured it to show venture capitalists or your developer team in order to get 270
the end product, the app that you create, looking exactly the way that you want it to. 271
And this is really the beauty of mockups. If you tell a developer you know "I want a news feed". 272
Then you might not get the nicest news feed. 273
But if you were to create a mockup then they would try to keep to the design that you've made. Now mockups 274
can be made in lots of different design software. 275
Anywhere from Photoshop with Illustrator or Sketch or Marvel, there's a whole bunch of tools out there 276
that you can use. 277
But, if you are the design developer, if you're going to code up the app and build it yourself you don't 278
always need to create mockups because when you're creating your app in Xcode you have the opportunity 279
of creating the designs within the software itself. 280
So you wouldn't have to duplicate your work inside a design software as well as inside your programming 281
software. 282
So that's what I tend to do 283
if I'm building an app just for myself. 284
Now if you want to design a mockup without having to learn how to use Photoshop or Sketch you can actually 285
use a website called UX PIN to simply drag and drop different elements onto your iPhone screen. 286
So for example you can drag on a calendar or you can drag on buttons to make it look the way that you 287
want it to. 288
Now while you're creating your designs, if you are the designer then you might need some other assets 289
as well. 290
And it's really important that 291
you can't just take images of Google search because some images are copyrighted. So you could potentially 292
be getting a letter from their lawyer sometime down the line and it would be terrible if you have this 293
huge hit of an app only to have to pay compensation to somebody. 294
So be really careful when you find designs that you want to put into your app. 295
Now a safer bet is to look for design assets that are creative commons or websites that allow you to 296
use their icons for free. 297
And the key phrase here is free for commercial use. 298
Now here are some of my favorite resources. 299
One is a website called Icon Store where professional designers have designed the beautiful packages 300
of icons. 301
So they have the same look and feel of each other. 302
And the best part is that they're free for commercial use. 303
Now if you needed HD images to use as the background of your apps then you can find huge collections 304
of beautiful hipstery HD images from Re: flashed and Unsplashed. 305
And remember that if you want to look at any of the resources just head into the description box and 306
I've included all of the links there for you. Now I can't stress enough how important it is to design 307
your app. 308
A lot of people make the mistake of jumping headfirst into programming it only to realize a month down 309
the line that "Uh 310
I should really change, you know, screen 2 should become screen 3 or this button should go to that screen 311
instead. 312
And the problem is that when you want to make those kind of changes and you've really got the code written 313
down then ripping bits of code out or trying to implement different functionality can be extremely time 314
consuming and difficult. 315
And that's why the process that I'm describing to you and the one that I'll teach you inside the course 316
is all about taking it step by step going from user flow diagram to wireframe to maybe mockup and 317
then prototyping and only then do you go into Xcode or Android studio to build your apps because something 318
that might take you a few seconds to rub out on your user flow diagram will end up taking you a month 319
of development time when you need to change it inside Xcode. 320
But what do you do after you've designed your app? So you know your app idea is a great one, 321
you've designed it to look and feel and behave exactly the way you want it to. 322
What's the next step? 323
Well, you might think it's getting into the programming and developing it but it's actually thinking 324
about the monetization strategy. 325
And this is something that you should bear in mind before you start developing your app and not as an 326
afterthought. 327
So I'm going to talk through some of the most common monetization strategies for apps and the cases 328
in which you might use each one. 329
So the first one that a lot of people would have heard of because this term is brandished about a lot 330
is the freemium model. 331
So this is where you download the app for free and you get around maybe 60 to 80 percent of all the 332
features of the app. 333
But then in order to get the premium features you would have to pay in order to unlock the paywall. 334
And this can be a one time payment 335
for example removing ads, or it could be a recurring payment. 336
Now this type of model works really well 337
if you have an app that has frequent daily usage and it has a high perceived value to the user. 338
So these are services almost like for example your Dropbox or your Spotify. 339
