

Rahul Varshneya of The Next Web attributes this largely to lack of effort and focus on marketing the new app/product across critical channels and audiences. Per a report by Gartner, only 1% of apps become financially successful upon release. Within a thriving market, your competitive advantage should be clear within the product and in how you market it. Having highly successful competitors isn’t always a bad thing! It means that you’re introducing a product or service into a thriving market. This type of research can help further refine a product roadmap that can meet and anticipate user needs. Develop a clear understanding of how your competitors succeed and/or meet users’ needs. Study not only their products/apps, but also their press, their app store reviews, talk to people who use them and find out why they do. Studying your competitors, their products and product cycles, can help level the playing field or even give you an advantage. For many industries, the mobile product is a major step towards competitive market gains, but it also means your business now has to compete in an additional field of play. However, meeting additional customer needs through an app isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to keep them as a customer or gain new ones. Related: The Fundamental Principles of Consulting: Part I Learn as much as possible about how they use your services or products, why they keep coming back and what problems they so badly need solving that they would pay for a solution. When you launch, will your app meet the most immediate and pervasive problem that currently exists for your customers? The most successful path towards launching a strong product is to start by studying your existing customers or users. For every discovery of “room for improvement” or “more return on investment,” keep that in mind when planning out the product and how your business can better perform or meet the needs of your customers. In order to achieve those outcomes for success, you must be very familiar and comfortable with how you’re performing in your market and how that might translate to mobile. Let’s say your company determines a need for an app because it will afford additional opportunities to improve performance in the market and achieve your outcomes for success. There are several areas of study in preparing for a successful product launch: your customers (if you’re already in the market in some form) and potential users, your competitors and the mobile market. This approach is also pragmatically appropriate for companies preparing to launch a consumer-facing application.

This included an intense study of personal performance in practice and in competition, of one’s competitor’s performances, style, and patterns, and of the potential weather and venue for competition. Prefontaine believed in studying every possible element and factor of competition.

Being confidently prepared requires an approach similar to Prefontaine’s in that you should study, plan, and train for a strong, successful launch of your application. This is the point in an app development project where it’s important to FINISH STRONG in order to do so, we push our clients to be confidently prepared. Successfully launching an app requires multiple teams, processes and checkpoints.
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Just because the last code commit and design review is in the bag doesn’t mean that you’re past the finish line. Adequately preparing for launch positively impacts crossing the finish line towards a strong launch in your competitive market. Launching is the culmination of a long-term effort towards the finish line it’s every milestone or lap, in product development, and every sprint along the way. While the industries and competitive markets for both clients are vastly different, there’s one area that every business has to navigate when it comes time to introduce a business’s app to the market: Launch. In November of 2016 at stable|kernel, we proudly helped two of our clients launch their first mobile applications, for iOS and Android. Adhering to this method ensures that our clients not only cross that finish line in first place, but also remain confident, prepared competitors for the long term. Steve Prefontaine, the best middle and long-distance runner in the early to mid 1970s, had a system for his obsessively competitive training program that aptly describes the approach we take here at stable|kernel on every app consulting project: study, plan and train. With our strong desire to establish long-term partnerships and build a solid foundation for our clients, it more closely resembles running the 5000m race in track. Finishing a development project strong and launching an app successfully is about more than just crossing the finish line by releasing the app to the public.
