Over the last decade, technology has witnessed a swift advancement audaciously. We have seen an immense shift in the evolution of technology devices from desktops to laptops to mobile devices. Mobile application development is growing exponentially with around 3.5 billion smartphone users that account for 45.04% of the world’s population. Consequently, it goes without saying that mobile application has become a necessity rather than an option for every software solution provider.
Mobile application development will continue to grow in terms of employment and revenue generation. With these numbers keep on growing, Apple has around 2.2 million apps in its iOS store and android over 3 million apps in google play store along with other thousands of apps ready to go live daily.
Keeping those statistical data in mind, it has become the ultimate goal of every business solution to provide an exceptional mobile app that will create value and provide a competitive edge to incalculable competitors in the market. However, it is of utmost importance that your mobile app business plan intended to be well conceptualized. The type of cost in planning till the execution of business plan involves planning and designing costs, development, designing, marketing, and after-sales supports will constitute diverse disbursements for a business plan.
A well-planned business can turn your dreams into reality
It all started with an idea, ideas reflect your devotion and passion that is incorporated into the designs and its launch. A business plan is all about visualizing a project and provides you a standard procedure from its design until its execution and launch. The positive energies that you inculcate in your idea will always help you in the initial phase after the launch. Moreover, it helps in cost allocation for each phase and calculates the estimated cost of the project. The business plan itself involves a cost but the projection of costs involved in a project reveals if your project desired cost aligns with your budget.
So are you excited about your new mobile app venture but at the same time uncertainty hits you harder? We are here with our Mobile App Discovery service. With more than 10 years of experience in mobile app development, we encourage small businesses to have a quick sense of their mobile app concept with our lean startup approach. Each app model is envisioned through wireframes and then prototype to get user data. On the basis of this feedback app, archetype and functionality will be modified or refined as per user experience.
Be watchful and analyze the market for all the faults and shortcomings associated with the product. With market research, you can get meaningful insights that give an idea of how your product stands out with your target market.
Choose Smart Mobile App for your Smartphone users
Be specific on the type of mobile app you are planning to introduce in the market, on a daily basis billions of users are subscribing to thousands and millions of smartphone applications for various purposes. These applications are generally categorized into three kinds of different apps i.e. Native apps, hybrid apps, and web apps;
Native Apps
Native apps are designed for a single platform or an operating system.
Web Apps
Web apps are responsive and run as websites on any desktop or mobile device irrespective of any operating system, via a browser.
Hybrid Apps
Hybrid apps are a combination of both web and native apps and have cross-platform compatibility. Hybrid apps do not have high-performance requirements but require full device access.
If you do not have a competitive advantage, don’t compete
There are loads of other applications just like yours in the iOS and Google play store. Almost every other application is offering the same set of features that is quite similar to your mobile app. While designing your mobile app business plan there must be a well thought out schema as well that will provide value and competitive advantage to your product. Well formulated and exceptional business plans can turn your cash flows into profits in a time of a few months. The best way to do it is to think like your mobile application user.
Conduct Mobile Application Market Research
Have you ever believed in launching your product recklessly? Well – not even give it a thought, there are too many risks involved in it and it is quite possible that your product will crash in the first phase of being launched. Here’s what business analysis and market research come in – while penning your mobile app startup business plan – market segmentation and market positioning must be clearly in retrospect. In this era of technological advancement, market research has become easier through social media avenues.
Use Social Media ads
As mentioned earlier, social media has made the lives of people easier, immediate access to information, networking, and getting ideas out has become unproblematic. With the use of Facebook and Google ads, a minimal amount can be invested and you can easily target the audience and send traffic to your landing and evaluate the response accordingly.
Check Google trends
The World Market is quite dynamic and especially when it comes to mobile application development it reveals exponential growth starting from Feb 2010 to date. But in case of any economic downturn what happens to your business, sometimes google might not help you with this and particularly when such traction would have not happened in history.
Keep updated yourself with the global trends and you may get help from google but do make a contingent approach while creating mobile app business plans.
Keep an eye on App Store – See What’s trending
App Store is a directory of all iOS and Android applications. To see what’s trending and featured on the App store is merely a click away. App Store is a valuable tool for doing market research for your mobile app startup business plan. You can easily see reviews of users and see what they are loving about a particular mobile app.
Tracking of apps via an app store can be done over the period of time as market trends keep on altering and it can better float ideas in customizing your application far better than your competitors. Top App Charts can be used to keep yourself updated.
App Annie and Sensor Tower
To keep yourself updated about the latest market trends and analytics App Annie provides three products for its users; Store Data, analytics, and Intelligence.
Sensor Tower is an app analytics platform focused on helping companies with mobile apps understand and improve their organic user acquisition, analyze their app’s performance, keep up to date with competitors, and manage reviews. Over 20,000 mobile companies & developers use Sensor Tower to improve their downloads on iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod) and Android.
