Mobile First Product Development
Izi Aviyente M’15, CTO of Date My Wardrobe, joined the Butler Venture Accelerator and shared his lesson learned from founding Date My Wardrobe at a peer to peer session a couple weeks ago. Date My Wardrobe is an online, localized marketplace for people to rent shoes, dress, and accessories to other fashionistas. Date My Wardrobe is a post web product and they just launched their app.
Aviyente shared some lessons he learned from launching a mobile app:
- Think about the app format first, pick one platform, and stick to the platform that they have chosen.
- Do not over build it. People are looking at the application for short amount of time. Try to capture the user in four to five seconds.
- Make the application simple. Just ask one question at a time.
- Decide whether you want the app to stand alone or work together with other apps.
- Know the target market for the application.
- Make sure to embed interaction tools.
- Make sure what you are measuring when using the tools.
- Making the app is not hard but making it appealing to the customer is hard.
- Use online tools that will allow you to find freelancer for design: Elance and 99designs
- Build good enough design before publishing it to public
- Learn from other application or start ups
Date My Wardrobe launched their application at the beginning of September and is continuously improving the application. Aviyente pointed out that the application traffic is better through a mobile app than web traffic because they can reach a larger audience by setting good key words. Aviyente pointed out to regularly update and optimize app store key words in order to stay top list of the search. Aviyente also emphasized importance of offline presence. Aviyente recommended participating in tradeshows and showcase evens to get more publicity for your venture and company.
Meet Aviyente and other developers at the Demystifying App Development panel during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Tuesday, November 18 at 5pm in Olin 101. See you there!