25 Jun47 Breakout Apps and Apptrepreneurs to Watch!
The mobile and app industry moves fast due to its low-barriers-to-entry, low-cost of production and high-market penetration. Revenue also echoes this sentiment, with the app industry growing from $365 billion in 2018 to a projected $935 billion in 2023. Thus, it is important to stay abreast of the biggest movers in the app and mobile industry. We have compiled a comprehensive list of Apptrepreneurs and apps to watch out for! We talked directly to the Apptrepreneurs that are spearheading the success of their newly launched or recently popularised app, that we think should be on your radar.
In this article
The Apptrepreneur’s Advice
Apptrepreneurs are those that focus their skills, vision and passion in the mobile and app industry. With a projected annual growth rate (CAGR 2020-2024) of 5.0%, projected to result in a US$3,568m market volume by 2024 – it is no wonder that some entrepreneurs are now focusing on apps exclusively. We talked to twenty rising Apptrepreneurs to find out, what it takes to succeed specifically in the app and mobile sector as a business owner.
#1 Chris Riley, Apptrepreneur @ USARx
“Move fast but don’t compromise your vision”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
Our mission is to improve health by making healthcare more affordable with discounted prescription medication. Since the company was started, our customers have saved over $25M dollars on their medications.
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? You really need to gauge market demand as well as supply and demand economics. Make sure your product, app, or technology solves a problem and that the demand is there.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? You definitely need to move fast but don’t compromise your vision or the original problem being solved by the app. While you will always be looking to improve your app once it is out, there is a difference between “updates” and entirely new versions of the app, and the accompanying processes behind them.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Stockdale Paradox – A Realistic Optimist. You have to be brutally honest with yourself, your team, and your investors while fully confident in the long term success of the company.
#2 Lori Cheek, Apptrepreneur @ Cheekd & Networkd
“Gather a group of beta testers and get their honest user feedback”
Get Cheekd on the App Store & Networkd on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? My strongest advice for others considering taking the leap is if you truly believe in your idea, give up excuses and doubt, surround yourself by a trusted and talented team, bulldoze forward and DON’T. LOOK. BACK.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Watch and listen to your customers. Gather a group of beta testers and get their honest user feedback. Make sure you understand the “how and why”behind how your users want to be contacted. Some apps overwhelm their customers by sending too many or irrelevant information. If your current strategy isn’t working, stop messaging until you solidify the proper solution. Quality always overrides quantity when it comes to communicating with your user base.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Resilience.
#3 Michael Pazaratz Apptrepreneur @ Rave
“Be prepared for everyone to tell you that no one is going to use your app”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? If your product is useful, entertaining, and easy-to-use, you will gain users organically. Don’t waste money on external marketing agencies that will charge you $1 per user acquisition. Market yourself and if your app is really good, people will use it and will tell their friends about it. Organically acquiring users because your app is simply good is extremely rewarding. These users will also likely be long-term, permanent users, compared to what a marketing agency will get you. Word-of-mouth marketing is still relevant, even in 2020.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Be patient and realize that growth doesn’t always happen overnight. Be prepared for everyone to tell you that no one is going to use your app, and that it’s going to be a flop. If you truly believe in your product and your team continues to make it better, over time, people will see you’ve made a great app and they will use it. It just may not happen as quickly as you want it to. Put time and effort into improving your product, and eventually, the world will see what you saw before it was ripe with fancy new features and a polished UI.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? I would say persistence. Rave is a 5-year-old company, and only in the past 3 months have we seen extreme growth in user-ship and downloads. For years, we worked on an app that had virtually no users – that requires extreme persistence and also belief in your product and that it’s going to someday be great and used by millions. We slowly acquired users over time, and we were consistently growing every month, which was already rewarding. And then the unexpected happened: we entered into a global pandemic and everyone was left at home searching for ways to stay connected with friends and family while in quarantine. We never could have anticipated a world where getting together would be nearly impossible. Within a matter of days, we experienced a 10-fold increase in user-ship, and that really was unreal. Even still, you have to remain humble and continue to work hard, even when success is within reach. You must remain persistent. Even now, we have a product called RaveDJ, the first Artificial Intelligence DJ on the market. While we have many users, it isn’t a world-renowned product yet. It really is ahead of its time. The world isn’t ready for an AI DJ just yet. But with our persistence, hard work, and the belief that some day RaveDJ will be a feature on everyone’s music apps, we will succeed. It just might not be tomorrow.
