5.

5 tips for launching your first app

By In Technology

Almost everyone wants to have an app these days. But how do you go about finding the right designers, programmers, and marketers to take your app from an idea to millions of downloads in the app store?

  1. Validate your idea. Not all ideas are as great as you my think, and no one wants to call their baby ugly. Validation can be done quickly and cheaply by creating a simple “Pros and Cons” spreadsheet of your competitors, and running online surveys. But you got to do it.
  2. The planning stage is the last time your have total control – You can save a lot of money in development costs if you have drawn the entire app drawn out on paper. I’m not talking about just the main screens; I mean EVERYTHING. Each pop-up message, every menu option. It seems like overkill, but you’re really designing an architectural blueprint here. Designers and engineer have to follow these “wireframes” so they know what to build, and even so that they can give you accurate estimates. You wouldn’t give a build a blueprint for your house with a downstairs bathroom missing, and expect them to just fill in the blanks would you? If you don’t want to do this, expect to pay your developer team to do the wireframes for you, and never use a company who doesn’t offer this step.
  3. Find the right team for you. In any technical endeavor, it’s hard to pick a good team, especially if you are not very technical yourself. You can be techno-babbled to death, or won over by shinny demos. There are a few simple questions you can ask to make sure the team you’re picking is a good one:
    1. Where is the actual development done (in the US? Or is it outsourced to India?)
    2. How does the team manage their source code? You want to hear them say that they use a version control system like GIT (This is like the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word, but for software code).
    3. How is the team going to help you through the planning process? Are they going to build you a functional wireframe you can play with? How about a basic prototype? The more steps they have early on, the more likely you are to succeed.
    4. Ask to touch and play with real life examples of systems the team has worked with.
    5. Find our if they’ve worked on similar products or in similar industries. A little bit of previous experience goes a long way. Find a team who has already made their mistakes on someone else’s dime, so that you don’t have to pay for it.
  4. Understand the process – You don’t have to become a programmer yourself, but spend sometime educating yourself on the technologies and jargon you will encounter. Unlike building a house, you probably have never seen a software project being worked on as you drive down the road. So your frame of reference is very difficult. The process can be extremely opaque as a result. It’s your money; learn a little about how the sausage is made. I’d suggest learning at least a little bit about how databases work, and how source control works – these two topics alone will allow you to have much honest conversations with your developers.
  5. Don’t launch it and leave it – When your app is all done, getting it in the app store can be tricky. Start finding out what you need to do to get into the Apple store early on – this includes reading their terms of use, which isn’t as bad as you think. Make sure you have a business entity set up, and a registered Dunn and Bradstreet number if you’re going to charge money for you app, include ads, or in-app purchases. And finally, learn about how to promote your app in the stores and on the web. You’ve all heard about SEO, but there is such a thing as App Store Optimization as well.
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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The Million-Line MVP

In Technology

A founder told me last week that his chatbot understands him better than most people he works with, and he wasn’t joking.

He had been alone in his house for the better part of a year building an app on one of the popular AI coding platforms, and he wanted me to take a look. Almost a million lines of code, one developer (him), no engineering co-founder, no senior reviewer, no nobody. The app had an ERP module, a CRM module, a custom AI agent with a name and a voice, built in mini-games (yes, really), dozens of character personas, a few landing pages, and a small army of social media accounts in multiple languages. He had not yet had a paying user, or even a free one.

He was, by the way, very excited.

(I’ve changed some details, since the pattern is what I want to talk about and not the founder. I see something close to this on roughly one out of every three sales calls now.)

What used to slow you down was the point

Building software used to be annoying for mostly good reasons. You had to hire developers, or learn to code yourself, or convince a co-founder to come along for the ride. Then, you would grind out every line, which would come at a cost (time, money, conversations, arguments, etc.)… basically friction. And that friction was not a bug, but it was like this ting that you are forced you to deal with, before adding any feature, whether the feature actually needed to exist.

Startup advice has been more or less the same for twenty years, maybe more:

  • Build something small
  • Show it to real people
  • Find out what they actually want
  • Don’t build a million things at once.

The Lean Startup came out in 2011 and we have all been quoting it at each other ever since (poorly, mostly).

This is what we talk about when we discuss “startup discipline”. It’s really not very complicated, but it can be really hard. It used to be hard because building was hard, and now it’s hard for a completely different reason.

How does one person build almost a million lines of code in a few months?

The honest answer is they don’t, the AI does, and the AI has no opinion on whether any of the code should exist.

