The popularity and adoption of mobile apps has skyrocketed over the last few years. Moreover, customers are willing to pay for these apps as evidenced by the $5 billion in mobile app revenue in 2010 and estimated $15 billion revenue in 2011. Development of a mobile app is a great opportunity for  your company to engage with customers as well as market to them. But the first step before you dive into this world is planning your strategy and honest evaluation of what it takes to build a successful app.

The most critical decision at the start of any app development process is to decide which platform(s) to target. You can read more on this topic in my previous blog post on Platform Selection. Once you have figured out which platform to develop for, here are the key 10 questions to help determine  strengths and highlight areas where they could use my help.

1. Do we build or do we buy? This is a very important question to ask. Most companies do not have resources or expertise to build all that is needed to get the mobile app launched. We have to really figure out what our core strengths are that we can leverage to build these apps.
2. Where do we start? First impressions are important not only for people, but also for apps. With between 30-50 apps on their smartphones, users tend to have shorter attention span. So, if our app is not going to grab their attention and keep providing useful information or features, users will stop using our app. A good app should be easy to use, useful, and provide a positive experience.
3. Where do we go from here? It is not enough to just have a good start, we need to continue building on the momentum that we gained from our first successful launch. Our product roadmap should be building not only features but also looking at the platform marketshare in order to account for changes. It should also consider new features being added to the various platforms that our app could leverage.
4. How quickly can we get there? While our initial release might take long, however, the subsequent release cycles should be of shorter duration. Given the fast moving nature of this market, a long app development cycle would be a deal breaker. We should be able to leverage Agile Development Methodology to achieve short release cycles
5. How do we react to customer feedback and feature requests? Customer feedback and our response to those feedback can make or break not only our app but also our business. So, incorporating the feedback quickly and efficiently is key for a successful app. Of course, these needs to be balanced out against our current Product Roadmap. Utilizing some of the Lean Startup principles will help us here.
6. What are our competitors doing? Users have numerous choices for product or service that we provide. So, we need to evaluate our competitors and make sure we are keeping up with the market place. This will have direct and immediate impact on our product roadmap. This will also help us differentiate ourselves from the rest of the pack especially when app discovery is such a big challenge given over 500K apps in iOS App Store and over 275K apps in the Android market place.
7. How are we going to distribute and market it? This is a big marketing question that will impact technical decisions. Depending on our platform choices we may have one or more marketplaces to distribute our app. Given the discoverablilty issue mentioned above, how and where we market our product as well as how effective our distribution will have a huge impact on some of the features we can include in our product.
8. How much are we going to charge? This is an important business decision as that is going to be our revenue generator. For example, if we are going to use a freemium model, then we need to plan our product feature set that would be useful in both the free and premium versions. Alternatively, if our app is free and ad-supported, then we need to ensure that we have a high fill rate and relevant ads so that we can improve our CPM over time.
9. How are we going to support users on un-supported platforms? While our mobile apps will be used by several users on the targeted platforms, we need to make sure that we do not alienate our potential user base on platforms not currently supported. We also need to periodically evaluate demand for apps on these currently un-supported platforms and decide if we want to support any of those platform or are we willing to give up on a wider market share so that we can focus on growing our market share on the currently targeted platforms.
10. What is the total cost of ownership? App development costs have come done significantly. So, while we can get the app developed cheaply, we need to consider other costs like post-deployment support, maintenance and upgrade costs, marketing costs, to name a few,  to truly understand how much it is going to cost us to develop, maintain and market the app.

Here is a slideshare deck on this topic that you can download for your use.

Hopefully this has given you a good start on what all you need to consider to go from an idea to app in the marketplace. Feel free to leave your comments and questions below.