In 2018, the overall mobile app revenues amounted to over $365 billion. That number is projected to increase to more than $935 billion by 2023 through paid downloads and in-app advertising.
With the huge demand for mobile apps in the market now, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that mobile apps have become an integral part of most businesses. Mobile apps keep customers hooked to a business’s services and boosts a company’s brand presence online.
If you are looking for your own app idea, then you may have started to generate ideas by looking at existing apps or app categories. But let’s expand the idea pool. Below you will find a few other ways to find a profitable mobile app idea. These ideas can be implemented and tested for developing some successful apps for your users.
Look for Problems
As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Some of the most popular apps are a result of a solution to a big problem. Oftentimes, these mobile app ideas are a solution to the problems that the founders themselves faced.
So in order to begin the brainstorming process, start observing things in your daily life. What problems do you face? Observe other businesses and their activities as well. What are some solutions they have created for problems? Look for issues your customers face in their daily life. Is there a way you can make their life easier?
Observe this on a daily basis and try to make a note of these problems and their possible solutions. As time progresses, you’ll start to get better at observing real-world problems that don’t have a solid solution. That will be your jumping off point to start developing an app that helps to solve one of the problems you observed.
At the end of 30 days, filter your ideas and funnel them down to the top three ideas. Repeat the same exercise for another 30 days and again, filter down to just three ideas. Choose the idea out of the six total that sounds the most interesting.
Exploit Your Skill Sets
Look for skills that can be leveraged to scale into a big business.
For example, Rachel Charlupski scaled her babysitting business into a network that now includes more than 1,500 babysitters. When she first started out, Rachel offered her babysitting services to hotel guests. Later, by using mobile apps, she scaled her business successfully.
Create a list of your top skill sets, strengths, and interests to begin the idea collection process. After doing this, write down five business ideas for each of those skills, strengths, and interests.
For instance, if one of your skills is writing, five possible business ideas may be agencies providing writing services, on-demand apps for writers, and people that want to hire them.
You can look for an app idea that excites you the most and has little or no competition in the market. This market can be just your city or state. Don’t think too big right on day one.
Find Apps With Downloads But No Updates
Look for apps that aren’t getting updated anymore. Whether in Google Play or the App Store, search by an area of your interest — fitness, social networking, productivity, etc. Skip past the first few pages of the most popular and recently updated apps to about page five. Once there, look for the apps that haven’t received an update in the last year, but still get downloaded.
Update these apps to revive them. The benefit of creating such an app is that there is already a market for these kinds of apps. Go through all the features of the app in detail and then speak to the existing and potential users. Later, make a better app for them as per their business requirements.
The Bottomline
There are loads of apps out there already, but there is still room for your idea! Keep brainstorming until the right idea fits.
