Mobile startups fail as in 99th year

Stop the madness

Long-term development of mobile applications leads to failures of startups, which refer us to the 1999th year. As if we forgot all the principles of agile and fast iterations learned over the past ten years. Stop this madness.



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

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How it all worked in 1999

We did about the same thing:

• to hoist a couple of zillions with a cool idea and charismatic founders
• spend 9 months to develop
• run with great pomp
• 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 get crazy, and dismiss the vice president of marketing. But from 2002 to 2009 we learned how to work faster, issue a new code several times a week and iteratively work on the product.

How it all works today

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



And this is how it works:

• to hoist a couple of zillions with a cool idea and charismatic founders
• spend 6 months to develop
• run the app in the app store with great pomp
• do not enter the market
• restart with version 2.0 after 6 months
• add facebook open graph
• buy installation via Tapjoy, FreeAppADay
• repeat until the money runs out

Unfortunately, not so strong difference.

The platform is like its master

We came to this life, because the App Store inherited from Apple excellent products and major launches. This strategy has been sharpened by this iron company since 1980, so when developers do something for this platform, they cannot but copy this approach.



Worse yet, this leads to the fact that people begin to imagine themselves as Steve Jobs in their fantasies, and to think that when they launch a product that has been polished over several months, they will also reap great success. And fixing on the polished product returns us to the mentality of a slow developer.

Do not spend half the funding for the development of the first version

Startups are now too high for the quality of the first version of their product. They want to make a big press release, catch up on traffic, since there are no other options for success. Therefore, startups burn 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 - after all, the remaining money is not 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 drastically improve the whole industry.