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Social relevant apps

I founded a start-up company called Innoprenez back in May 2012 with a vision to create mobile apps innovations that are local relevant and having the potential to make huge impact among South Africans. From that day,  we have done quite a couple of things including participating in the Vodacom Developer Programme to facilitate android technical workshops and outreach programmes both in developer communities, townships and academia. We have also worked with Sowertech contributing to the  development of Afta Robot solution for the Taxi industry.   This is one of the mobile app projects that was quite interesting during its development and the day it was launched. Today, we are working on a mobile platform that aims to revolutionalise the way in which Career guidance and counseling is offered.

I hope you have heard this phrase "social relevant apps" almost a couple of times and you might be asking yourself what apps are social relevant and what apps are not.  To share some light on this topic, Let me first begin by quoting the words of a young successful entrepreneur named Khethi Nkosi who runs a JSE Listed company called Xuma Infrastructure Group(XIG).  During our pitch, he said to us "The only way to make a success in the mobile apps space is not inventing another facebook or twitter as the next big thing,  but creating innovative  mobile solutions that address the pressing problems of your country".  These are the words that caught my attention and i always reflect on them on every business endeavor.  Solving the problems of your country is key, it is the fundamental criteria that differentiate successful solutions to those that are destined to fail.  From this what you can learn is that the first characteristic for a social relevant app, it must be a solution that address a social problem. You need to address a problem rather than copying someone else thinking you will make it.

You may be asking yourself, how do I find the problem.  How will I know that this problem is important to address or not. Which problem are likely to succeed and which are not.  If you have lived in South Africa for the past ten years.  There are certain prevailing problems you observe among people in the communities whether disadvantaged or not, with local municipalities, government sectors and so forth.  Most of these problems is what people are complaining and debating about everyday, every hour, every minute, meaning they don't have a solution yet. Remember that most problems comes from observations, if you are not convinced ask the people you believe are facing the problem, they will give you better insights regarding the problems they are facing.  Some problems come from something you think it is a problem to a specific audience but not sure, you also need to validate your thoughts with the audience that you think is facing the problem.  That is the best approach i have find to be useful through my experience.

There is a temptation among entrepreneurs to create a solution without doing consulting with the target audience because they think they best understand the problems of a specific market, than the market itself.  This is a trap. Don't be surprised when people are not interested in your app or you receive a handful of downloads. The involvement of the people whom you are creating an app or a service for,  is as important as creating the app itself. You have to keep that in mind.

There also other factors we need to take a look at,  such as Impact, Innovation, User Experience, Originality.  The impact of your solution is directly proportional to the amount of pain that the solution is addressing.  Mobile phones sold like cakes even in low-income communities not because they were highly innovative or something completely new. It was because that they were eliminating the pain that has severely constrained communication among individuals for decades. I remember the days when i had to make a call to my uncle who was in Springs, my grandmother would sent me 5 kilometres away from home to a family that had a landline. I hated traveling that path just for a simple call. Today, you just grab your mobile handset and select the contact there you go.

Corporates have a different perspective on innovation compared to startup entrepreneurs. I know we may argue for the whole day on what is innovation and what it is not,  but i am not here to define what innovation is. I will only give you my perspective on what i believe is good innovation. Good innovation is disruptive in nature, meaning it makes meaning and  wow its audience.
It is not just a minor modification of what is existing just to differentiate as  most corporates do.   An typical example companies with great innovation is Apple and Google.   Innovative apps bring something that users never thought it was possible or have though of it but the way the solution presents it is excellent to the end user.  Innovation should be exercised across all aspects of product development life cycle, even in the business model for the solution you are creating.  To be an innovator, you need some level of craziness, great passion and vision in your idea. A certain group of people will think you are mad but it is okay.  Students in academia seems to be the ones who have this character of innovation at best, believe me, i was part of the adjudication panel at end of year student symposium at Vodacom in summer 2012, the audience was blown away by the apps that the students developed. To them it was fun. Innovation solutions are created when there is fun involved.

Creating exceptional experiences that are both memorable and appealing to your users with your app or service is highly important. User experience is a process not just a once off thing. Great first impression is vital, it is what your audience will judge you with. Remember that the first bad impression is likely to doom you forever in that market.  Windows Vista is an example of crappy experience that has made users skeptic of good features in Windows 7 and also Windows 8 on a desktop is another example of a bad user experience. To create an app with good user experience you need to understand your audience very well, learn about their constraints and behaviours. Understand what are the different context will my audience use my service or app.  Interact and get feedback from them concerning what do they think will be a better experience for them. Do user research, get user experience designers, developers are bad user experience designers.

Originality, yes your idea can be completely new or an existing solution with novel ways to bring a new experience to it. PC was there but Steve Jobs has a different vision for it. Search was there but Google had a new idea of making it interesting. What these guys had was not new but something existing with a new vision for it.