How on earth is this post getting voted so high right now?

How do you write a post and make a statement like this without one single example? Seriously, give me a list of mobile app companies that failing in this manner and scale.

I could rattle off plenty of mobile startups that went the raise-money -> no-traction -> acquihire route. But I don't know what he's talking about here and he offered no data to back it up.

Anyone who reads this and thinks this is what 1999 is like didn't live through it. In 1999 all these apps went IPO and the founders and VCs made a ton of money. Many wish it was like 1999.

Edit (please read for amusement value): http://www.sandspring.com/charts/cdj0214ipet.html

I was trying to have the conversation about "real mobile companies" today in this HN thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911728

People don't seem to understand that building a company 99 cents at a time isn't going to work. Real companies have overhead. Sure someone in the Ukraine might be doing great with $1000/month in revenue but that's not going to cut it for most people.

The problem described here is partially inaccurate. The problem of the app store market is that it is largely misunderstood by investors, as it is way closer to the CD-Rom market of the 1990s than it is close to the web of the post Google web. Most apps in the app store are games/utilities/social products...and this is what consumers go out and look for.

Games and utilities can be searched, but the Best Buy truth is that only a few actually make some money, and this tends to be the best ones that are featured in the Top 25 rankings (Turboscan, most camera+ or camera add ons, or SuperCell/Minecraft, etc...). Like at Best Buy, where being featured in the shelves triggered more sales (ask Intuit). Some vendors have created niche businesses for themselves, but they tend to be not VC-funded.

Social is a category with a lot of large mobile only players (Instagram, Snapchat, Tango, WhatsApp, Viber, Voxer, Vine, Grindr, Waze, Kik...) and a lot of web players (Facebook, Twitter...). None of the mobile only players monetize their user base right now appart from WhatsApp. What are the odds that another one can emerge from there in a niche? It's tough, and it's not a discovery/search problem, because the day that Facebook launched in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg could not count on search to drive traffic to Facebook as nobody was typing "pictures of my Harvard Econ 102 classmates" on Google.

If you go back to the web, with the exception of a few social products (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter), which businesses make money online?

ECommerce? They do pretty well on mobile if you look at older models like eBay or new ones like Uber or Instacart.

SaaS? This one is a tricky one, the Apple Store tax of 30% even on SaaS subscriptions discovered on mobile does not help this market to thrive.

Media? Media is already tough to monetize on the web, but on the mobile with lower CPM, it's mission impossible.

Lead Generation? This is a very search oriented field, and the Google search ecosystem will dominate this market until the Google search stronghold disappears.

Overall, I am not saying that mobile app startups are easy - but I think that there is a misconception about what they really are - thus comparing to their web counterpart, when the right analogy might be the software rack at Best Buy.

This article would be more convincing with examples.

Startup or not, you need a plan and a real value proposition. Most people building apps don't have much of either. You need:

- To understand what pain you are solving, and have a compelling reason to believe a mobile app is a suitable solution and not a solution in search of a problem.

- What competition there is, and how you will beat them or at least compete on level footing. If there is no competition there is probably no market.

- Understand who your audience is.

- Understand how to message your audience. And understand out to get that message out.

- Have a way to get feedback, and have a conversation with your audience.

- Have a way to leverage your early adopters to drive more usage.

- Have a way to put money and time in one end and get positive App Store reviews out the other. (Pre-requisites: a product people really like.)

- Understand your fixed and variable costs. Understand your margins.

- Have a way to measure success or failure. Have a way to A/B test and iterate. Be able to see what people are doing in your app and where they are falling off.

- Have an plan on how to do all this quickly and objectively.

- Be able to tell the difference between a doomed idea and an app that just needs product refinement.

- Make calculated risks that can be measured. Throwing a giant PR launch over the fence and saying a prayer is not a calculated, measurable risk.

I got brick walled by a request to sign-up to get posts emailed. That's a terrible way to welcome new readers.

Since comments on the blog post are closed:

What we need to solve this problem depends exclusively on Apple / Google, since they chose to follow the native / app store path.

- Change App Store discoverability, removing the emphasis on Top ranks - Decrease delay times between approvals - Provide a way to discover from where your users come from

We're also locked to the native approach, which slows down the whole process. This is also a huge drawback for mobile as a whole. For instance, there isn't a easy way to crawl apps like Google crawl's pages.

In mobile, we're basically 'recreating the wheel' in many areas. All this effort could be directed towards supporting web technologies the best way possible, like webOS was doing in a great way.

I agree it's difficult on mobile having to support two platforms with many resolutions.

We have iOS and Android apps but our service is 100% web views from launch -> registration -> usage. We did this since we are still in the prototyping process and are not concerned about optimization/conversion rates.

