Comprehensive Guide to Selling Mobile Apps from Scratch

Selling mobile apps is one of many ways to build a business and make money. With all of the innovation in the field of mobile app development, it’s become quite easy to get up and running into a side hustle or even a 6-figure a year revenue stream.

I want to show you just how easy.

I’m going to walk you through the 5 simple steps you can take today to get started with building a business selling mobile apps – from scratch!

Let’s get started…

 

Step 1: Who Are You Selling To?

First things first, you’ll have to define who it is you’ll be selling to.

Do you want to help real estate agents retain their clients via mobile?

Do you want to help restaurants bring in repeat business? You could build mobile apps for churches.

There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing your markets, and we’ve come up with three easy ways to identify markets that will be easy for you to enter based on your own situation.

 

1. Who Are You Connected To?

Inevitably you’re connected to business owners and people who could become mobile app clients, you just have to think through it.

What do your friends do?

Do you have any family members in particular markets of interest?

What you want to find are markets that can be easily accessible based on your existing physical connections.

List out 5 to 10 of these markets on a piece of paper now and then keep reading.

 

2. Who’s In Your Network on Linkedin?

Linkedin is arguably the biggest professional network around with over 467 million users and chances are if you have an account, you’re connected to some people who could lead you to your ideal market.

It’s pretty simple to get going, just click on the “Advanced” link beside the search bar.

Then select “1^st Connections” under the “Relationship” section and hit “Search”.

This will show you everyone you’re connected to directly on Linkedin. Meaning you can also get in touch with them directly via Linkedin for free.

If you don’t have a premium Linkedin account you can just scroll through the results and make note of any industries that peak your interest here. If you have a premium Linkedin account, you can take this a step further and use a couple of additional filters to see only owners and CEOs of companies.

You can paste this into the “Title” field: “CEO” OR “Founder” OR “President” OR “Owner”

Then select “Current” from the drop down just below the “Title” field to ensure they’re currently running a company.

Now you can scroll through all of the results and note down an additional 5 – 10 markets on the same piece of paper from the first method. We’ll use this list in step 2 to narrow down our focus.

 

3. What Industries & Markets Interest You?

What you’ll want to look at in addition to these markets is any other market that might interest you personally. You may already have a list of 20+ markets on your piece of paper – and that’s ok. But if you have an interest in a particular market, chances are you’ll be able to grow your business faster because you’ll already know a bit about that market.

Ideally you’ll want to note down markets or industries you have an interest in and already know something about.

For example, if you know a bit about real estate because you helped a family member sell a house, that’s a good market to write down. You’ll be on the right foot in knowing a bit about the market when you have to dive into researching it.

Come up with a few markets you may have an interest in here and you’ll have to end off with at least 20 markets on your piece of paper.

If you can’t quite think of any, grab our list of mobile app markets to try:

In the next step you’ll be researching these markets and narrowing in on the best market(s) specifically for you. They’ll have the right audience size, be easy enough to contact and ideally you’ll have a bit of personal interest in the market. It’s step one to giving you the lowest-barrier path to generating revenue by selling mobile apps.

 

Step 2: Research The Market

Now that you have a list of 20 or more markets, it’s time to ask yourself one key question:

“Does this market have an effective use for a mobile app?”

What you really want to understand here is the pain or problem you’d be helping that market solve with a mobile app. Whether you’re looking at real estate, landscaping, plumbing or any other market, you need to understand the problem before being able to sell them on the solution.

In many cases the answer is yes because businesses in a particular market want to bring new customers in or they want to retain existing customers or they want to nurture customers to make that next purchase.

You need to identify which particular use cases makes most sense for them.

If you can’t think of one, than put a line through that market on your list because they don’t have a problem you can find, that can be solved with a mobile app. If there is no problem, you’ll have a hard time selling them on something they don’t need.

Go through your list until you’ve identified the markets that have a problem you can realistically solve using a mobile app.