#4 Shaun Savage Apptrepreneur @ GoShare
“Get ready to embrace change and evolution”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Get ready to embrace change and evolution. There are many opportunities in the mobile app market, in part because new technology is constantly pushing the bar forward. Innovative ideas paired with excellent execution can always find a place. But, the same market that is so inviting to innovators is quick to leave behind anyone that becomes static or stale. Yesterday’s best-in-class can quickly become tomorrow’s out-of-date. To succeed in this space, no matter what type of app you offer, you should be committed to constant progress, updates, and improvements.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Your users are your boss. Do user experience testing, conduct surveys, and always read and respond to your reviews. Listen to the feedback they are giving you as you improve your app and grow your business. If you are connected to your users and prioritize their experience and interactions in your development flow, you will find success.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? An entrepreneur needs to be determined. Setbacks are inevitable. Despite all your best efforts, bugs happen. You must allow these moments to become the mountains that help you climb to greater heights, not obstacles that prevent you from moving forward. Be determined to succeed and find a path forward. Believe in your product, your team, and your customers.
#5 Andy Green, Apptrepreneur @ MyRadar
“How will people use your idea in the real-world flow?”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Be persistent, have perseverance but know when to shift gears. You may have a great idea that needs tweaking in order for it to hit the sweet spot for widespread adoption.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Make sure you stay focused on context; how people will use your idea in the real-world flow, and all of the quirkiness that goes with it. Iterate on it often, don’t get too comfortable with your achievements even if they take off – there will always be somebody who tries to come in afterwards and do it better than you.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Weirdness ? It’s usually the people who look at things differently that make a new path for everybody else to follow and enjoy.
#6 Greg Smith Apptrepreneur @ Trunkit
“Seek it out and try to find people who will give you harsh feedback that you might not like”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Upon launching, your app must be user-friendly and ‘glitch’ free. If users find your app difficult to use, or they run into any issues along the way, then they simply won’t use it. Don’t rush anything, don’t take the easy way out, and don’t launch until your app is 100% operational. We are now (finally) happy with where the Trunkit app is, but it was a process that involved a lot of in-depth testing, fixing, and being patient.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Listen to any and all feedback given to you. In fact, seek it out and try to find people who will give you harsh feedback that you might not like. Have thick skin and stay focused on improving things. Don’t let the critics of your product bring you down, listen to what they have to stay, explore their feedback, and react to it. This world is full of so many smart people – many of them in the app-building world – and their feedback can help.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Honesty, hands down. Being honest with yourself; honest with your co-workers; honest with your customers. If you are finding excuses and bending the truth, then it will catch up with you and just drag you down.
When you are honest, everything is right in front of you for you to react to. When you begin to weave lies into your professional life, then you are only building more obstacles that you will have to defeat eventually.
#7 Adrian Chenault Apptrepreneur @ Contact Mapping
“Distribution is the biggest challenge you will face”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? This is a great time to be experimenting with new ideas without having to make huge investments to validate you idea. “No code” tools like Zapier, Mighty Networks, Trello, Airtable, and Notion make it possible for you to create a prototype version of whatever concept you have in mind before committing to custom code. It’s amazing how quickly you can become anchored to your early tech decisions once you start down a custom coding path, so it’s well worth it to start this way even if you throw it all away to build a custom version later.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Distribution is the biggest challenge you will face. Think deeply about how you can create virality and sharing into your app, even if it’s not traditionally social. What will keep your users coming back to the app daily and what will inspire them to share it with others? If you nail those two questions, you have a winner.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Grit. In entrepreneurship, everything takes longer, costs more, and goes off the rails compared to what you think going into it. You have to be able to keep pushing forward in the face of frustrations.
#8 Leigh Isaacson Apptrepreneurs @ DigDates
“You’ve got to have a sense of humor”
Available on the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? You’re going to be asking (read: begging) for help a lot in different ways. You’ll ask the media to cover you, ask friends to share your business with their online audience, ask investors to read your pitch, and more. Have something ready that you’re willing to offer people to help them in return. It doesn’t have to be related to your business! Consider your skills and how you can help. Maybe you can design a logo, edit a press release, bug fix, make introductions, knit a dog sweater, or write a unique jingle. Then, you’ll feel much more comfortable asking for help – and it’ll help you build real relationships!
