LAUNCHING AN APP

On 3/25 Alley Boost had a panel that was focused on starting a mobile application. The panelists were among the most successful mobile startup professionals in Silicon Alley such as Drew Howard who is a product strategist at Fueled, Avi Millman co-founder and CEO of Stray Boots, Tobias Peggs the CEO of Aviary, Andrew Frankel the founder of lambda, and Harry Raymond the founder of Shindig. There were many great questions asked and many great answers given at this event and for those of you who missed it I would highly suggest watching it at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/12997. But if you do not have the time to see it yourself here is what I took away from it.

There were 6 major questions that every founder in this area ends up facing that were discussed here. What is the future of mobile apps? Which operating system should we come out for first (ios or android)? Where do you look and how do you get a developer? How do you market your mobile app? How do you make money? and What are the roles of the technical and nontechnical founders in a new startup?

The key points that I got from this panel are:

• Dont do both iOS and Android at the same time
• Android can quickly iterate and can segment
• Discovery in the app store is not very good on either platform
• Developers in high demand need groundwork done to entice them
• Word of mouth is best – use sharing to your advantage
• Downloads do not equal users
• If you start out as business cofounder make sure you make the developer happy
• if you’re a business cofounder make sure you know everything about app
• Test out developers before you marry

Howard Sherman