Demystifying the App Development Process
As part of last month’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Butler Venture Accelerator in collaboration with Alpha Software, Babson Entrepreneurship Club and Babson Tech Club to held a panel on demystifying the app development process. Izi Aviyente M’15, CTO of Date My Wardrobe, Gordon Fontenot, iOS Developer at Thoughtbot, Bob Moore, VP of Mobile Development at Alpha Software, and Anton Yakushin ’08, Director and Co-founder of Venture Blocks joined the panel. Niket Anjaria M’13 of Alpha Software was moderator.
We had approximately 75 audience members and had an exciting conversation on the process of development process.
- Here are some of the key takeaways from the discussion.
- When you are thinking of building a mobile app, think about technologies and tools that you are going to use.
- There are lots of free tools available for the public. You need to pick the right tools and find balance among the tools.
- Before building the app, think what the primary focus of the application is.
- Look how to interact with lots of different existing application, for example Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and think how you can connect to the stored data and store data.
- Build your own story board for the application.
- Find someone that you enjoy working with because building an app is a continuous process.
- If your primary business is an app, your relationship with developers will be long term relationship. You have to have chemistry with the developers and business partners.
- Create concrete problem solving idea with an effective business model.
- Try to break down the problem that your app is going to solve.
- Good prototype is a prototype where you can prototype simply everything. Try to Prototype the most important part of business.
- Figuring out the first starting point is enough to bring you to the market.
As a takeaway, the leaders of the hosting students clubs put together some additional online resources for participants of the panel. If you are looking to build a mobile app, take a look at the resources below. These are just some that are available, there are of course many more!
Rapid Prototyping Tools:
- Balsamiq: Online Wireframing tool https://balsamiq.com/
- Proto – Fully interactive hi-fi prototypes http://proto.io
- Wix: Free website designing http://www.wix.com/
- Lucidchart: Wireframes, mindmaps and more https://www.lucidchart.com/
- MarvelApp: Free Prototyping without coding https://marvelapp.com/
- Alpha Anywhere http://saas.alphasoftware.com/landing.html
- Invision App: Hassle free product design http://www.invisionapp.com
Learning Tools:
- Lynda: Free online learning platform lynda.babson.edu
- General Assembly: On campus classes and workshops https://generalassemb.ly/
- Codecademy: Lear to code interactively, for free http://www.codecademy.com/
- Udacity: Online learning platform udacity.com
- Udemy: Learn real world skills online https://www.udemy.com/
- W3Schools: Learn all about web development http://www.w3schools.com/
- Hackdesign: Learning UI/UX Design https://hackdesign.org/
- Raywenderlich: Learning IOS development. http://www.raywenderlich.com/
- Rypress: software tutorials. http://rypress.com/
- Rails for Zombies: A fun way to learn code. http://railsforzombies.org/
Equity based Tech Partners:
- DashFire: Dashfire.com
Freelance Programmers:
- oDesk: oDesk.com
- Freelancer: Freelancer.com
- eLance: eLance.com
Product Requirement/Bug Management/Issue Tracker
- Jira: Plan, track, work faster https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
- Zoho Projects: Project Management as effective as it gets https://www.zoho.com/projects/
- Asana: Teamwork without emails https://asana.com/
Other Productivity Software for Startups
- http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ – Bizspark program by Microsoft provides free access to a ton of software and platforms that enable small businesses create apps.