07/10/2022
Have you ever wanted to build an app, but don't know where to start? People meet with me every day and ask me the same question over and over - and I give them the same answer time and time again. What's the question that I get asked consistently? Well, usually the conversation starts out with a brilliant idea that someone has. This idea is super exciting! It solves some big problem and it's going to change the world. Actually almost every idea seems to always be "a billion dollar market" and sounds amazing! The idea often doesn't even seem that complex to execute usually! This is where the person with the idea believes their concept won't even be that difficult to launch, and all they need to do is just get it off the ground, and this amazing application is going to turn over millions for them.
Let me just tell you straight up - this is all a myth. I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear: Even if you have the perfect idea, and even if you have all the money in the entire world to make your idea happen, even if you hire the absolutely most perfect team and they execute your brilliant idea flawlessly, and even if you achieve successful customer outcomes, if you do every single thing 100% right, you can still launch an app that doesn't come close to paying for the launch expenses for years - if ever.
I have seen these situations over and over. Some of the top tier people in the world, funding some of the best and brightest ideas from the most brilliant individuals, assembling the absolute best teams, in raging markets that are "sure things" and still end up going out of business after trying for years and burning every resource imaginable.
I'm telling you this because I want you to be in the right mindset before you start on your journey to building your app. I want you to understand that success is never guaranteed - even if you have the perfect idea, perfect timing, the best team and unlimited funding.
At this point you might be asking yourself "why would I even try?" Well, this is a tough question people should ask before they set out to build their dream. I want you to think hard about it - not because I want you to avoid building your brilliant idea, but because I want you to be in the RIGHT MINDSET. When you build an app with the wrong mindset it's often fatal to the project!
So, back to the most common question everyone wants to know. Let's say you've got an amazing idea. You want to make it happen! What's the 1st thing your going to wonder about? Well - if you are in the mindset that 99% of people are in at this stage, you are going to wonder "how much will this cost to make" and I want to stop you right there and tell you with absolute conviction - that is the wrong question. It's not even a question you need to know the answer to!
Now you might be thinking to yourself "that's crazy" but I can assure you that successful projects do not start out with that being a leading question. Why? Remember what I said a moment ago? Even if you do everything right, have the best idea and execute it perfectly with the best team in the world, you still might not get where you expected?
I call this the “quantification paradigm” and it’s potentially the biggest challenge to critical thinking that has a substantial impact on your project’s outcome.
People are accustomed to a quantified lifestyle. When you buy a gallon of milk, you know how much it costs. It has a price tag. When you buy a car, you know what it’s price is up front. Even if you want custom countertops installed in your home, you expect the contractor to give you a price for the job – and you expect a successful outcome. Imagine hiring a contractor to build a chair for you and the contractor couldn’t give you a price? You wouldn’t use that contractor! The reason is because that person should be able to estimate, with reasonable assurance, that they can get you the OUTCOME you wanted, for the PRICE you agreed upon!
This is not how software development works. The outcome you WANT and the outcome you GET can be completely different and yet the project can STILL be 100% successful! It’s actually counter-intuitive, and it’s the #1 reason why people fail at achieving results. When I say results, I don’t mean the result you expect, I mean getting a result at all! Software projects die on the vine faster and more frequently than you can imagine. The person with the brilliant idea who is in a “quantified” mindset often finds out too late that there was no way to quantify the costs to achieve their expected result. This is extremely disappointing, and leads to grief.
This is why when someone asks me the question “how much will my app cost to develop” my response to them is typically “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
Wait a moment. What kind of answer is that?! Who am I to assume what you can and can not afford? Here’s the deal – if you are in a mindset where you have to quantify your app from day 1, you probably are not ready for this journey. If you break out of this mentality, then the sky is the limit.
Lets face it – apps are not commodities. A commodity is something that has a known market value. An ounce of gold, an apple or an orange are all commodities. A custom piece of software is not.
But people quote fixed prices for building apps all the time! So surely I must be wrong about all this, because you certainly can get quotes from developers to make your dream, right? The answer is, yes you can. Actually, a large organization paid me $100,000 one time just to write a quote for a multi-million dollar software development project! They decided not to build the app after spending 6 figures figuring out how much it would cost – and that was considered a successful outcome! The reason I bring this example up is because there are cases where it’s a good idea to quantify your idea, but it needs to be done properly. This was a 2 year project that involved me flying around the country interviewing teams, reviewing systems, and performing deep analysis on existing code bases. It required writing a detailed plan and weighing complexities. Even then, it was impossible to provide a “fixed price”. It was only possible to estimate the tens of thousands of hours it should take a normal developer so that they could know how many full-time devs would be needed to staff for how many years just to reproduce an existing, fully functional piece of software they needed to re-write. At the end of the day, they found another approach to solve their problem – just buy something off the shelf and license it. This company has billions of dollars, but they couldn’t justify the expense of writing the code to solve their problem. They where in the quantified mindset – but they took the RIGHT approach!
What is the right approach for a quantified mindset? One that involves extensive planning, and that planning doesn’t have to necessarily translate into a project – it translates into tasks you have to execute so that you CAN quantify your brilliant idea.
When it comes down to it, you can spend as much time and money planning an app as it might cost to build, more frequently your planning costs are somewhere between 5% - 15% of the entire cost of your app.
So what goes into planning? Join me for a session and learn about how I go about planning apps when quantifying them up front is absolutely necessary – OR skip months of work and thousands of extra dollars spent, and just have me dive into seeing how far we can get executing YOUR BRILLIANT IDEA.
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