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Ask HN: What product I should build on iOS and Android? Side Projects?

11 points by desaiguddu ↗ HN
We are a development agency working on mobile projects & web applications.

Last month was very difficult for us. 2 of our long-term customer's projects were finished & 2 other projects were closed intermittently due to budgetary issues. Some of our pipeline projects are not getting confirmed.

We have 4 iOS developers & 1 web developer with very minimal work.

- Do you recommend building a technical product which can eventually generate revenue in next quarter?

- Building in-house side projects, what sort of planning we need to do?

Cheers

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread
AbenezerMamo
Sorry to hear your team is going through a rough patch but hang in there! :)

Here is my 2c: Work on something new! This will keep your team excited and push them to learn new things! Maybe play with AR or even Ethereum DApps or coreML for iOS.

Use this as an opportunity to learn and build new awesome things. Your clients would appreciate that I'm sure!

Good luck out there!

desaiguddu
We have started working with coreML & ARKit a bit.

Ethereum DApps is still early stage for us! Thank you for your feedback.

muzani
I recommend finding something you can do better (which is not a to-do app) and cloning that. Look for something poorly done in an existing market.

There are a lot of these, and they can either be done better or resegmented into a certain type of market.

soneca
I agree with AbenezerMamo that you should build something new with some hot hyped tech as opposed to a side project with revenue generation goals. It is very hard to generate revenue that fast, stay where your expertise is.

Build something that will work as a portfolio for your agency, a showcase of your skills. That's why I think it must use some new hyped tech. You want to build something that the press will pick up. PR is much easier when you are building something free, cool and using a new tech.

With 4 iOS people, I would definitely choose to build something using Apple ARKit. It is among the most hyped things right now, everybody that tries it loves it and it still with very little reach, meaning there are not many products out there using it. If you build something really cool using it you can get enough attention from the press and fill your pipeline with prospects to build something with ARKit (doesn't matter if in 5 years AR will be the new forgotten tech like Google Glass, until then, big companies will be investing a lot in it, just in case).

That way you keep making your business stronger, not starting another one from scratch.

raresp
Improve your existing web presence by creating/optimizing your website (on page seo/blog posts). A good article posted here can get you 10 000 potential customers to your contact us page. That's what I'll do.

More details:

1) set distinct page title (the title should contain up to 63 characters)

2) set disting meta description (the meta description should contain up to 154 characters)

3) create a H1 tag for each page, should be something similar to the page title; create some H2/H3 meta tags

4) add alt and title attributes to website images

5) create a blog/ create a blog post which should contain over 1000 words and explain there what you're company is doing, what technology you use, programming languages..

6) crate facebook/twitter/google+/linkedin/reddit profile and ask for feedback on these social networks

7) make sure the page size is below 2/3 mb and that it loads fast enough

8) submit the website to google webmaster tools; create a sitemap and add it to you're website in the webmaster tools

9) if it's not working, create a new blog post and make sure it's written better

...

desaiguddu
Thanks we will take these steps to boost our web presence!