Surveys and Questionnaires
Running surveys and questionnaires are the most convenient ways of doing market research. Social media has made it a lot easier to conduct surveys and questionnaires. They can be effortlessly managing via social media networks. It is simple to target an audience for this purpose you can approach people via your email contact, WhatsApp groups, Facebook group, and people in your friend’s list. With the use of polls and ads can help you to send traffic to your survey.
Business Plan Vs Business Model
As evident from the discussion above, a business plan is a static document that highlights the strategic point of view and financial performance of a product in years to come and it is impossible for a business plan to be rewritten after adoption. On the other hand, the business model is dynamic, and at the center of the business plan. It tells more about the product positioning in terms of industry and in relation to its suppliers, clients, and partners in order to generate profits.
How to Create a Business Plan?
There are a number of reasons to make a business plan.
- Firstly, a business plan is a complete roadmap to your startup.
- How much will your mobile app cost you? There are a lot of costs involved in developing and executing your business plan for mobile apps. Cost estimations are very viable and also the timing of return on investment.
- Dream Big – You need to keep this in mind that you are designing your mobile app startup business plan to provide business solutions to enterprises, individuals, and non-profit organizers. Your application must be anticipated to provide a leading-edge at odds with your competitors.
Executive Summary
An executive summary is the main highlight of your business plan. It is written to target the investors so they can sponsor your business. This information must be clear and concise, detailed information must be provided that clearly depicts how your product works. The executive summary is a critical aspect of your mobile app startup business plan, especially for an aspiring entrepreneur or those who are planning on running a startup. It must attract investors to provide enough funding for your startup.
Problem Statement
In continuation of the executive summary, the problem statement is the most important part of the executive summary. Clearly define the problem before you provide any details about your business and how it works. It is very important to identify the need and by what means you will address this.
Solution
Another imperative to take care of when you highlight a problem statement is a way it addresses the needs of the users and strongly challenges the competitors along with value-added features. List down the important features and functions that your product has to offer and its proficiency to disrupt the mobile application market.
Unique Value Proposition
Unique Value Proposition refers to the unique or distinct aspects of your mobile application. It refers to at least one unique feature that your application has to offer in comparison to your competitors. While preparing your mobile app business plan, be careful in writing your unique value proposition as it will substantially appeal to your business investor. This must be avoided that it is “better than” your competitor as it seems impractical.
Goals
Mobile App business plan must be goal-oriented and be able to access the projected number of users, revenue targets must be quantified, the strategy should be defined to achieve the revenue targets whether it is through advertising or in-app purchases.
Business Description
Here, it is very important to highlight the important aspects of your business that provide an overall description of your business. Starting from brief information about the company and then give details about your mobile app. It is very imperative to highlight the mission, corporate values, how you see your product, and the factors that will make it a success.
The business description must reflect the potential that it creates a spark in the minds of investors. The investors are most likely to sponsor small companies that seem to be a prospective venture in the future.
Company Overview, History and Team
Complete details about the company and business must be clearly described in this section; that includes the type of company’s business structure, history of the company, location of company, onshore/offshore teams and mobile application product to address the needs of the community at large.
Here, the company’s mission should be highlighted to depict the current processes in your project i.e. inputs required from investors. This mission statement must focus on how things currently work in the business. The vision of the company must be towards your motive and future projections of the business.
The important aspect to discuss here the history of the company, how you have established teams, the way you came up with this idea.
Furthermore, how you make up a team is another significant part of it. Here, do mention team members, their qualifications, experiences, and their responsibilities. Nonetheless, also mention if there is an advisory team that helps you in making such decisions. This advisory team must be credible in terms of its experience in the industry.
Market Analysis
Getting market insights and strong analysis can give you a broad idea about the realization of your product. Keep yourself updated on the market trends and make short-term forecasts regarding your product must be done through market analysis. In addition to this, the projection numbers of your target market along with SWOT analysis should be conducted.
Size of Target Market
A key phase of market analysis is to be familiar with the following;
- The overall demand for your app – either its product or service based on the market.
- A quick analysis of the numbers of demand fulfills through sales.
- Assess the demographics of your audience that have been covered through the sales channel.
Market Forecasts
Make market forecasts in terms of numbers, already solutions providers in the market of similar mobile applications, a number of companies in the mobile application industry, trends of market leaders in industry, and the amount spent by them for this service.
The goal of market forecasts is to know if a real market exists for your product and there are enough customers available for it, whether those customers are willing to pay enough money. Try to convince them that there is a need for your unique product in the market.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis helps businesses to have an overall clear picture of the demand for their product in the market. It is used in many management disciplines and used to evaluate enterprises, products, or whether to check feasibility of a startup. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Marketing Strategy
The purpose of the marketing strategy is to build a strong connection between your app and end-users. The marketing approach helps to finalize a deal between your firm and investors. The Strong marketing strategy helps your product and convinces the investors that your mobile application has the competence to reach users’ smartphones via an app store.
