We get asked this a lot. And honestly, we don’t always know the answer. We don’t know when commercial apps will succeed or fail, whether your enterprise app will be widely adopted within your company, or whether the public will flock to your new platform. But often, we know. We are pitched app ideas every day, and we have a lot of experience listening to our clients and working with them to make great products. Time and experience have taught us to recognise potential, and bring that to life. We’d like to hear your idea, when you’re ready to talk.

When we talk, we’ll ask you three important questions:

• Does your product already exist? Check out this article to learn how to research this.
• What makes your product special?
• What have you done to validate your idea?

We like to be open and honest with our clients. Let’s use a bill splitting app to illustrate this (a bill splitting app is if you go out for dinner with friends and need a quick, easy method for working out who owes what and making/taking payment from each party). When a client asks us to develop this, we show them the Google search results with thousands of matching results for products that already exist. It’s true that not many people have a bill splitting app on their phone, and maybe for some people it would be a good thing to have – but if those people haven’t bothered to find an existing product that already solves that problem then why are they going to find yours? Maybe you have a plan for that, and that’s great. Plans need data, which is why the first step in deciding whether you should go ahead with development is to learn about what’s already out there.

Sometimes a product already exists. Our enterprise clients are aware that they can purchase an off-the-shelf iOS form app for less than they can develop their own custom app but they come to us anyway. Why? Because we can make your app sing and dance (figuratively) while your off-the-shelf solution lies chained the constraints of a generic solution. In this case, the part that makes the product special is the ability to fully brand an app, integrate with your other systems, include whatever data types or images you want, place fields however you like on forms, add other related functionality, and a myriad things big and small that make it better. Sometimes the product almost exists, but no one has it quite right yet – tell us why your idea is special.

The concept of validating your idea deserves a book, not a paragraph. If you work for the government or large company, then you’ve probably already had a few hundred meetings about your product before you speak to us. For everyone else, we strongly recommend you do some research into validating an idea, or speak with us for an honest appraisal. We talk about this more in the topic Concept validation sites.

Unlike many of our competitors, Dapper Apps does not charge a fee to meet with clients or work with them to generate a requirements document and quote. Before we get to that though, you may wish to avail our paid services to:

• For a small fee, receive a report of your product market, competitors and viability
• Attend a validation workshop to explore your idea more deeply

If you’re certain you have a great idea then the next question to ask is how do I protect my idea?

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