HOW DO I GET MY APP ON YOUR PHONE?
I sit through lots of meetings these days wondering how so many smart people can be so oblivious to some of the web’s harshest realities. They work so hard and they’re so creative in most parts of their business and yet they consistently overlook the singly most obvious shortcoming in their plans for global domination. These aren’t mediocre mopes or deluded dreamers – they’re great technologists, really sharp systems engineers, dynamite designers and even prominent professors. But, far too often, as they pitch their products, services and amazing ideas, what always comes through to me is the sad fact that they just don’t get it.
What’s the horrendous hiccup? Ya gotta get it out there before it’s gonna do you any good. I call it Digital DARE which stands for Distribution, Adoption, Retention and Engagement. If you can’t get your mobile application on my phone (distribution) and convince me to initially try it (adoption) and to then keep it on my phone (retention) and finally to use it on a recurring and fairly frequent basis (engagement), you’ve got nothing to talk about. And each of these steps in the success path presents different challenges and hurdles.
I see this same syndrome with all the new frenzy around content marketing. There’s a fierce focus on content creation coupled with “Field of Dreams” fantasies about the ease of digital distribution. The hard truth is that if you’re not spending almost as much time thinking about (a) how your message will reach its intended targets (and how you will know [measure] that it has) as you are on (b) developing the message itself, you’re just kidding yourself.
In the old days, when we were still talking about desktop computers (before the world moved to mobile), we used to say that “if it ain’t on the screen; it don’t mean a thing”. The point back then was that ideas and talk were cheap whereas execution and delivery were much more difficult. Fascinating features and functions didn’t cut it if they weren’t in the code base. And all the wonder and wishful thinking in the world wasn’t going to get the product shipped and launched. Then, once you shipped your product, the bar was quickly raised again and, at that point, distribution and penetration were the whole ballgame. Yes, that was way back then, but it’s just as true and as critical to your success today.
And while the screens we’re dealing with may be smaller and much more mobile, the job is still exactly the same. Distribution and adoption are all that matters in the first instance and the competition is tougher than it has ever been because, while there are billions of phones in the aggregate out there in the world, each and every individual user gets to choose what occupies the prime positions on his or her own device. It’s just like the real estate business – location and placement are everything. As I’ve said now for several years - the scarcest piece of real estate in the world is the front screen of the smartphone.
And if you think the adoption curve on cool new technologies is quick; wait until you see how fast these fickle fanatics abandon the latest and greatest anything in favor of the next bright shiny thing coming down the road. Especially anything that’s a novelty rather than a necessity. Not only is nothing the future forever; the fact is that it’s hard to hang on to a prime position even from week to week without some powerful staying power. The basic rule is: “out of sight, out of mind”. Getting there is plenty hard; staying there is harder still. If you’re depending on me looking for it; you better be sure that I love it or I’m not gonna make the effort.
So, if you want to be taken seriously (however amazing your application may be), you’ve got to address the critical concerns which will be front and center in every investor’s mind. And while there are no simple solutions, it helps to spend some time thinking about the different ways that you can get over the hurdles and who can help you in the process. Because especially today, these things take tough teams and strategic partners. They never happen by themselves because no one has the time, talent or money to bring it home all alone.
Think along these three dimensions:
(1) Utility – Make It Multi-Purpose
The more functionality that your application provides; the more value it creates for the end user and the more likely it is to succeed. In addition, engagement and retention are frequency games – the more reasons I have to use something; the more instances in which it saves me time or money; the more likely I will be to retain it and keep it close at hand. But don’t make it bulky. Feature creep and too many functions is a sure formula for failure. Interestingly enough, excess complexity is exactly why Facebook is now slicing and dicing the FB mother lode into a series of single purpose mini-apps. But it’s a doomed effort because the sheer number of the individual mini-apps will assure the eventual abandonment of many of them simply because the vast majority of consistent users (MAUs) will pick a couple of core favorites and forget the rest. I realize that it’s a straddle, but the winners will be the ones who strike the right balance.
(2) Ubiquity – Make It Multi-Channel
The more channels and locations through which the end users can encounter and obtain your application; the more likely it is to find its way onto their devices. This is all about distribution partnerships and about engineering as many different “win-win” formulations with channel partners as you can manage to put in place. You want to be everywhere the user looks and the “go to” solution for whatever problem or need you’re addressing. If you do this right, you’re going to spread your application’s availability horizontally across the universe of uses in multiple channels and this will provide you another significant advantage against individual vertical channel solution providers who simply won’t be able to match the volume and scale that a single multi-channel horizontal solution can achieve.
(3) Universality – Make It Multi-Cultural
You’ve got to go global from the get-go. Sure the U.S. is a huge market, but it has never been easier or less expensive to make sure that your solution is available and works around the world. I hear stories every day about the power of the web and especially the cloud and how users – acting entirely on their own - are adopting new products or services world-wide without their makers spending any material marketing dollars or trying to put a bunch of feet on the street. Make it easy to go big and broad. Just like the most successful global movies are short on explication and long on explosions; you want your application to be a vehicle that basically doesn’t care or even know about the identity, language or other attributes of the content processed through it. This is precisely why photos work so well in so many contexts and sharing applications. What you see is exactly what you get – no more, no less, and no one cares.
