October 24, 2013 at 12:51Positioning Mobile Studios
In the rating Apps4All registered 146 mobile studios. About ten of them come up with and design applications for customers and have a normal portfolio. The rest are being leased to developers or have not yet done any worthwhile work.
Introduce yourself at the customer site. Where should he go? All ten studios operate in approximately the same price range and have developed “strong” portfolios. Who better to cope with the task? Studios must answer this question themselves. To realize what and how it turns out to do best and tell how they differ from others. Then the customer will compare the specialization of the studio with his task and turn to the right place.
Read more about positioning in the presentation of Andrey Terekhov ( Terekhov)
And I will talk about the positioning of three mobile studios: GALS Soft, e-Legion and Touch Instinct.
DO NOT work with
In GALS Soft, they came up with their own coordinate system to describe their positioning. So, there are three types of projects:
1. Innovative projects. Come up with a solution that was not before.
2. Typical solutions and products (banking applications, media, cms like octopod ). The customer does not need a specialized solution.
3. Support and clean work on the terms of reference. Conveyor, low cost, many beginning developers.
Work on each type of project requires completely different people and processes, so it’s good for a mobile studio to do only one type of project.
GALS Soft makes projects of the first type only. And doing according to the model of filming a film. There is a budget for him to gather “star” experts, make a cool project and diverge. Although there is a difference. It is not random people who are recruited into the project, the “actors” either already worked on other projects or “are casting” on a small assignment from a real project.
It is difficult to imagine Brad Pete, who would be sitting on a salary in the company. So in GALS Soft for each project the most suitable team is recruited. The studio itself employs several key people: a technical architect, product managers, designers.
Project support is not provided, this is the task of companies of the third type. Project development takes place in large blocks with mandatory redesign.
The project is divided into two stages: design and development. Until the completion of the design, the development cost is unknown, only the order. The project in GALS Soft is led by a product manager and technical manager.
The product manager interacts with the customer, comes up with the idea, designs the application and monitors the work. Products are bison of mobile applications, in GALS Soft they abandoned the near-by girls accounts, they lower the professionalism of the company in the eyes of the client to their level.
A technical craftsman breaks the designed application into tasks, cuts into basecamp and controls the work of development contractors.
GALS Soft developed the application architecture, designed the interface. For design, a designer who draws only Windows Phone / Windows 8 applications was attracted, for development, the company Sly Lamb (http://slylamb.com/). Sly Lamb was one of the first in Russia to begin development under Windows Phone / Windows 8 and specialize exclusively in these platforms.
Another example is the development of the Kommersant application .
GALS Soft constantly updates the list of potential contractors for projects: designers, technical architects, server developers, mobile outsourcers. If you want to get there, write to job@galssoft.ru
The strength of the e-Legion is the development of applications for large companies. Where reconciliation processes are complex and responsibility is blurred. Where 20 people from 5 departments participate in the coordination of the color of the button. State customers, a nightmare for many studios, do not scare e-Legion at all.
The ideal customer is a bank, airline, government agency or a large holding that requires at least one year of application development and support. e-Legion works with Yandex, Mail.ru, Raiffeisen-Bank.
Secret sauce - project managers grown internally on large and difficult customers. They are stress-agile, calm, able to circumvent bureaucracy, smooth out jambs and difficult situations.
Experience is essential for working with large customers. The bank is more willing to order development from a mobile contractor with experience in developing banking applications. Such a contractor knows where complications may arise and warn the customer and the team.
70% of customers work with e-Legion on Time & Material. First, the project is designed, then developed. The customer is given an approximate assessment, payment is taken according to the actually spent time of employees.
The e-Legion pays great attention to working with customer expectations. The development process is as transparent and comfortable as possible for the client. This helps to build long-term relationships and avoid conflicts when working on t & m.
To become even closer to customers, the e-Legion itself becomes a corporation. He teamed up with Digital Zone. The holding has offices in 5 cities and plans to absorb a couple more companies.