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Don’t get stuck playing catchup with the big players for every new feature. Trust your instinct and your innovative team, communicate regularly with your subscribers, keep the design clean, and just make sure the app works!
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? You’ve got to have a sense of humor. Laugh at yourself and laugh with others. You’ll be in many anxious, tense, and uncomfortable situations. Laughing has an actual physical benefit for your health and wellbeing, and it’ll help you relax, break the ice, and be memorable.
#9 Brandon T Jackson & Mark Bush Apptrepreneurs @ KingdomPay
“No means NO-thing can deter me from pushing and moving forward”
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Stay the course, move past ALL the NOs and cynics, and do SOMETHING everyday towards your dream – none of that COST anything.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Staying abreast of the industry and tech changes and understanding your market.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? No means NO-thing can deter me from pushing and moving forward with my venture BOOM or BUST!
#10 Darin Alpert, Apptrepreneur @ Find Me Gluten Free
“NAIL your SEO”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? NAIL your SEO, if you don’t have a way to drive downloads/traffic, you’re in for a long road.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Revenue. What is your plan to monetize/keep the lights on that is sustainable? We had a revenue model very early on and executed that plan.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Grit. You’re going to need to work harder on the days you don’t want to work to succeed.
#11 Scott Wayman, Apptrepreneur @ Kangarootime
“Businesses only fail when the founder gives up”
Available on the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Treat your customers like gold. Especially those early “burning edge” customers who are most likely taking a risk—reward and honor them by doing whatever it takes to make them happy. If that means staying up all night, do it. Or maybe creating a feature just for them, do it. Don’t underestimate relationship building early on when you’re heads-down creating the product. We’ve been in business since 2015 and grown exponentially, but we still hear from customers—new and old—how amazing our team is at going above and beyond their expectations in responding to their feedback and helping them with issues. By doing this early on, you’re also hardwiring your team to become customer-focused, which will pay off in the long run.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Listen to your customers challenges and solve their problems. Not just some of their problems—strive to solve all of their problems. It’s easy to get caught up in data and noise from your investors or your industry, but sit down with your customers and listen to their challenges and see how they interact with your product.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Relentlessness. Businesses only fail when the founder gives up. If you believe in your mission, be relentless in pursuing it.
#12 Alexander Lazutin, Apptrepreneur @ ICarter
“Would you be a loyal user?”
Available on Google Play and the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Focus on the customer journey. Users take seconds to judge an app and will instantly quit if it’s difficult to use.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? Collect as much feedback from users out there, this is important for two reasons. First, you will know what people are after and how they react to your app, and second, your first users will feel engaged in the process and be given more loyalty as a result. Picture it yourself, if an app asks your feedback, you give recommendations and they implement what you said, how would you feel? Would you be a loyal user?
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Self-discipline, by far. In entrepreneurship, nobody asks you to do anything, all initiative has to come from yourself, from the spark of inspiration within you. Once you become stronger mentally, you will be able to lead a team and form a successful company.
#13 Patrick Hardy, Apptrepreneur @ Disaster Hawk
“Set an ultimate goal that defines what you want to get out of this”
Available on the App Store
What is the one piece of advice you’d give to budding apptrepreneurs? Set an ultimate goal that defines what you want to get out of this. For me, disaster preparedness has been my career, and Disaster Hawk was just the next step in defining myself as the premier small business and family disaster planner in the United States. But my goal with Disaster Hawk was to make disaster plans available to everyone around the world. And when I evaluate new ideas and projects from my team, I use my goal to help me determine if I want to go forward with it.
What advice do you have for succeeding in the mobile and app industry? You can’t do this alone, so don’t try. Find your weakness, then hire someone who has that trait as a strength. Since I had already started a successful disaster planning business, when I started Disaster Hawk I knew exactly the kinds of skills we were looking for.
What is the one personality trait essential for entrepreneurship? Passion. You have to truly believe in what you are doing in order to endure the ups and downs of trying to build a sustainable business. You have to be the embodiment of your dream, because your team will look to you for leadership and their motivation will derive from that.
