In the last two decades, we have seen huge technological advancements. The desktops were in common households, then soon we were surrounded by laptops, and now we can smartphones everywhere. These smartphones have become a part of our daily life and have become a necessity. Almost every person now owns a smartphone. That’s why most of the startups, entrepreneurs, small or medium-sized businesses, large companies, are building mobile applications to get a great number of users for their businesses. However, developing a mobile application is not a game of fortnight. It takes a couple of weeks and before the development one must have a proper business plan of it.
A mobile application is developed to target the massive population of millennials. A well-thought business would be your first step to success. It will cover every aspect of it including the app development cost, planning, designing, and much more. Henceforth, in this article, we are presenting you the steps of creating a perfect mobile app development plan along with its importance.
Why you must make a mobile app business plan?
Attracting Investors
This is the most important reason for entrepreneurs or startup owners as they required to bring more and more investments for their idea or app. With a proper business plan for your mobile app, it is completely feasible to attract your investors or even the co-founders of major companies.
If you are having an efficient business plan, then you would be able to represent your idea in a very transparent way which will demonstrate the scope of your mobile app concept and idea as well.
Reduces the risks
When you create a business plan, you have considered all the potential outcomes, take account of every single unfavorable condition, and much more. With this, you get more insight into your idea in a practical manner. This will help in reducing the risks of cost and resources in a long-term way.
Keep everything in focus
It is quite common that while making some important and big decisions, you will forget some small points which are like the small stones of your foundation. They can break your business at a much later stage. But when you create a business plan, you include all set of points that remind you of those crucial stages. It is easier for you to remember them.
So these were the core benefits of making a proper business plan for your mobile application success.
Now let’s move on to the important steps to consider during business plan creation.
Steps for creating a business plan for your mobile application success:
1. Executive Summary
2. Introduce your company
3. All about the Industry
4. Marketing strategy
5. Operational strategy
6. Financial plan
We will discuss each of these points in more detail.
Executive Summary
As the name indicates, it will be a short summary of your mobile app business plan. You must give proper attention to this stage because you are going to explain the summary of your business plan first to your investors. In this section, try to use fewer words but convey more. Don’t mention the working of your product instead focus on market scenario, target users.
Problems Addressed
The core meaning of startup is “a company which is addressing a problem within a society and have developed a solution for it”. And with room for innovation and improvement. You must focus on analyzing the problems that the existing users are facing and find out:
· What do the users require presently?
· What problems the users are facing are similar to yours?
· Why the existing solutions failed to woo them?
· What features they are lacking and you can provide them? And so on.
State your solution
Don’t get deviate from your path while explaining your solution to the underlying problems i.e. don’t go into the features and functionalities of your mobile app. Instead, be focused on the problem and the ways by which you will address it.
Unique Value Proposition
To make yourself distinguishable from others, you must mention the uniqueness of your sell i.e. a unique value proposition. It wouldn’t be just better but completely different.
Ultimate objective
After mentioning all the important things, you will come down to mention the ultimate goal that you want to achieve through this app.
You can state the future of your app such as how many downloads will you expect initially and how the numbers will grow over a period of time. It is best to visualize your short-term plans and then improve your answer through metrics.
Read more: 10 Essential Best Practices for Mobile App Development
Introduce your company
After giving the initial summary, the next step would be to prepare the information about your company. It is not necessary that the investors would be interested in you on the basis of your first step i.e. summary.
Firms like Y Combinator, TechStars, and many others, are known to select startups for investing on the basis of their team and founders. Hence, now you may understand why this section is equally important. You can add one more advantage if you can also provide the information of an MVP or prototype you have developed. Some of the few things that you must cover here are:
Give an overview
There are some basic questions for which you must give an answer to your investors. They must know to which and which type of organization they are investing in. The potential questions are:
· Mention which type of company you are i.e. private or LLC
· Mention the location of your company
· When you founded the company
· Do you have international operations as well or not
· What are the problems your company is currently going through
· State the ultimate goal of your company
· Lastly, the vision of your company
Take it from the top
Just like a novel, it would be a great idea to tell the story of your company while briefly mentioning your motivational factors, ideas, problems, etc. that you faced during inception.
Mention your company history that worth knowing. If you hide any crucial information then it can have adverse impacts later.
Management Team
Always remember, even the most junior employee of your company is highly important. Hence, you must mention the names of all employees in your company’s management. Including their qualification, professional experience, etc.
Advisory Panel
Almost every mobile app development company has an advisory team to back. There are many industry experts on this team who have profound knowledge and years of experience. In fact, they are responsible for the success of many applications. You must create a list of these advisors. This will improve your brand image and build a reputation in front of the investors.
All about the Industry
Ultimately, there would be an industry which must be in the target by your product. Hence, you must have every vital information about that industry, including its market history, current trends, and much more.
Size of the market
This is the very basic thing about an industry from which you can initiate. Showcase the total size of the industry’s market. It includes the total available market which depends on your app, the serviceable available market i.e. the potential number of users which will arise, and the serviceable obtainable market, (initial users segment in 6-12 months).
