How Startups Can Reduce The Cost of App Development

If you seriously believe that your business needs an app to power its next round of growth, then you should definitely get down towards making a streamlined plan that enables you to acquire the app as soon as possible.
The first thing you will need to consider here is the feasibility of the app development project i.e. whether building the app will actually translate into tangible business benefits for you. Once you have that and you know that building the app will definitely drive business success, the next step you need to take is to ensure that the app development cost remains within your budget.
This problem is faced by most startups, since they are at the initial stages of their business and highly strapped for financial resources. So for them, the question of keeping the app development costs low is almost non-negotiable.
Here, what you need to understand is that keeping the cost of app development lower is not related to stripping the app to its bare essentials. This will make the app unattractive to use and devoid of many important features, leaving the whole app idea as a rueful failure for your business.
You shouldn’t be wanting that. Instead, what you can do is to ensure that your app development costs remain within budget is to follow this structure process mentioned below:

The role of your app development company

Building a mobile app can cost you a lot, depending on the scope of your project. As you are dealing with higher values, one of the costliest mistake’s startups can make is to rush the development process.
Your app can make you a lot of money if you can figure out the right approach. On average, the top 200 apps on the app store make about $82,500 per day, whereas the top 800 apps earn a daily revenue of $3,500.
You can highly improve your chances of building a successful app if you adopt a couple of pre-development practices, which can also help you cut down the cost of development.
How much revenue your app can earn and how much it ends up costing you also depend on your tech partner. Whether your hire the best iPhone app development company out there or hand over the project to your in-house development team, always make sure that they follow the right practices, understand your vision, and help you develop an app that delivers results, all while remaining within the defined budget.

How to cut down the cost of app development

Let's look at some critical app development practices that can make a big difference in minimizing your costs and risks, along with increasing the chance of building a product that genuinely caters to the customers' needs.

Create a customers' panel

A brilliant way to ensure that your customers love your app is to make them part of the app development and decision-making process.
Talking to your customers and keeping up with what they actually want is the most significant part of any successful business strategy including app development. But what do you do in case you don't have any product to show or a customer base?
Several entrepreneurs and startups conduct interviews with potential customers to understand their expectations, but you can take this relationship to the next level. By turning your customers into business advisors, you are actually saving possible hundreds of hours of work.
Create a panel of 100 potential users of your app who match your ideal customers' persona. Try to reach them and get them to sign up for an interview where you can discuss a solution to a particular problem they face. This would be the time to start building a trusting relationship without making any sales pitch.
When you design the first version or prototype of your app, you can contact your customers' panel for another session and give them the demo to your product. Now, how effectively you use this second meeting is up to you.
• Ask for their feedback, and how they think their experience can be improved.
• You can also make your first few sales in the meeting or get them to sign up for annual subscript.
• Try to recruit for a long-term customers' advisory board with more regular meetings to work on improving the product.
This will help ensure that your app is as close to market expectations as possible, thereby ensuring that the chances of it ending up as a failure are reduced significantly but also there are fewer changes to the app once its goes live, saving you up a high amount on potential costs that you could have ended up spending had you not take user expectations into account.

Adopt the design-first approach

Building a functional, scalable first version of the app will cost you around five to six figures. But, in less than ten thousand dollars, you can get your product prototype or design ready.

Building a design prototype enables you to make relatively cheaper mistakes. Several design tools help you create a clickable product prototype that allows you to get more real experience of using your app.
This would be the design you show your customers' panel in the second meeting and get their feedback on it. The prototype can be very helpful in understanding what is working for your app and what isn't. Make sure you go through at least two rounds of adjustments before stepping into the development stage. This is the perfect time to rethink and revise your product strategy.
Moreover, a product prototype also makes your idea more tangible. A lot of startups also use the prototype to engage investors and raise funds, as it is easier to gain investors' confidence with a clickable prototype of the app that represents the true potential of the project.

Be more diversified with your funds

One of the best things that the customers' panel can do for your startup is that it helps you identify the core feature of the app. The key functionality of the app, which is the big solution to customers' specific problems. This is what your minimum viable product or app's first version will cater to.
Bring more diversified with your funds means instead of spending everything into building the final app, you divide the investment into two or three versions of the app. You start with the core functionality of the app that solves the real problem and then includes additional features that may improve the users' experience or add a competitive advantage. In this way, you will have the initial version ready you may even be able to raise additional funds or also make sales early on.
In reality, whether you practice customers' panel or not, building an app with several features that satisfies the users' expectations in the first go, rarely happens. Hence, it makes more sense for startups to be prepared for the constant changes and start with the core functionality and then add to it to avoid having to bear high redevelopment costs.

Wrap up

These practices can help startups avoid unnecessary expenses that arise later on. Above all, these practices not only help startups keep up better with the budget, but it also reduces the risk of failure and helps develop a product that customers actually want to use. These pre-development practices are an excellent chance for startups to realize that the goal isn't to build an app, but it's to provide impactful experience and solution for customers.