Creative app commerce

The brief

Write a 250-300 word post noting your progress so far. Identify one challenge and / or an obstacle and one SMART action to resolve the issue.

My experience in week six

The source material over this week is focused on commercial aspects of creative apps. Specifically funding and monetisation models, the importance of unique selling points, the content required in a pitch to investors, how to analyse and present information to a business audience and the typical contents of a business plan.

As has been the case in most weeks on the course so far, I do have first hand industry experience in all of the areas mentioned, but as usual the weeks research has made me realise that my process has gaps and devoting a week to study in this area has helped to bring further insight into my practice and enabled me to unify my understanding and make it more relevant to the types of app I am interested in creating.

Funding and monetisation models

The two, ‘funding’ and ‘monetisation models’ go hand in hand but more so in reverse. The monetisation model is important to get right first, without a viable monetisation model your application is not going to have any worth and therefore you will struggle to get funded.

There are various options available when it comes to monetisation and the key is to consider which of these suit your application and your audience the best. Below is a list of common ways to make money from an application taken directly from a Tech.co post How will your app make money?. Though this post was written in 2015 the methods haven’t changed but the ordering has ever so slightly. To be more current I’ve re-ordered my list based on the 2017 trends reported in this StartUS post The 5 best strategies to monetise your mobile app in 2018:

Paid Apps (Pay money to download): This means that the app cannot be downloaded for free and it must be purchased from the app store if the user wishes to use it.
In-App Purchases (Selling virtual or physical goods): This strategy involves the selling of virtual or physical goods within the app itself which helps the company to yield profits.
In-App Advertising (Free with ads): Most commonly seen in smartphone apps, the company gets rid of the cost barrier and allows free downloads. It aims to gather information about the people using the app along with a good user base so that this data can be sold to app publishers who then place specific ads in your app.
Freemium (Gated features): In this strategy, the app is available for free but some of the features are locked and unlocking them costs money. The app’s basic functionality is accessible by the user but he has to pay a price for using its proprietary or premium features.
Paywalls (Subscriptions): Being similar to Freemium, the content instead of the features are locked. A specific amount of content can be viewed for free after which the user needs to sign up for a paid subscription to view more content.
Sponsorship (Incentivised advertising): This refers to partnering with advertisers who reward your user when they complete specific in-app actions. In order to be a part of the incentive system, agencies and brands pay and you take a share of the revenue from the rewards redeemed by users.

When selecting the monetisation model/s for my apps I will first need to understand the audience and what model/s perform best with them, I will then weight in favour of the higher performing models outlined above by the 2017 trends and tailor my solution to use one or more of these techniques.

The importance of unique selling points

Finding an idea with a unique selling point or shaping your idea to have a feature that sets it apart from your competitors is instrumental when trying to get funding. As I identified above Paid Apps (Pay money to download) was the best performing monetisation model in 2017 and having a unique selling point is important when convincing a user to pay for your app. Of course you can look at your competitors and offer the same thing but execute it better and charge less which is an option but it’s the unique features that will allow you to charge more. The more money you can charge the better as this will then be easier to sell to a potential investor, especially the type of investor that is motivated primarily by the figures.

Pitching to investors

Pitching is something that I’m relatively new to, and something that I was frankly quite terrified of. For years I was happy to sit behind the scenes and I actively sought a partnership that put me in the technical driving seat but kept me at arms length when it came to pitch delivery.

Over time, having attended many meetings I realised that I am in fact a very confident speaker and that shying away from pitches was actually a mistake, and that I’m often the person who knows the product best so I should be out selling it. I’ve since been involved with groups such as The Business Networking Institute (BNI) where I was judged on a sixty second pitch every week and more recently one of our products Roadle was shortlisted for The Pitch 2018 which I attended as the co-founder to construct the ninety second pitch we delivered.

I’m always looking to improve my pitching skills and I found Rich Barham’s video on Canvas to be very helpful in exposing more depth to pitch consideration.

Looking back at our previous pitches, they have all been based on a common template that we have built over the years at Antiblanks. Given the format of the pitch we would tailor the content in length but the structure of the pitch would always remain the same. I now understand that I need to better research my audience and tailor the content specific to what they are most interested in.

Contents of a business plan

Historically at Antiblanks we’ve only ever created an investor pitch deck that has a structure which bears a strong likeness to that of a typical startup app business plan template such as this one from AppPartner.com. This weeks content has helped me to identify that the investor pitch deck we are pitching to all investors is actually too much and what we should be doing is constructing our pitch from our investor pitch deck but use the relevant content tailored and organised to our audience. The investor pitch deck can then be sent as a follow up to our pitch for more detailed information.

Tying this to my project

It was always intended that I would exit the course with one, if not two viable IPs and since joining I have been searching for the first strong idea to move forward with. As my existing SMART actions denote, I have been taking the time to regularly ideate each week for the last two weeks and though I would like more time to happen upon an idea, I felt that being we are coming to the end of week six, I should get behind one of my existing ideas if I am to stand a chance of creating an MVP of the application before the end of the module. For this reason I have decided to begin further exploration into the ‘Escape Room’ idea surfaced in the App Jam.

One of my intentions was always to construct an investor pitch deck for each of the applications I create on the course and also to go out and seek investment alongside development to further the applications outside the realm of study. With this in mind I see the next seven to eight weeks being used to create my MVP for ‘Escape Room’ and to produce the material required to seek investment to develop this further.

I’ve created the following SMART action to support this:

Making it Specific: The goal is to create an investor pitch deck for the ‘Escape Room’ application
Making it Measurable: I will break the pitch deck into five sections and complete one section at a time
Making it Attainable: I want to achieve this over the next ten weeks
Making it Relevant: The investor pitch deck will be used to try and acquire funding for furthering development of the ‘Escape Room’ application past the MVP version I create in the first module
Making it Time-Based: I want to spend two hours per week on this for the next ten weeks

Summary

In this post I’ve looked more deeply at the four key areas highlighted by the introduction video: Funding and monetisation models, the importance of unique selling points, pitching to investors and the contents of a business plan. In reading about these topics I’ve expanded my knowledge and set the foundations to complete the SMART action I’ve identified in order to create an investor pitch deck for the ‘Escape Room’ application and developed an understanding for how to better tailor this content into a pitch when it comes to pitching for funding.