Why Crowdsource Your App Idea?

You’re sitting at work half listening to your boss asking you where that TPS report is when you start to lose focus and begin to daydream. Suddenly, you have a flash of inspiration – an amazing app idea!  This could be a million dollar idea, but that begs the question… what do you do with that idea? You don’t know anything about apps besides the fact that you love Angry Birds, and that apps can make a ton of money. Where do you even begin developing your app?

Luckily, there are tons of options for bringing your app idea to light. If you’re a coder, you might just develop your app yourself. If you’re an entrepreneur, you might go hire a coder, and make a business out of that app. For the rest of us, everyday, busy people, we can turn to the crowd.  There are a ton of great platforms out there that are involved in crowdsourcing every other aspect of business.  For crowdsourced work, head to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Most notably, for crowsourced funding, head to a site like kickstarter.com. The app industry is no different, and that’s what we’ll highlight in this post.

Advantages of Crowdsourcing

There are many advantages to using a crowdsourcing platform to get your app developed. First of all, the process is a lot of fun. It’s an exciting experience seeing what people think about your idea. On any crowd type platform, if someone is voting or funding your idea or project, it means they are passionate about your idea. If lots of people vote for or contribute funds to an idea of yours, it means that chances are that lots of other people will buy that product if it’s developed. Essentially, you can use the crowd to prove a product when it’s still only an idea.  In the app world, these “promises” to download your app are even more important than in other businesses because having a large amount of downloads on launch day can propel an app to the top charts for your smartphone, where organic downloads then follow. App discovery is becoming increasingly harder for developers, giving the advantage to apps released from either a huge, well-known developer, or you…with the help of a crowd based community

Crowdsourcing, for apps

Crowdsourcing has been unbelievably successful in raising money for all sorts of cool projects – just look at Kickstarter. So what crowd platform should you use for your app idea?  Well, if you have a great app idea, us folks over at Applits have been hard at work creating a  home exclusively for this reason.  Applits is a website that crowdsources app ideas; site members vote on the submitted ideas every month, and at the end of each month, the submitter of the idea with the most votes is given a cash sum as well as a 10% royalty to all of the app’s net profits once developed and released. The cycle repeats every month, which means there is plenty of opportunity for idea submitters. And even better, since it’s run as a competition, you can kill two birds with one stone, and satisfy your competitive urges (think, may the best app idea win!). Once an idea is selected to be developed by the voters, Applits takes care of the entire development process, and also handles all aspects of running the app after its release including branding, marketing, and support. Now that’s a lazy man’s dream.

If you’d like to learn more about Applits, please do feel to drop by or watch the video above.  We’re always available for a quick chat to answer any questions you may have.