And the reason is because only if the user has integrated it into their workflow or into their daily life 340
does this model start making more money rather than if it wasn't outright paid for app. 341
So think about what type of app that you have or you're building 342
then try to fit the monetization model to it. The next model I want to talk about are in-app purchases. 343
So this can be real, say if you're selling T-shirts or if you're taking people around in UBER cars but 344
it can also be virtual. 345
So things like gems or energy or time or lightning bolt whatever it may be. 346
Now the important distinction is that if your in-app purchases are virtual then they need to go through 347
the Apple payment gateway. 348
And during that process both Apple and Google will take off 30 percent of whatever it is that the in-app 349
purchase cost. 350
So of course, that kind of margin is not sustainable if you're selling T-shirts right? 351
So that's why they allow you to use alternative payment gateways 352
if you are indeed providing the user with real life goods. And that is something you should think about 353
ahead of time. Now a few more types of monetization models that I want to run through him. 354
One is white labeling. 355
So for example if you were a gym and you wanted an app built and the features that you might want include 356
maybe allowing users to book the classes, maybe the user should be able to update their membership details 357
or update their payment methods. 358
And-- but the thing is these features aren't unique to your gym. Every gym 359
if they wanted an app would need these sort of features. 360
So you find one gym that wants to have this app and then you reskin the app in order to have their 361
custom branding and color palette and then you sell it to another gym and another gym and another gym 362
and so on. 363
So that means that you develop once and you sell many many times. 364
Now that works well if you have contacts or domain knowledge in a particular niche and you want to build 365
apps almost as templates that you can resell again and again. 366
Now the next monetisation strategy want talk about that's becoming increasingly more and more important 367
is ads. Now perhaps more on the Android system than the iOS system 368
people are becoming more and more reluctant to pay for apps. Instead they're willing to suffer through 369
interstitial ads and banner ads and having the screen taken up by a lot of advertising. 370
But this is the truth and we as app developers have to deal with it somehow. 371
Now personally I'm not a huge fan of ads because as we spoke about before, you know, I spent weeks even 372
months just tweaking the designs, redesigning, making new prototypes, sketching it out again, just to get 373
it pixel perfect and make it look beautiful. 374
And then a fifth of the app screen is taken up by Clash of Clans and that somehow just really hurts 375
me inside. And having the iOS ecosystem being my predominant market 376
you can almost get away without having to use ads as long as you can create good enough apps. But for 377
clients or for Android then this is a really important monetization strategy that you need to get to 378
grips with. 379
Now another monetization strategy that's relatively new is the partnership model and this is usually 380
when you involve one large advertiser and incorporate them into your app. 381
So as an example one, of the first apps that implement this we would Runkeeper where if you ran a challenge 382
say 5000 meters like say a 5K or a 10k run then you would be rewarded with things that had real life 383
value. 384
For example 10 percent of Nike shoes or 20 percent of added Adidas shorts, whatever it may be. 385
But it would reward your behavior in the app with real goodskids. 386
Now if you think about it 387
all three parties who are involved in this process, they all benefit. 388
So your developer benefits because they get paid by the advertiser, 389
the advertiser benefits because they get to show their products and they get to be in front of their 390
target audience and your users benefit too because not only is encouraging them to run, it also giving 391
them some real life benefits. 392
So if there is any way that you have links with maybe retail or real life companies that you can get 393
to sponsor your app and you in turn advertise them to their target audience, then this tends to work 394
really really well. 395
Now the last monetization strategy that I'm going to talk about that nobody likes talking about because 396
it's a bit of a problem child in the world of app monetization. 397
And this is selling your users data for money. 398
Now you might not believe this but if you look inside your health and fitness apps especially inside 399
the privacy policy, hidden beneath layers and layers of legal jargon is the right to sell your in-app data 400
associated with your account. 401
Be it your name or date of birth whatever it may be. And you can see that ethically it has some issues 402
because you probably don't want this data getting into the hands of health insurance companies or life 403
