Read the previous lesson 03 article here.
Now that we’ve made the choice with what type of business to start, we need to focus some time on our competition. It is necessary to understand how they are attracting their customers and notice what they are missing—or better yet, what they are doing wrong. In the technology business, there are hundreds if not thousands of potential-competitors that must be kept with an eyeful watch in order to be successful in our business.
Starting a white label app development company yields many potential competitors. Some of these fall within four basic types; perfect, monopolistic, oligopoly, and monopoly. This is all basic Economics 101 for those of you who are remembering hearing these terms somewhere before. I’m not going to go into detail as to what each one is because that’d be boring as hell (sorry Econ guys & gals but I’m being real), so what I’m going to do is do what I do best—research.
From what I can pull from the interwebs, besides the platform that I will be basing this white label business off of with BuildFire, there’s many to choose from. Some of the most notable ones are Appy Pie, Swiftic (formerly Como DIY), Appery.io, appmakr and AppMachine. Each of these offer a low cost monthly fee that rises with the amount of features you get. For example, you can build and launch a mobile app (minus the costs associated with getting the app in iTunes and Google Play) with or without it being branded by the company of your choice or you can pay extra for your own branding and not have any reference to anyone but you.
According to Savvy Apps, a mobile design and development company in Virginia, simple apps can cost around $25,000 with more complex apps pushing the $1 Million mark. Yikes! So the cool thing about building this white label mobile app is that I’d be able to offer this service for a small monthly fee which gives me two advantages. The first advantage is that I’d be able to market this to a wider audience including start-ups, small-medium businesses, and even to large corporations and organizations. The second advantage with offering this service as a monthly fee is that I will not be forcing anyone to sell-off their grandma’s jewelry or taking angel investors to pony up the dough to pay for a mobile app to be developed. A monthly fee is something that is more attractive than writing a check for $100,000, don’t you think? I sure as hell think so and it’s a better sell.
As far as what the competition doing and what they are not doing, I see a few things. I will start with what they are doing. Most, if not all are blogging. This is a great way to get your voice heard in a free way. All it takes is for you to post an article on a blog that you’ve set up and you’re done. Writing articles also establishes you as an expert in your industry, which can weigh heavy depending on how you spread your articles. They are also using social media like everyone else is. Unsure how effective that can be with certain social media sites, but I know that with facebook, instagram, and linkedin, you can tap into those who are business owners and those who call themselves “entrepreneurs” so you can directly hit them.
What are they not doing? Well this takes some investigating. Not being from the standpoint of looking for an app to be developed, I’m unsure if I’m just not seeing any particular advertisements on facebook or even twitter because I am not. But I am a business owner, and business owners I would think would be a target, so maybe they aren’t utilizing social media direct advertising to their benefit. Another thing that I can think of right now is that I have never seen a printed flyer or postcard marketing piece advertisement for a mobile app development company. The great thing about direct mail is that it’s faded out and is not as popular as it use to be. Which for us can be an awesome thing to hear because it means there is less competition doing this type of marketing. What if we were to hit the business owners and those start-ups with not only marketing on social media but also with direct mail? To read an article I wrote about print, click here.
I will continue to research articles on reddit and other sites to get a better idea on this business. The cool part is this is all new to me, as I’m assuming will be all new to you as well. I do not have the slightest idea with how to build a mobile app, but I’m not going to let that stop me from entering into an industry that I see as being viable in the future. Eventually, I see that mobile apps will take over for websites as the first thing businesses build rather than a full fledged website.
The next post that you will see will be inside the Knowing Your Competition—Chapter 2 Session: Find a great domain that is keyword relevant and find hosting (if needed) – Lesson 05.
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Till next time Biz Army…
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What’s In My MP3: The audiobook I just finished on my trail run is #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness by HarperAudio
And if you don’t have an Audible account, I highly recommend signing up for their monthly service ($15 bucks) where you not only get discounts on audiobook purchases, but you get a free monthly credit to download any audiobook in their library. This is how I’m able to get as much education on business and development as possible. I also recommend listening to the audiobooks at 1.5X the rate (or even faster if you can still comprehend) so that you get through the book even faster! Click here to check out Audible by Amazon.