We believe that the success of an application depends not only on the design and development of the application. Working, profitable applications in Russia on the fingers count: Litres, Alfa Bank, Lingua Leo, Delivery Club. Behind success is not development, but a strong team of mobile products, marketers and analysts. As our experience shows, the rest of the companies are not able to gather such a strong team. Therefore, we decided to collect it and rent it out.
Each client is assigned a product manager. He does not change until the end of the work with the client and oversees all activities of the project. Products are versed in mobile strategy, user behavior, analytics, promotion and other things necessary for success. In addition, the product is the person who cares, project vision carrier.
Work process:
After analytics, we return to the mobile strategy, either we understand that it is true, or we change it and try again.
KPI (or performance indicators) is the guiding star of the project. Design, development and promotion strive to one goal to increase performance indicators. KPIs depend on the mobile strategy and can be completely different: profit from the application, the number of active users, user satisfaction, virality ...
After research, it turned out that selling refrigerators through the iPhone application is impossible. Therefore, we decided to collect and grow an audience loyal to the brand in the application. The application will have frequently-updated discounted goods, auction and unusual goods. All positions are cheaper than 3,000 rubles. KPI - the number of active audience and conversion to spontaneous purchases.
This is a hypothesis, it needs to be checked. In Touch Instinct designed and developed an iPhone-application. After the release, we will begin the promotion, not for getting into the tops or for buying cheap installations, but for getting an active audience with a good conversion to spontaneous purchases.
After receiving a statistically reliable number of installations, we analyze the conversion at each stage, user behavior, sales volume (for each client, their own performance reports are developed). If the result of the analysis is encouraging, we will continue to develop the application, conduct a / b tests, port it to new platforms, and refine the functionality. If not, we will think about a new idea.
The work of the product and analysts is paid monthly, the work of designers, developers and testers on the hours actually spent.
Thanks to Vadim Mityakin and Anton Krokhmalyuk for their help in preparing the article. Analytics image from Google Analytics .
Subscribe to our habr-blog . Every Thursday, useful articles on mobile development, marketing and the mobile studio business.
Introduce yourself at the customer site. Where should he go? All ten studios operate in approximately the same price range and have developed “strong” portfolios. Who better to cope with the task? Studios must answer this question themselves. To realize what and how it turns out to do best and tell how they differ from others. Then the customer will compare the specialization of the studio with his task and turn to the right place.
Read more about positioning in the presentation of Andrey Terekhov ( Terekhov)
And I will talk about the positioning of three mobile studios: GALS Soft, e-Legion and Touch Instinct.
DO NOT work with
- private individuals;
- companies with clear technical specifications;
- budgets of less than 1.5 million rubles;
- on project support.
In GALS Soft, they came up with their own coordinate system to describe their positioning. So, there are three types of projects:
1. Innovative projects. Come up with a solution that was not before.
2. Typical solutions and products (banking applications, media, cms like octopod ). The customer does not need a specialized solution.
3. Support and clean work on the terms of reference. Conveyor, low cost, many beginning developers.
Work on each type of project requires completely different people and processes, so it’s good for a mobile studio to do only one type of project.
GALS Soft makes projects of the first type only. And doing according to the model of filming a film. There is a budget for him to gather “star” experts, make a cool project and diverge. Although there is a difference. It is not random people who are recruited into the project, the “actors” either already worked on other projects or “are casting” on a small assignment from a real project.
It is difficult to imagine Brad Pete, who would be sitting on a salary in the company. So in GALS Soft for each project the most suitable team is recruited. The studio itself employs several key people: a technical architect, product managers, designers.
Project support is not provided, this is the task of companies of the third type. Project development takes place in large blocks with mandatory redesign.
The project is divided into two stages: design and development. Until the completion of the design, the development cost is unknown, only the order. The project in GALS Soft is led by a product manager and technical manager.
The product manager interacts with the customer, comes up with the idea, designs the application and monitors the work. Products are bison of mobile applications, in GALS Soft they abandoned the near-by girls accounts, they lower the professionalism of the company in the eyes of the client to their level.
A technical craftsman breaks the designed application into tasks, cuts into basecamp and controls the work of development contractors.