This is the part I want to sit with for a minute, because I think it’s the heart of the problem. Imagine you’re building a startup that lets local news anchors rent out their unused toupees by the hour (try not to overthink this). You sit down with one of the AI coding tools and you say “build me a marketplace where toupees can be listed by the hour,” and the AI builds it. Then you say “actually, add a loyalty rewards program,” and the AI builds that too. Then you say “and also, add a Pokemon-style mini-game where users battle each other’s toupees,” and the AI starts coding.

It doesn’t pause or ask why, and it doesn’t say “dude, I love your enthusiasm but I am genuinely worried we are losing the plot here,” it just builds the toupee-battle-feature.

This removes the single most useful thing about a good engineering team, which is that engineers PUSH BACK. A senior developer, or a seasoned product manger, asked to add a toupee-battle mini-game to a B2B rental marketplace would slowly take off their glasses, set them on the desk, and ask one of those long quiet questions that means “we are not doing this.” The AI this is a sycophantic drone that has the eagerness of an underfed puppy to please you, and it has no glasses to take off. It also has unlimited keystrokes and believes that every single idea you’ve ever come up with is absolutely genius. At least it tells me that everything I’ve ever written or thought about is pretty clever.

A few months ago I ran into the perfect name for this, which is Slurm Coding. I used to call it AI crack coding, because the dopamine loop is very real, and I have really needed another hit of that good AI crack just one more time before I went to bed on more than one occasion. But Slurm is both more insidious in its combination of addictiveness and corporate outreach.

The MVP don’t change

Here’s what hasn’t moved in twenty years of startup thinking:

  1. Build the smallest thing that solves one specific problem for one specific person.
  2. Show it to that person (a real person, probably not your spouse, definitely not your mom, and DEFINITELY not my mom, and 100% not your chatbot).
  3. Find out what they actually do with it (which is probably not what you thought).
  4. Kill features, pivot, or double down based on what you learned.
  5. Repeat.

What’s new is that step one is basically free, and while not perfect, free is very alluring. You can build the smallest thing in an afternoon, or the largest thing if there’s no one around to tell you not to. Steps two through five still require getting out of your house, talking to humans, accepting that most of your assumptions are wrong, and throwing real work away. None of that is faster than it was in 2005, none of it is fun, and none of it scratches the “I NEED MORE SLURM” build-a-thing itch the way an AI tool does.

So a certain kind of founder just skips it, staying in the build phase indefinitely, because the build phase now feels like winning at a casino while getting unlimited free martinis. The feature ship (how to get them onto a server is someone else’s problem) the codebase grows, the agent agrees with everything. Meanwhile the only thing that actually matters, which is whether anyone wants this, goes unanswered.

It’s the founder version of Wilson the volleyball. In your unwashed isolation, you’ve made a friend, you’ve named the friend, and the friend agrees with everything you say. The problem is that the friend is also the boat, the island, and the ocean, and you haven’t actually left the house yet.

To be fair, I am not above this myself, by the way. I have, in my time, built things that nobody asked for and gotten weirdly emotional about them, but the difference is that mine were three hundred lines of code over a weekend, not almost a million lines of code over the better part of a year, which is sort of the whole point. No one asked for my William S. Burroughs poetry writing twitter bot, but I loved it anyway.

Codebases don’t love you back

Code you wrote yourself CAN hard to let go of, and code you wrote with an AI, when you are not a trad-coder, seems to be way harder. Experienced engineers seem to be more than happy to throw away AI code or rebuild it in a heartbeat. But I can see how even if you didn’t actually write the lines, but the shape of the thing is yours (you named the characters, you picked the voice, you spent months in a chair with this thing as your only collaborator), and you have feelings about it.

But one day, if you’re lucky, and it does have SOME product market fit, a real engineering team is going to need to look at your masterpiece. And they are not going to share those feelings. They’re going to tell you, as gently as they can manage, that most of it has to go. Not because they’re mean (they might actually be mean), but because almost a million lines of AI-generated code, written by one person, in one tool, with no architectural review, is never maintainable, almost guaranteed to not be secure, and almost never going to scale past the “prototype” it currently is.

So what should you actually do?

I mean, I already told you… Build the smallest thing you can, then show it to ten strangers and actually listen to them. Throw away half of what you built and build a slightly different smallest thing, and repeat until one of those things is real. Keep your runway reserved for the moment you realize you were WAY off about something important, because, like, you will be, and that moment is what your runway is for.

Use AI tools, because they are legit amazing. But treat them like a coffee machine (fast, useful, no opinions of their own), not like a co-founder or worse, a slot machine. Co-founders are supposed to tell you no, slot machines whisper “just one more hit baby!”