insurance companies without your explicit agreement. 404
So this is not a strategy that I encourage. 405
Not only because its kind of unethical but also because the Big Apple stores Apple and Google are cracking 406
down on this. 407
And if you do end up getting banned by Apple or Google then they remove all of your apps from the App 408
Store and prevent you from uploading any more to these markets. 409
So its something that is good to be aware of as an app user yourself, but it's something that I don't 410
encourage using as a monetization strategy. 411
As an aside, if you are really keen and you didn't mind giving your data away, 412
well there's actually that be a way where you can sell your own data: 413
so your browsing history or your app usage data or your health and fitness data for something like £40 414
a year, so something like maybe $60 a year. If you're interested 415
there are these opportunities out there. 416
Now finally we've assured ourselves that we have a great app idea, 417
we've designed our up to look and feel beautiful, 418
we know exactly how we're going to make money from our app once is on the App Store 419
and now it comes to the main event. 420
How do you develop your app? 421
How do you turn it from these ideas and designs on paper into something that you can hold and use in 422
your own hands? 423
Well that is where the programming part and the app development part comes in. 424
Now there's many ways of developing an app 425
and I'm going to go from most expensive way to least expensive way of doing this. 426
So the most expensive way is going to a physical shop. 427
So I live in London, there's a lot of great app development boutiques and you get to sit down with a 428
designer, a developer, the people who'll be working on your project, you get to talk to them about your 429
ideas and you know flesh out what it is that you want made. And you can be close to the development process 430
of your app every step of the way. 431
Now the reason why most people can't afford to do this is because you're going to need a budget 432
anywhere between 80,000 and 150,000 per app 433
so Android or iOS, in order to get this kind of service. Now part of that is because you're paying for 434
the expertise and advice and guidance of designers developers. 435
But another part of that is that rent in London is extremely expensive. 436
I would know. 437
So instead of paying somebody based in the UK, you can also find a freelancer who's based 438
elsewhere maybe somewhere where it's cheaper to rent an office mostly in eastern Europe or parts of 439
Asia. 440
And the really important thing here is to make sure that you select your freelance developer or development 441
team really carefully and make sure that you vet them properly. 442
Now here's a bit of a horror story from one of our students on one of our App Brewery programming bootcamps. 443
So she had this idea to develop an app 444
and she approached a team that were based in China over one of these online Web sites like Elance oDesk 445
where you can find freelance development teams. And you may or may not know but there's two ways of paying 446
freelance developers. 447
You can either pay per hour of work they do or you can pay per milestone, 448
so you pay them a set amount once they reached 20 percent completion 40 percent completion 60 percent 449
etc. 450
Now she was at 80 percent completion, 451
the app was so close to being done 452
and they'd shown her the intermediate apps and she'd been testing them on her own phone 453
and it was all going so well. 454
But then when it did reach 80 percent she got a call from them over Skype. And they said to her that 455
something terrible has happened. Their company had been raided by the police in China. 456
They had all of their computers taken along with all of the work that included her app. And they said 457
that one solution might be that if she was willing to pay an extra £10,000 then they could bribe the 458
Chinese police and try to get their stuff back. 459
Now at this point, she rightly started getting very suspicious of this team and actually ended up walking 460
away without having her app completed because she was scared that she couldn't trust this team. 461
So what if they put down some code that would end up stealing her customer's credit card details or 462
something dodgy like that. 463
And this is one of the reasons why when you work with a freelance development team abroad where you 464
can't meet up with them regularly, you have to make sure that you interview them more than once: 465
so face to face or over Skype. And you also have to make sure that you speak to some of their past clients 466
and see some of their past projects that they built. This way you can try and figure out what the working 467
what the experience is like working with them. 468
And most of these teams if they are legitimate should be able to give you a contact of somebody who 469
is based in the same country as you are who have worked with them before and you can talk to them about 470
what it was like working with that team. 471
Now this still carries a pretty high price tag. 472