It's been very useful for us. UX has been terrible but we've been able to gather valuable feedback, make a couple of big changes and a lot of small tweaks.

Now, we are on the cusp on rolling out to making everything native and starting heavier marketing.

Its a link baity headline and a content free blog post posted by an account that is one day old.

The start-up scene today is nothing like it was in 1999, trust me I was there and I've got the worthless shares to prove it. That said, a lot of people want there to be a bubble so perhaps they were voting the headline rather than voting the article?

This was previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389061. My comment

Two points

1. Yes, most startups failed in 1999 and most startups are failing now. This isn't unexpected. Anytime, there is a boom in startups, most of them are going to fail.

If the first 10 startups succeed there will be 100 more. If the first million startups succeed, there will be 10 million more. Ultimately, most of them will fail.

2. imo Andrew is mistaken in assuming that the failures are due to startups having a "super high bar for initial quality in their version 1".

If anything, I'd say that the quality of many apps is too low, Many of the big-name apps are often unstable and crash (not just in the V1 version, but in later versions as well)

It'd be true what's he saying only if you asked one question; what's the point of agile development? Is it to just release a better product faster? Don't startups need to do something that others aren't doing? Imagine a world where somehow, everyone is doing agile development on mobile; so we'd just get better quality apps faster but how would a startup become successful in a sea of otherwise also high quality and rapidly iterative apps? The very vicious cycle that he's warning us against, in another form, is exactly what he's advocating.

Is this not a symptom of the app standard set by the app store? It seems like your app store submission is going to be judged largely in light of the the other apps in the app store, and the design/interface standard there is already so high...

It seems like getting a "big" app in to the app store is a huge risk because it requires hiring the type of people that can polish an app to the point that it's app store acceptable, and those are expensive people. Going in to such an expensive process with a murky idea/business plan/value proposition seems suicidal.

I write about Android app development and consult to developers of mobile apps. It is still a tough business to make money selling mobile apps at app store retail prices. All of my clients have some other business model.

BUT this is changing. The number of app customers is growing very quickly. Eventually, perhaps soon-ish, volume will overwhelm the currently crappy economics of selling apps and collecting ad fees.

Ubiquity of smartphones is more than just more customers. Once penetration gets high enough you can actually buy advertising and PR and expect it to work. More users drive a virtuous cycle that cures most of what's wrong with trying to sell mobile apps.

I don't know if this is true. But.

One mistake I see a lot of companies making is treating mobile like a sandbox. And I say this having gone through a 3 month accelerator that was for companies doing mobile apps. The ones that succeed, or even have a chance of succeeding, build a platform, into which mobile is a conduit. Outside of games, there are very few mobile apps I can think of that wouldn't be better built in this way. Call it "the cloud", a platform, or whatever you like. The point is, mobile is hot right now, but a solid business is more than an interface, it's a service.

The author of this article is obviously someone who doesn't see the bigger picture of mobile apps. The problem is inexperienced developers who drop out (programmers) think they can 1. Write an Instagram clone or some one hit wonder app and expect it to help them build a business without any science behind what they do, obviously those will tank, its a not an app that supports a company, its shown time and time again that it is the web back end that supports a company and all those services. btw I am not a web developer, I am an native developer.

One thing that I think might be an interesting gamechanger is Mozilla's HTML5 approach to apps. It would be stupendous if FFxOS enabled a much better mobile app world.

What do people really expect though.. I don't understand how all of these people can just say i'm building an iPhone app! then try and start a company based around this basis. Come up with an original business model and maybe you can get somewhere. Instagram was an app, but the app was just the medium for the service. Think of an app as your store front, what really counts is the products you sell on a daily basis.

My feeling is that this return to waterfall development model is induced by the app validation process imposed by Apple.

I don't call back in question it's pertinence and efficiency. I just point out that publishing an app has again become a significant milestone you need to prepare and be ready for.

So it's not a matter of culture or free choice of developpers. It's a consequence of particular constrains.

Thanks for the practical feedback on managing workflow. It's useful to me as a person who's just getting into developing mobile apps.

One mobile app seldom makes a business (unless it is instagram, whatsapp etc.). Sound business model or massive user acquisition will be key.

It's a false premise that App Store approval = 6 month deployment cycle. Sure you can move faster on the web, but not that much faster.

This blog post is 10 months old, if it matters.

single app != startup in most cases

Pretty impressive answer, and I agree for the most part.

I do believe there are a lot of apps that do get Apple's approval and get showcased, but never really make it -- which you do address. A great example in the video space is Vyclone which go promoted very much, and still gets front page promotions quite often, but they never really went anywhere.