 

Market Size

Now that you’ve narrowed down your list to the markets who have a problem, you have to see just how big of a market you can deal with. If the market is too small, it’s going to be hard to scale and sell a lot of apps. The ideal market size is over 10,000 businesses operating in one or two major and accessible countries. If you’re working within North America, the aim is to have at least 10,000 businesses in the particular market across Canada and USA (or USA and the UK).

You can often find a sample size by looking at Manta.com or YellowPages.com. Look in a small town and then a major city to compare and you can estimate from there.

Location	Population	Number of Dentists
Niagara Falls, ON	82,000	Sample size
Toronto, ON	2,600,000	4,000+

For example, if we were assessing the size of the dental market in Canada, I’d take a look at dentists in Niagara Falls, ON (population of 82,000) as a small town example.

Then I’d take a look at Toronto, ON (population of 2,600,000) as a major city example.

From here I can see that Toronto alone has over 4,000 dentists listed. I know Canada has quite a few Niagara Falls sized cities and I only need there to be 30 cities of that size to make up the minimum threshold of 10,000 business. Based on this, dentists is a good market to start with based on the size.

If your market can be targeted by a job title, real estate agents for example, than you can simply go to Facebook’s advertising tool and get a pretty accurate audience size.

First you’ll want to go to your Facebook ad manager section and then click on the “Create Ad” button.

From here you’ll just want to select “Traffic” and put any name for the campaign.

Now you’ll be able to enter in some targeting options.

For real estate agents, we’ll click on the “Browse” link in the “Detailed Targeting” section. Then click on “Demographics”, then “Work” and finally “Job Titles”.

When you do that you’ll be able to search for people with particular job titles on Facebook. In this case we’ll add in everything related to real estate agents and realtors.

With all of these job titles being targeted in the United States, we see that our total target audience size is 310,000. In that case we’re well above the market size we need for it to b

Developing Apps Through An Agency vs. Using An App Building Platform

Aspect	Developing Apps Through An Agency	Using An App Building Platform
Customization	High, with custom functionality	Limited, except for platforms like BuildFire with custom plugins
Cost	High, starting at $30,000	Lower, custom plugins from $500
Markup Potential	20-30% markup	100% or higher markup
Pricing Model	Custom quote	Setup fee ($500-$1,000) + monthly fee ($99-$299)

Often time, just like with custom development, you’ll still want to deliver a completely finished product to your client through an app building platform. That means you’ll also be able to charge a setup fee on top of the monthly recurring and maintenance fees you can charge, while still being price competitive.

We’ve found some of the most successful agencies selling apps through app building platforms charge a $500 to $1,000 setup fee to build the app and then have one all encompassing monthly fee (usually inclusive of hosting the app and updating the app) between $99 and $299 per month.

The key to pricing is to look at how long it will take you to build the app using the given platform, how long it will take to sell each app and how much time is realistically involved in monthly maintenance or update requests. Calculating your pricing based on these metrics ensures you’ll never undercharge for your services and always carry a good profit margin to your bottom line.When comparing the two ways I can work with you, here’s a clear breakdown:

Option	Description
1) I build you this reservation generating system and then you take it over	You manage the system after it’s built, allowing you to have full control over its operation.
2) You have me build you this reservation generating system and run it for you	I manage the system for you, so you can focus on what you do best – running your restaurant!

Approach	Pros	Cons
Manual List Building	Better quality and more accurate data	Time-consuming
Buying Lists	Quick and easy	Quality may vary

If you have the time, I highly recommend building a list manually. You’ll often get better quality and more accurate data. You can do this using YellowPages or Manta. Here’s a template you can use to build your lists.

If you don’t have the time, here’s a few places where you can buy lists to use:

• – SalesGenie.com
• – InfoUSA.com
• – InfoFree.com
• – LimeLeads.com
• – ExactData.com

I’ve personally used all of these at some point or another, but I can’t make any comments to current list quality for any given industry. All of these do have valid sources of data and are, for the most part, up to date.