The Cost of Developing an App (Interview #1)

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring interviews with various individuals and companies that have gone through the app development process. The focus of these interviews is specifically on the costs associated with developing and marketing an app.

If you have any follow-up questions, please post them as a comment and I will let our interviewees know that they are here.

The Cost of Developing an App – Interview #1

1. Tell us a little bit about your app.

We developed sportsfangraph.com, an application that collects fan and follower data from Twitter and Facebook on professional, collegiate and international sports teams. The initial purpose of the application was to create a site that attracted Sports Marketers for Coyle Media, a sports marketing firm. Coyle Media was our client on the app and was looking to expand their footprint internationally. The application has been very successful in achieving this.

2. Can you describe the initial costs that went into the development of the app?

We initially put approximately 100 manhours into developing the base application. We already had hosting available so there were no hard costs to creating the application.

3. What were the costs like to market the app?

Marketing was provided through our partner, Coyle Media. There were no hard costs – Coyle Media is a leader in the Sports Marketing industry with events throughout the world. Once they put the word out, Sports Marketers everywhere began to use it, spread the word, and provide feedback. I think there were some hard costs (less than $1k) to develop the graphics for the application – other than that there was nothing.

4. Are there on-going costs to maintain the app?

The application was improved a little at a time rather than having all development up front, so we still work 1 to 2 days per month on outstanding bugs and optimization.

5. What were the most important details and considerations that were determined before app development began?

We focused on getting the bare minimum of features up immediately so we could get the application to market sooner. That was a smart move that worked and the application got a ton of attention early. It also got a ton of feedback early on that required us to go back and redevelop (on a smaller budget) from the ground up. That’s been our ongoing challenge.

Scalability was a smaller issue – as the popularity grew and the number of accounts grew, we had to develop caching mechanisms to keep the speed up. That’s set us back on some feature development but, again, it was a good move to wait until we had challenges before developing those performance enhancing features.

6. Did the app creation and marketing process exceed your budget or did you come out ahead?

No, it has not exceeded budgets. However, we’ve also not had the budget/resources to aggressively improve the features overall. We have a couple of glaring bugs on the application that need immediate attention – but it could be a month or two before they’re fixed. That’s an uncomfortable position to be in.

The application is still an overall success, though. It has enabled Coyle Media to network with key players in the industry. As well, we now have a third party interested in purchasing and redeveloping the application from the ground up.

7. What would you do differently next time in terms of overall app development and marketing cost?

I believe we would have started the project exactly the same – working to get it quickly to market on a shoestring budget. However, we would have also anticipated a much larger budget and resource pool AFTER taking the application to market to accommodate the necessary changes. If our initial budget was $20k, I would have recommended an immediate infusion of another $20k after launch… then recommended a maintenance budget.

8. Where can people learn more about your app / company?

http://www.sportsfangraph.com/
http://www.coylemedia.com
http://www.dknewmedia.com

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