The Things To Learn From Your Competitors

You thought having a competitor was one of the toughest hiccups for your apps. You need to put another thought to the same. Let us first talk about why is it tougher to be a completely unique out of the box app?

1. You start off from ground zero – you don’t have an initial audience to bank upon.
2. You have to make a strong and crucial decision on the pricing strategy – if there is already a free similar app, then choosing a better freemium model for your app won’t be an uphill task. But when your app doesn’t have a single competitor its tough quoting a price and then facing stiff competition from a similar app which pops up later in the market and comes for free.
3. You will not be aware of how easy can be the functionality and you won’t be wary of any bugs that might just trouble you later.
4. You have to be ready to spend most of your investment on building the audience by taking complete responsibility of the marketing department.
5. You would have to have a new concrete purpose which people can get addicted to.

If this makes you a little tensed before going for an unique app, don’t be if you are confident about your marketing skills and your app’s expected appeal.

For those who would like to play it a little safer, then having a competitor would be a bonus to start off their trade. Learning from your peers will lead to profitable business. There will be three types of competitor apps and you will have find different learning experiences from each of these three types:

1. Competitor apps that are not doing well:Now the best learning experience from any app that’s not doing well is find what’s missing – can the idea be made scalable? You need to do a thorough background check on why the similar app is not doing well. Is the app too boring? Is it too mundane? What’s the problem? If the problem is any of the two things I mentioned, maybe the learning experience would be to think twice on investing on another similar boring mundane app. If they are not doing well because they haven’t done their marketing properly, then you should chip in with a better marketing plan.Sometimes an app might not do well because it has a price tag?

   Is it possible to launch the same app for free and choose a freemium model for the same?

   Is it graphics that is the gap between quality and number of users? You can try finding out whether the app was a blockbuster on the launch date but failed to manage its rate of downloads after the first week. Then you might bring about a possibly exciting client engagement plan because you already have the initial audience to start off with.

   Wondering who’s the initial audience?

   The initial audience includes those users who downloaded your competitor app and left using it. What you can actually learn are the mistakes they did to fail as an app.

2. Competitor apps that are doing well:You don’t have to do any statistics now. You know your app would also have a huge market if it was launched. But will people be ready to shift from the original app to your app? This depends on how you hone your learning experience in the process of learning about the competitor. Is there any scope where you find people spending more on the in app purchases? Can you reduce these costs for the users? Do they have irritating ads? Can you have a cleaner version? What type of market is your competitor app serving? How are the reviews of the competitor app? Can the review change positively with the inclusion of your app because of the same being user friendly and easier. You know the market the competitor app served – so is there some increased functionality which can bring in users from different domains.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of mistakes your competitors are going to make and you can learn a lot out of these mistakes.