With the penetration of mobile phones and a flood of apps coming in through the app and play stores, startups tend to get consumed and enamored by having their own mobile app. Lot of discussions focus around which platform should be built first; Android or iOS. No wait, lets build a HTML5 version so that we can cover multiple platforms with minimal effort. There is hardly ever a question of “If” but a discussion around “When” a native or hybrid app needs to be built.

Seems a bit basic but an often-overlooked question is “What is your business?” and how central to your business is the app. During my talk at a business school a few weeks ago, I categorized apps into three broad areas:

   
1. The App is your business
   
2. An online business where the mobile app is a customer touch-point
   
3. A business where the app is a nice-to-have (Just for keeps)

1. App is the Business

Perfect examples are Candy Crush, Draw Something and other related gaming/leisure apps. This segment is where the app gets ALL the attention. Every aspect of the app such as gamification/rules, user experience, device compatibility and virality become paramount to the success of the app. I would anticipate that 99% of the resources in your team are spent towards achieving the above objectives. Getting it wrong is not an option. Statistics indicate that app games see very high uninstall rates (as much as 90%) and the lifetime of an app is around 14 days. Successful games and examples we often quote are outliers and constitute less than 0.1% of all apps out there.

2. Online Business where the App is a touch-point

This applies to e-commerce companies, Online Travel Operators and other related businesses where mobile is an increasingly important component of the business but still one of many touch points for the customer. In this case, User experience, efficiency and performance become key to the success and other aspects such as social integration and virality are not as important.

3. Nice-to-Have App

In today”s mobile world, there is strictly nothing as a “Nice-to-have” mobile presence but businesses that are inherently offline (brick-and-mortar) do not require a mobile app from Day 1. The focus needs to be build a strong primary product/service that customers will appreciate and adding a mobile app will only enhance the experience. Restaurants, Logistics and other related players fall into this category. There is a lot of disruption in the back-end and enterprise spaces where mobile plays a key role in bringing efficiency of operations or salesforce but that is still not the primary objective of the business.

As for Zippr, we see ourselves in Category 2 and believe that we need to have a strong mobile app to keep the consumer connect but also understand how the consumers will our service and open up those channels of interactions