Mobile startups fail like in the 99th year

Stop the madness

The long development of mobile applications leads to the failure of startups, which send us back to 1999. As if we had forgotten all the principles of agile and fast iterations learned over the past ten years. Stop this madness.

Today, startups can receive primary funding, release 1-2 versions of applications in 9 months, and quietly disappear. In web development, we learned the benefits of fast iterations, we need to do the same in mobile applications.

How it worked in 1999

We did about the same:

• raise a couple of millions with a cool idea and charismatic founders
• spend 9 months on development
• start up with great fanfare
• do not enter the market
• restart with version 2.0 after 6 months
• repeat until the money runs out

These are projects such as Pets.com, Kozmo and so on. Still, as an option, you can freak out and fire the vice president of marketing. But from 2002 to 2009, we learned to work faster, issue new code several times a week, and iteratively work on a product

How it works today

After the advent of large platforms for smartphones, we rolled back. Only we do not launch the project, but submit it in the iOS App Store.

And here is how it works:

• raise a couple of millions with a cool idea and charismatic founders
• spend 6 months on development
• run the application in the app store with great fanfare
• do not enter the market
• restart with version 2.0 after 6 months
• add Facebook Open Graph
• buy installations through Tapjoy, FreeAppADay
• repeat until the money runs out

Unfortunately, this is not such a strong difference.

The platform is similar to its owner

We have come to such a life since the App Store inherited from Apple great products and major launches. This hardware company has honed this strategy since 1980, so when developers do something for this platform, they cannot but copy this approach.

To make matters worse, this leads to the fact that people in their fantasies begin to imagine themselves as steve jobs, and to think that when they launch a product polished in a few months, they will also reap great success. And fixing on the polished product brings us back to the mentality of a slow developer.

Do not spend half the funding on developing the first version

Startups now have too high a bar for the quality of the first version of their product. They want to make a big press release, catch up with traffic, because there are no other options to achieve success. Therefore, startups burn through from 1/3 to 1/2 of all the money received before the release, which is dangerous when your first launch does not get into the stream - because the remaining money will not be enough for a full update.

What to do?

How to stop this madness? What to do to combine the flexibility and speed that we have acquired over the past 10 years with the requirements of the App Store? If we can answer this question, we can radically improve the entire industry.