I started a new project this week and thought it would be particularly useful to document the process of planning it out. I have a few points I’ll cover one at a time.
Objective
Every app needs an objective, a problem it’s attempting to solve. You have two practical options. You can either solve a problem that hasn’t really had an answer yet, or you can tackle a problem that already has a solution if you think you can innovate on it to be better.
We’ve seen this in the past where Facebook dethroned MySpace or when Amazon brought us a global online one-stop-shop marketplace.
I should interject here and say that you could build an app for some other reason. I built several apps during my bootcamp that weren’t new or better than existing apps. My objective with those was to learn so they still certainly had an objective with my lack of knowledge as the problem.
Only the sith deal in absolutes
In my use case, I wanted to design an app for a beloved topic of mine, falconry.
Research
Once you’ve settled on a topic, you’re going to want to research it. Primarily what I mean here is it’s presence in the marketplace. The only way you can make something new or better is to find what’s out there. Thankfully this pretty easy. Like a few google searches easy. If your idea already exists, you need to check out the competition. See what they do and how they approach the problem you’re trying to solve. Are there things you could better –not even technically, but in approach? If you can’t find much about about the topic, you may have stumbled onto an untapped market.
Let’s go back to my new project. Falconry is too broad. It encompasses a lot of different facets of the topic. If we wanted information about falconry, we are probably better served to just go to Wikipedia to get a summary of the topic. This likely isn’t worth making a whole app for. This is where we need to narrow in and get specific about the objective, the problem to be solved by the app.
In my research, I noticed a considerable lack of information on how to break into the hobby (I’d be shunned for calling it a hobby –not really, but lifestyle is more appropriate). I should say I found the WHAT of breaking into the hobby, but the how, while defined, had a much less clear path. In order to get into falconry in the U.S., you are required to certify as an apprentice, find a mentor that is of general class or higher, and study under them for 2 years. As you can imagine, in a niche hobby like falconry, finding a mentor isn’t the easiest task ever.
With a topic in mind, and a bit of research, I was able to hone in on the actual problem my app needed to address. I wanted to create an app that would help bridge the gap between mentor and apprentice. I want something that makes it possible for would-be apprentices to seek out mentors and vice versa if so desired. I still haven’t worked out all the details of how that will come to fruition, but I have what I need to get started.
While there are other questions that you’d typical want to answer as well to get started, my particular stage in my journey has me somewhat limited. You’d want to consider what languages and frameworks you’d use to build your app. Right now, I’ll be using Javascript/React for my frontend and Ruby on Rails for my backend. I plan to widen my tech stack in the future, but my priority at the moment is honing and refining the stacks I have at my disposal currently.
Next week I plan to dive a little deeper into the specifics of my unnamed falconry app so be sure to check it out.