It goes without saying that apps are popular. You’ve probably got at least a dozen installed on your phone that you’ve chosen yourself; plenty more on your computer too. When you think about it, you’ve probably spent a lot of money on software over the years (and even the free apps you’ve downloaded come with advertising on them, so the developer is still making money). You might even have thought to yourself “gosh, I wish there was an app that does this!”, right?
Well, guess what: there can be, and you can be the one to do it!
Getting from here to there: the hard bit isn’t as hard as you might think
There’s a ton of resources out there for learning how to code, and many of them are free. You can get a tertiary-graduate level education in coding from the comfort of your home (in those pajamas, yes). But the good news is, to learn to code an app, you really don’t need that high a level of expertise: a few weeks of committed self-study is all it takes to gain these skills. They’re extremely useful for self-employment but also very transferable to the workplace: especially if you’re going into IT, but even in other fields, it feels pretty good to be able to say in an interview that you’ve developed apps! And some parts of the work can be done for you already via third party software: from a sophisticated system designed to protect your software from illegal copying, to a wealth of app creation templates that can be as easy as drag-and-drop, and online graphic design sites that do most of the work for you, there’s never been an easier time to use existing options to make app development easier.
OK, I made an app. Now what?
So it’s sitting there on Google Play or the App Store, but people don’t know it’s there, because it’s lost among millions of other apps. We feel your pain. It’s not enough to have an amazing app, you have to actually let people know it exists. Fortunately, almost every self-employed app developer has been in your shoes. You could spend a lot of money going to a professional marketing company, and that could be well worth doing… or you could wing it. Fortunately, since you’re not exactly the first person in this situation, there is a ton of information online, from sources as expert as Forbes and Entrepreneur, about how to make your app shine like the sparkly little diamond-in-the-rough that it is.
So go out and give it a try. You’ll be glad you gave binge-watching Netflix a break for a few weeks and did something incredibly fun and productive with your pajama-clad downtime. Let us know how you go!