You're looking at anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 to develop an app through a freelance team. 473
So now we've come to the cheapest solution and the most customizable and that is building the app yourself. 474
Now the App Brewery we've run in-person programming bootcamps for over three years and we've seen hundreds 475
of students come through who have been able to build their own apps and become app entrepreneurs. 476
Now even if you don't want to be a developer yourself, it would still be a huge benefit to be able to 477
look at code and understand what's roughly going on. And also to be up to estimate how long would it 478
take to build a particular feature or how much it should cost to build it. 479
And these are all valuable skills that will stay with you and that benefit will appreciate over time 480
as well. 481
And it's a lot easier 482
than you think it is. At the App Brewery we've taught over a thousand students in person and over 50,000 students 483
online. And we know that a lot of people have come from different backgrounds with no programming knowledge 484
at all and they've been able to build crazy wonderful apps 485
after completing the course going on to develop a company or continuing to work as a developer. 486
So it's very much within your capabilities. 487
But once you've developed the app, what is the next step? 488
Well you need to get downloads right? 489
You need to be able to market your app so that people will hear about it and will be able to download 490
it. 491
And there's some skills involved in that. 492
Now back in the days when the App Store first came about it was really the golden era because you can 493
make any old app and somebody would download it because there wasn't much choice. 494
And I'm convinced that if I time traveled back and I took a picture of my own face and made it an app 495
that it called "Take a look at Angela's face" app and it did nothing other than to display a selfie of me, 496
then people would still download it and probably even buy it. 497
That was just the world back then. 498
But today it's a very different place. 499
There's a lot of other apps that you have to compete with. 500
So when you search for something like Ninja games on the App Store there are hundreds if not thousands 501
of apps are targeting that keyword. 502
So you need to learn various skills and tricks in order to be able to rank highly and also to get people 503
to know about your app and get downloads for your app. 504
But before you do any marketing you don't want to market a bad app. 505
And by bad I mean a buggy app, 506
so if something wasn't working. 507
So you have to make sure that you test your app extensively before you put it onto the app store and 508
put a lot of effort into marketing it because if you market a really buggy app you're just going to end 509
up with lots and lots of bad reviews which is not what you want. 510
Now here's a trick that I like to do for some types for certain types of app launches. Say that my target 511
market is the US and the UK 512
what I can do is I can release the app to smaller countries that match the demographics of my target 513
audience. 514
So for the US and UK the smaller mirroring demographic tends to be Canada or New Zealand for me. 515
And what you do is that's three months ahead of the main release, you release your app only to Canada 516
and New Zealand and then you watch the reviews and the feedback that you're getting from these real 517
users because some of them will have feature requests, 518
some of them will discover bugs and they'll give you a lot of really useful feedback which you can act 519
on to improve your app. 520
And once these users are loving your app then you can be pretty sure that your main markets will love 521
it as well. 522
So that's just a quick tip for beta testing for free 523
essentially. Now what happens on launch day? 524
Now it's really important to think about your launch day. 525
So that's the day when your app goes live on the App Store. 526
Ideally, what you want is to have a large list of people ideally their emails. 527
People who have signed up before saying that they want to download your app once it's available. And 528
you can achieve this by building a landing page for your app. 529
So what we tend to say is that before you design your app before you develop your app before you lay 530
down a single line of code, the first thing you need to do is to create a landing page for your app. 531
It doesn't have to be very it doesn't have to be fancy it can just be a one pager that briefly describes 532
what your app is about. 533
But most importantly, it has an email collection box. And this will allow the people who are interested 534
in downloading app to put their email down. 535
And that means that on launch day you'll be up to hit up 10,000 or 20,000 of these potential users who 536
will download your app on your launch day. 537
And both the app stores Apple and Google look at your metrics over the first 24 hours, 7 days and 538
