Marketing a Product - Part 2

Creating business model

Draw a table, expenses & revenues. Decide breakeven point. Decide initial investment

Having a business model is very important. Everyone has an app, but what most of them doesn’t know is how to get it to the targeted audience. But if you have a sound business model, you’ll start earning revenue very quickly. Let’s be honest, you work to live, and to live you need money.

Define the problem you’re trying to solve. The problem should be very focused and narrow. It should be well-defined. All these will help you to define the scope of your product. Then determine the targeted audience. Don’t say its entire nation. You should have specific groups as audience. Make sure you understand their behaviors and culture. Else, you’re going to have problem penetrating their market with your product.

Determine what can go wrong in the product/application & solutions. This not only gives you bad reviews but also causes you to lose money. Think about it; if you have an application with loop-holes, then some users may try to get advantages beyond their permission. Stating the risks of your product shows that you have thought about them.

And it’s important to make your product unique. Study well; what makes your product different from the rest already out there. Don’t ever say that you don’t have competitors, everyone do have. Study them very well, make comparisons. Evaluate your product based on what they already have. Make sure your product stands out of the rest. People need to notice your product, so it should have something to notice.

It’s very important that you come up with a plan for the future when you want to earn revenue. You can’t earn without investing. But it’s quite possible not to earn anything after investing. Therefore be very careful when coming up with a business plan. Just putting your app on Android or iOS app store will not generate revenue. Customers should be convinced and satisfied with what you are offering.

You also need to have very focused plans how to reach the audience. Audience is everything. After all, you’re developing the app for them. So make sure they are reachable. Social Media won’t always work. But don’t forget the Social Media. Make a Facebook page, lure people into it.

Next, have visual aid to understand your plans. Have a plan 1yr/2yrs ahead of what you’re planning to do. 

• The capital investment (money you have to spend till the breakeven point)
• When are you going to earn salaries (Obviously, you can’t start earning from the first day)
• How much the expenses are (Labor, System, Marketing, etc.)
• What is the breakeven point (Expenses = Revenue)

Finally, it’s very important to have validations of your product. Ask possible stakeholders, would you buy such an app? What kind of features would you like to have? Do you use existing similar applications? Show survey results, statistics to the investors. They will be more convinced if they see that there are customers around the product.

Demo

When it comes to the demo, it should demonstrate the main flow of the product. Usually, you can skip back-end.

These are few points in detail that I've learned in my Hackathon experience. Hope this will be useful to someone.