If you are facing difficulties to find the data then you must try some 3rd party platforms, such as Sensor Tower, App Annie, and Statista.
Keep updates with a market graph
You have to gain an understanding of the market history and present so to gain future insights. You can compare the market projections within a period of 5 years. Check the newcomers, total fundings, etc.
Don’t include global market stats if you are covering only the domestic market.
Analysis of your competitors
You can’t avoid analyzing your competitors’ in any business on this land. Whatever your industry niche, the business type is, it is definitely required.
There are many different models introduced to attract angel investors, one of which is a 2×2 matrix model. There are 4 aspects in which the variables are portrayed: challengers, leaders, niche players, and visionaries. In order to highlight the execution and vision of the app as it progresses, these four elements are displayed via an x-y axis scale.
SWOT analysis
There are 4 main components in SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. It is used by almost every organization for self-assessment. You can get a structured description of the situation of your company through this.
It is best not to hide your shortcomings. Doing so will ensure the investors of your self-awareness and that you will find ways to improve them.
Marketing Strategy
Marketing is like a bridge that connects the end-users and your company. You must devise a marketing strategy that can play the role of a “deal-sealer” between your firm and investors. This will show the investors that you have the medium to make your app reach the users’ smartphones from an app store.
Some of the important points that you need to consider are:
User persona description must be first
There are many benefits to creating user personas. If there are more than one user personas, include this in your business plan. More depth of the plan would be more attractive to the investors. Some of the solid information that you can include are – Age, Gender, Profession, Location, Income, and Marital Status.
The strategy of acquiring customers
After identifying the user personas, you can move on to determine the customer acquisition strategy. Customer acquisition cost is the foremost thing here. You have to identify the right cost after establishing channels and campaigns you will use to highlight the USP of your app. Some of the popular channels that you can use are:
- User downloads
- Search Engine Marketing
- Number of installs
- Social media platform ads
- Partnerships
- PR
- App Store Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Push and in-app notifications
- Retargeting campaigns
- Mobile site redirection
- Mobile app wall ads
- Email & Event Marketing
Keep your CAC expectation realistic from each channel. Also, try to be as quantitative as possible. Since a majority of your funds will go towards business growth, investors should be made aware of how much risk is involved in your growth plan.
Landing Page Creation
There are many different ways by which a landing page would be beneficial for you. One of which is that it can help you expand your horizon focusing the target users. The readers will get all updates and information of your app through it. Don’t forget to add the name of your app, its description, promotional videos, etc. in it.
Mention your key metrics
There would be many different metrics that will help you determine the growth of your business and mobile app popularity. You must include all these metrics in your mobile app business plan. Pick up the right metrics which are related to your industry niche and business model. For e.g., if you are dealing with social media, then your ideal key metrics would be mentioning daily active users instead of downloads figure.
Do not fall prey to the ‘vanity metrics’. They make it seem that your business is growing but in actuality, you are not headed towards a sustainable business.
Operational Strategy
If you are mentioning the operational strategy in your business plan then you are giving your investors an impression of awareness and readiness.
It will also include your strategy for customer relations. You must describe and map out how you are going to handle customer services and maintain quality assurance. Other things you can include are:
Users Process
You can mention the entire journey of the user from its onboard to the end when they first hear of the app and start using it.
Personnel Plan
It will mention the data related to the employees. You will mention how and when you will hire employees, how will you expense their salary, etc.
Financial Plan
Finally, we have reached the last stage of our business plan, where we can say “Let’s talk number”. What the investors expect in this section are questions like:
- How will you make money?
- What will be the cost to run the business?
- How many funds do you require?
Devise the app monetization strategy
Apart from marketing, you must have an efficacious mobile app monetization strategy. It simply means how you would be able to get revenue.
Startup costs
As per the CB insights report, one-fifth of the startups get fail because they get out-completed. You must avoid this by in-depth analysis of the cost you may need. It is equally crucial for your investors as well. You have to mention all the details related to the costs and expenses you would be needing and for what. You can include:
- One-time costs
- Recurring costs (rent, inventory, etc.)
- Fixed costs (rent, utilities, etc.)
- Variable costs (salaries, etc.) and much more.
Funding requires
And here you are going to ask for the funding that you will require from your investors. You will reveal all the details related to it. The main questions would be:
- How much money do you need?
- What equity percentage you will give them in return?
- Is this going to be a convertible note or a preferred stock?
- For what duration this money will suffice before you need to propose for another funding round?
Read more: Top 20 Trending Questions in Mobile App Development: An Expert’s Insight
Wrapping Up
Whatever may be the category of your mobile application, it will definitely require a business plan for attracting investors. Well, this is a thing which you have to give personal attention to. But you don’t need to worry about mobile application development. We, at Amplework, the best mobile application development company, are having expertise in developing mobile apps of every industry niche. Let us know your requirements.