Competitor Research
One of the main components of business analysis is the research of competitors. It helps to have a comparative analysis of your mobile application with that of your competitors. Moreover, it also helps to closely examine your mobile application’s unique value proposition that will improve your processes.
Mobile App USP
USP stands for unique selling point, which is a marketing strategy that refers to convincing customers to switch brands. It reflects from your USP that how well you sustain in the market in the presence of competitors and also to convince them with value-added features to switch products. For instance; USP of M&M’s is that chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
User Persona
It is very important to visualize the end-users of your mobile application. The mobile app business plan must reflect the detailed overview of user persona. For a mobile app, there can be multiple user personas. A user persona is more like building empathy with the target audience and get into their shoes to understand the needs and more clearly address the solution to their problem. In this phase, it is very important to get a detailed assessment in terms of their demographical data i.e. Age, Gender, Geography, Occupation, Marital Status, and Income.
App Ranking
App rating is another important part of your business analysis. The more you find it in google search results the more it will hook that attention of end-users. To improve its rating, you need to optimize your mobile app in terms of load times.
Product Growth
Product growth depends on the number of end-users; product growth can be reached to an extent depending on the type of mobile app startup. The business strategy to enter into the market also varies, eventually, massive advertising can help you increase your product growth by carefully evaluating user persona. For instance; Dove in 2013 has reached out to the customers in 110 different countries by marketing their product in different 25 languages and it was viewed on YouTube more than 114 million times.
Key Metrics
Key metrics is identifying a limited number of parameters to evaluate your product. It is better especially for your startup mobile app business plan to limit performance parameters, eventually, it will assist to have a central focus on your application.
Financials
Finally, and most importantly the financial part of your startup mobile app business plan must state the kind of financing to let your product enter the market. The financial aspect of your mobile app business plan must help your investor to understand the kind of financing you are expecting. The financial plan of your mobile app must provide the future forecasted models in terms of loss, profits projections after five years, cash flows, balance sheets, and valuation. In a startup mobile app business plan, it is essential to predict the expected and revenues forecast on a short-term and long-term basis.
The following components are essential for your financial part of the business plan.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost is a key financial measure for any kind of business. Customer acquisition cost in terms of a mobile app can be calculated with reference to cost per app installation. It is very likely that end-users can uninstall apps without engaging with them. Established companies have exact CPI data, to get an exact idea about CPI, this needs to be measured against the industry standard CPI indices.
Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value refers to the amount of money that you can earn on average from a single customer. This indicates the financial sustainability of your mobile app. In the case of low lifetime value (LTV) and high Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), this can crash your mobile application and can prove to be a disaster.
Burn Rate, Runway, and Cash Flow
Burn rate refers to how much amount you will be spending per month. This leads to all kinds of expenses that include; salaries, utilities, office supplies payable, and other overheads. There must be a cost-effective approach to handle the burn rate and to minimize the cost as low as possible.
The runway can be calculated by using the following formula;
Runway = Total funds / Burn rate
Cash flow for your mobile application can be calculated via the kind of monetization strategy designed in your business plan.
Startup Costs
Estimated costs shared with investors must be shared in the form of estimates as this kind of costs fluctuate, there must be a room for any additional expenses.
Monetization Strategy
There are many ways through which you can plan your monetization strategy; Monetization strategy can be an effective way of earning revenue so plan it accordingly;
- Advertising
- As described in your business model if your application offers paid services then you must be able to convince your customers and for what type of services they need to pay.
- In-app purchases are a common model of monetization for Android and iOS users.
- Subscription fees are charged by customers, for instance, Netflix, charged on monthly and yearly basis subscriptions.
Profit and Loss Statement
Finally, an estimated profit and loss statement must be a part of your startup mobile app business plan for due liabilities and assets accumulated over the period of time.
Conclusion
Writing a mobile app business plan is a challenging job, a careful qualitative, quantitative, business, and marketing analysis must be done. It is like visualizing your business plan and having an empathic approach for your end-users. It is a roadmap of your complete business execution and most importantly it must be designed keeping in mind the viewpoint of your investors. This is a very initial document that an investor will think of whether it is worthy to finance your business. Consequently, it is very critical to maintain the viability and make it financially desirable for investment.
A business plan is not just a piece of paper to be penned only for documentation purposes. It is really as clear-cut business and marketing strategies are part of it. It is impossible to make your business successful by downloading another business plan for another’s business. It is not anyone else’s business but your own business affair. Also, it must be kept in mind that successful people do not think of what others are doing, as they mind their own business ?
Folio3 has been working for decades to deliver innovation, whether you are a billion-dollar company or two-people startup making or planning to make the next big social app we are here to deliver our design and development experience at your service.
Do contact us in case of any queries.