Becoming a mobile app entrepreneur is all the rage these days. Yet, before you jump ship from your investment banking job to enter the sexy world of mobile app entrepreneurship, you want to scope out the scene to make sure this is going to be the life for you. To start, you’ll want to begin to understand what you can expect from this career and what roles and responsibilities come with success in the space.

Success as a mobile app entrepreneur really boils down to three things: identifying the right problem, getting the people on board to help you bring that vision to life, and getting a product that you can continue to optimize into the hands of the right people. If you can navigate these key elements of the job, you’ll be well on your way to building a strong app that people can’t wait to use. In order to succeed in this career, you really need to push yourself to continue to think outside the box and innovate on a daily basis.

Throughout this article, we’re going to give you a glimpse into the world of mobile app entrepreneurship in an attempt to help you decide if this lifestyle is right for you. We’ll cover what a mobile app entrepreneur actually is, what the life of a mobile app entrepreneur looks like, and what it takes to be successful in the space. Here we go!

What is a Mobile App Entrepreneur?

A mobile app entrepreneur is an entrepreneur who is specifically focused on creating, launching, managing, and optimizing mobile applications. While mobile app entrepreneurs are responsible for driving the ideation, strategy and business development efforts of the app based business they intend to start, they often don’t take on the full design and development process on their own. Instead, many mobile app entrepreneurs choose to work with digital product agencies to reduce their time to market. Aside from landing the right idea and collaborating with the right developers to bring that idea to life, one of the most critical aspects of the job of a mobile app entrepreneur is to establish the right pricing strategy and monetization plan to generate revenue.

What Does the Life of a Mobile App Entrepreneur Look Like?

The life of a mobile app entrepreneur isn’t for everyone, so before you commit to jumping into this lifestyle make sure you take some time to try to understand what you’re getting into. In the early stages, much of your time will be spent doing some intensive brainstorming to identify the problem you’re trying to solve. Then you’ll dig into trying to think through the solution you want to develop and who your target audience will be.

Much of this early work will entail a lot of independent design thinking. Yet when you get to the next phase of designing and developing the actual app, you’ll likely begin collaborating with other stakeholders such as a digital product agency to bring your vision to life. One important thing to keep in mind is that building an app requires some up front investment, so make sure you have the resources readily available to finish the MVP version of your app before you invest in getting started.

What Does it Take to be Successful as a Mobile App Entrepreneur?

Plan Financially

In order to be successful as a mobile app entrepreneur, there are a few key things you’re going to need to keep in mind. First, you’ll need some upfront capital. Even if you have strong technical skills and development training, it’s going to be hard to tackle the entirety of the workload on your own. In order to build a clean product that people are actually going to want to use, you’ll likely need to partner with a development team and potentially an audience and revenue department to really execute your vision and reduce your time to market. This requires a financial investment, so to be successful, you’ll want to plan for these costs up front so you’re not left surprised along the way.

Connect with People

Creating useful and intuitive mobile apps ultimately starts with understanding your users. In order to be successful in this career path, you need to be able to be observant about the actions of those around you and try to observe nuances about the way that they live their lives. Taking this one step further, you need to be able to dig deep and try to understand the problems people are faced with in their daily lives, and specifically the challenges facing those individuals that you are setting out to help.

Be a Self Starter

Like any entrepreneurial venture, starting a mobile app business requires a lot of initiative and self motivation to get something off the ground from scratch. You’ll need to be able to develop a vision and ultimately possess the implementation skills necessary to bring that vision to life. Being a self starter doesn’t mean that you need to do everything on your own. Rather, you need to be able to visualize what solution you’re trying to develop, who that solution is going to help, and how to create tangible features that can bring that solution to life for your target users. Being a self starter doesn’t mean that you need to do everything on your own. Rather, you simply need to understand what resources you need to build the app aligned with your vision and how to get the necessary stakeholders involved.

How Can You Become a Successful Mobile App Entrepreneur?

1. Keep an eye on the App Stores and the app market more generally to see what else is out there, what new apps are popular, and how people feel about these apps. This will help you to get a feel for what other people are doing, what already exists, and what types of apps are the chart-toppers of the moment.
2. Practice design thinking. Continue to push your mind to think outside the box. Expose yourself to new stimuli to make sure that you’re giving yourself the best possible chance of ideating. Innovation is central to this career, so you want to make sure you’re willing and able to embrace new and different perspectives.
3. Focus on simplicity, performance, and usability. The key to a strong app is not making it overly complex. Rather, it’s about understanding and building out a clear user journey so that you know exactly how you intend for users to interact with an app and what behaviors you want them to execute along the way.
4. Don’t try to do everything at once. You’ll need to learn to prioritize features throughout the development process. This is particularly important in the early stages when you might have a limited up-front budget. Identify the features that are the nuts and bolts of your solution and see how users respond to the launch of these features before you make incremental feature additions to the app.
5. Prioritize a monetization strategy. Think through all the different revenue generating opportunities and pricing models that are possible to push your thinking before you hone in on the one you think will work best. Seek stakeholder input throughout the process to see what monetization strategy will help you to optimize revenue generated.
6. Continue iterating and don’t stop when you launch. Prior to launch, you’ll be able to do some basic user testing to see how users will interact. Yet, the real data starts flowing in when you physically launch and can see how users interact with the app on a daily basis. Continue learning from these data points and use what you’re learning to iterate your app and inform new feature development.

Don’t Go At it Alone

Becoming a mobile app entrepreneur can seem intimidating at times, especially if you don’t have a technical background. But don’t let this stop you! One of the most important things to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t be entering the field with the expectation that you need to tackle all design and development efforts on your own. Instead, consider partnering with a development company like Camber Creative once you have your idea solidified so that we can remove some of that burden that you’re feeling and leave you to what you do best. We can really help you to accelerate your time to market so that you can start getting real user feedback and navigating how to improve the quality of your application and how to get it into the hands of the right consumers.