Make money off iPhone applications (Part 1)

If you have an idea for an iPhone application and you think that there is a market for it, please don’t rush out to invest your hard earned cash and jump into development. You can use some really simple and effective tools to validate a need for your application and get a feel for the market size before you invest any considerable amount of your money or time.

Idea

There are many ways of coming up with ideas for applications. I won’t get into too much detail here, but let’s just say that the least risky and time consuming way to start with an initial idea is to try and solve a problem that you personally experience.

Let’s assume that I was into free diving. This is the sport where you hold your breath and dive as deep as you possibly can. As a free diver, I really need to work on holding my breath. There are a number of techniques that I can use to improve my time and people have been using these with great success for quite some time now. So, instead of looking at charts, writing down times, comparing numbers to understand my progress and so on, we can create an iPhone application that will automate a lot of these tasks and help me improve faster.

Mock ups

Now that I have a general idea of what I need, I have to look into the details of this application. There is no better way to do that, than to actually create a mock up of the application. There is an awesome tool you can use to speed this process up and create amazingly realistic looking mock ups very quickly. You can download MockApps templates for PowerPoint and Keynote and start turning your idea into a concept straight away. The templates include a large number of standard iPhone UI components, but that doesn’t stop you from generating new ones if your idea requires more custom elements.

To make this tool even more useful, you can export your mock ups as a PDF and view them directly on your iPhone using a PDF reader (GoodReader for example).This means that you can see what you application will look like directly on your iPhone! You can also include links in your mock ups which means that you can even click around the application on your iPhone. Extremely useful!

Let’s assume that I have created mock ups for our free diving application and loaded them onto my iPhone.

User testing (optional)

Once we have the basic application mocked up, it’s time to test it out with potential users. This step requires you to find people who have the same problem as you and get them to give you feedback on your application. If you are solving your own problem, chances are you will know other people who face the same problem. This step will allow you to refine your application and make sure that it’s easy to use and easy to understand for all of your users.

This step is optional as you will be able to judge how many people are interested in your application, even if you don’t have the whole application properly designed and user tested. We’ll get into that in the next post.

Make sure you test your application on at least 5-8 potential users. This will help you iron out most of the inconsistencies and problems inside the application. At this stage, the application does not have to be perfect, just easy to understand so that you can judge people’s interest.

I will take my free diving mock ups, load them onto my iPhone and after my free diving training session ask a few of the students to give me feedback. You will find that people love to give you opinions if you ask them and especially so if it’s around an area they are interested in. Be careful not to jump to conclusions based on one or two opinions. Everyone will have their own take on the application and it’s your job to find the middle ground. Based on talking to 7 of my peers I’ve realised that some of the screens are a bit confusing and that there is a way to simplify and improve the application greatly. It’s important to include those improvements in the mock ups as soon as you can.

That’s it for this post. In the next posts, we will talk about getting a feel for the market size and evaluating the opportunity, tracking visits to your site, being constantly updated about the interest in your site/application, promoting your application, making the call on investing money and how to approach development.