Example: MVideo for Windows 8
GALS Soft developed the application architecture, designed the interface. For design, a designer who draws only Windows Phone / Windows 8 applications was attracted, for development, the company Sly Lamb (http://slylamb.com/). Sly Lamb was one of the first in Russia to begin development under Windows Phone / Windows 8 and specialize exclusively in these platforms.
Another example is the development of the Kommersant application .
GALS Soft constantly updates the list of potential contractors for projects: designers, technical architects, server developers, mobile outsourcers. If you want to get there, write to job@galssoft.ru
The strength of the e-Legion is the development of applications for large companies. Where reconciliation processes are complex and responsibility is blurred. Where 20 people from 5 departments participate in the coordination of the color of the button. State customers, a nightmare for many studios, do not scare e-Legion at all.
The ideal customer is a bank, airline, government agency or a large holding that requires at least one year of application development and support. e-Legion works with Yandex, Mail.ru, Raiffeisen-Bank.
Secret sauce - project managers grown internally on large and difficult customers. They are stress-agile, calm, able to circumvent bureaucracy, smooth out jambs and difficult situations.
Experience is essential for working with large customers. The bank is more willing to order development from a mobile contractor with experience in developing banking applications. Such a contractor knows where complications may arise and warn the customer and the team.
70% of customers work with e-Legion on Time & Material. First, the project is designed, then developed. The customer is given an approximate assessment, payment is taken according to the actually spent time of employees.
The e-Legion pays great attention to working with customer expectations. The development process is as transparent and comfortable as possible for the client. This helps to build long-term relationships and avoid conflicts when working on t & m.
To become even closer to customers, the e-Legion itself becomes a corporation. He teamed up with Digital Zone. The holding has offices in 5 cities and plans to absorb a couple more companies.
We believe that the success of an application depends not only on the design and development of the application. Working, profitable applications in Russia on the fingers count: Litres, Alfa Bank, Lingua Leo, Delivery Club. Behind success is not development, but a strong team of mobile products, marketers and analysts. As our experience shows, the rest of the companies are not able to gather such a strong team. Therefore, we decided to collect it and rent it out.
Each client is assigned a product manager. He does not change until the end of the work with the client and oversees all activities of the project. Products are versed in mobile strategy, user behavior, analytics, promotion and other things necessary for success. In addition, the product is the person who cares, project vision carrier.
Work process:
- market research;
- formulation of company application strategies and KPI;
- design and development;
- content filling (if required);
- project promotion;
- analytics (flurry, heatma.ps, user reviews);
- goto 2.
After analytics, we return to the mobile strategy, either we understand that it is true, or we change it and try again.
KPI (or performance indicators) is the guiding star of the project. Design, development and promotion strive to one goal to increase performance indicators. KPIs depend on the mobile strategy and can be completely different: profit from the application, the number of active users, user satisfaction, virality ...
Technosil example
After research, it turned out that selling refrigerators through the iPhone application is impossible. Therefore, we decided to collect and grow an audience loyal to the brand in the application. The application will have frequently-updated discounted goods, auction and unusual goods. All positions are cheaper than 3,000 rubles. KPI - the number of active audience and conversion to spontaneous purchases.
This is a hypothesis, it needs to be checked. In Touch Instinct designed and developed an iPhone-application. After the release, we will begin the promotion, not for getting into the tops or for buying cheap installations, but for getting an active audience with a good conversion to spontaneous purchases.
After receiving a statistically reliable number of installations, we analyze the conversion at each stage, user behavior, sales volume (for each client, their own performance reports are developed). If the result of the analysis is encouraging, we will continue to develop the application, conduct a / b tests, port it to new platforms, and refine the functionality. If not, we will think about a new idea.
The work of the product and analysts is paid monthly, the work of designers, developers and testers on the hours actually spent.
Thanks to Vadim Mityakin and Anton Krokhmalyuk for their help in preparing the article. Analytics image from Google Analytics .
Subscribe to our habr-blog . Every Thursday, useful articles on mobile development, marketing and the mobile studio business.
Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.
Where would you order the app?
- 33.3% GALS Soft 29
- 35.6% e-Legion 31
- 31% Touch Instinct 27