30 days to see how you perform on a range of things like how many app downloads, how many times you app 539
was opened, how many people left a review, how good the reviews were etc. 540
And that first 24 hours is really really important to get your app noticed and possibly start ranking 541
on the app stores. 542
Now if you're a web developer then you'll know how easy it would be to create this landing page. 543
But if you're not a web developer then there's a whole bunch of tools such as Wordpress or Squarespace 544
and even something called AppStop which allows you to put in the your cell of your app on iTunes and 545
it will automatically generate a landing page for you 546
grabbing the data from your iTunes listing. 547
So it's another resource that's worth looking at. 548
Now app marketing is not just about bringing in new users or your existing user base 549
download your app. 550
It's also trying to target people who are already searching on the App Store for something that they're 551
looking for. 552
And the scary statistic is that the top 5 apps for a particular search term. 553
So for example if I searched for Ninja games on the App Store and the top five apps that show up account 554
for 72 percent of all the downloads. 555
And that's pretty scary. 556
And the top app alone takes 35 percent. 557
So that's why you also need to learn about App Store Optimization. 558
Now some of you might have heard of Search Engine Optimization or SEO and that's when you try to get 559
your website to rank highly on Google because we all know that nobody looks at page 3 or page 4 of Google 560
right? 561
So App Store optimization is about how do you get your app as close to the top of the search screen 562
as possible. 563
And the real secret to this is knowing which keywords to target. 564
What are the words, 565
what are the things that a lot of people are searching for 566
but not many apps are targeting. And a process that you can follow to do this is by using a reverse dictionary. 567
Now reverse dictionaries is not a thesaurus because thesaurus gives you synonyms. 568
So if I search for happy I might get the word joy. 569
But reverse dictionaries give you all the words that are used in the same context or in conjunction 570
with the word that you're searching for. 571
So for example, if you search for coffee you might get Java you might get beans you might get espresso. 572
And what you realize is that a reverse dictionary gives you a whole bunch of words that make really 573
good keywords. 574
And then you stick all of these keywords through a service like Sensor Tower or App Annie which can give 575
you some analytics and insight into each of these words. And you look at how much traffic each of these 576
words get. 577
so the high the traffic the better. 578
And you also look at how much competition each of these words have 579
and the lower the competition the better. 580
That means there's less apps that are trying to target those words. 581
And for Sensor Tower at least the sweet spot is when the traffic index is above 3 582
and the difficulty index is below 3. 583
Those tend to be good keywords to target. 584
Now when you upload your app to the App Store on the iOS App Store you actually get a box where you 585
get to put in the keywords you want to target. 586
But with the Android app store 587
so the Google play store, you actually have to sprinkle your keywords inside your 588
description and inside your title much like SEO in websites. 589
Now there's only so much that I can cover in an hour. 590
I could probably talk about all of these topics for days and days on end. 591
So if you're interested in learning more then be sure to take a look at the link below where for a limited 592
time you'll be able to get 95 percent off of my gigantic 43 hour course which is normally priced at 593
£200 but you'll be to get it today at $15. 594
Now before I leave you there's just three final tips I want to give you 595
if you're going to start the journey of creating your very own. 596
The first thing is keep your app simple as simple as you can manage. 597
Don't try and build every single feature that you could possibly want into your app in the first instance. 598
Just as if you were learning mechanics, you wouldn't first start by building a car because you might 599
get stuck. 600
You might end up with just one wheel. So you would start by making maybe a skateboard right? 601
Keep your app simple. Make it a minimum viable product with only the core feature that you want to have. 602
And then once you've got that and once you've uploaded to the App Store you can listen to user feedback. 603
You can see what other features are people willing to pay for and from there then build your product 604
up, give it more features and flesh it out more and make it more capable. 605
The next tip is if you do any marketing at all you're already above 95 percent of all the independent 606
developers and it gives you a real leg up in the app stores. 607
So it's well worth doing. And finally, just do it. 608
It's a lot easier than you imagine it to be right now. 609
And I will be there teaching you every step of the way.