- An app development business plan is structured into six key steps: executive summary, business description, market analysis, marketing strategy, monetization strategy, and startup costs & funding. Each section addresses specific questions that provide a clear vision of the project to stakeholders.
- Detailed financial planning, including startup costs, funding, and a well-defined monetization strategy, is essential. Understanding the market, competition, and customer persona helps in crafting effective marketing strategies.
- Writing a comprehensive mobile app business plan is crucial for the success of a mobile app startup. It helps clarify goals, allocate resources effectively, attract investors, and reduce risks.
The number of unique, useful apps increases daily.
According to Statista, the number of applications available on the App Store was close to 5 million in 2023. The forecast says the mobile industry will generate almost $520 million in revenue in 2024.
These statistics prove two important statements:
- Running a mobile application is a great business idea with a large monetization potential
- The competition in this industry is intense, and there’s little chance you will start monetizing your app without a proper understanding of the industry, your direct and indirect competitors, and your strategy to outplay them.
If you would like to join this beneficial industry with your great app idea, it is time to take the next step toward your goals and create a great mobile app business plan.
Reasons to prepare an app business plan
When you get a new idea for an app, you feel super excited! You want to start working on it right away because you believe it's going to be a big hit. You're so pumped up that you don't even want to spend time researching the market or making a detailed plan. You just want to jump in and get started on making your idea a reality!
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
As you know, Benjamin Franklin wasn’t involved in software development, but these words highlight the significance of the business plan for an app. Writing a plan enhances your knowledge about the market you are going to enter. It helps clarify your goals, set priorities, and build more accurate forecasts.
When you find out about all the benefits of a business plan for an app, you will get excited about the preparation stage, just as you are about the implementation. So this is why you have to plan your venture from A to Z:
Attracting great minds and great investments
Depending on your situation, you may need a technical co-founder or a development team. However, it is not easy to convince experienced professionals to start working on a product that hasn’t achieved anything yet and exists only in the mind of the initial founder. A detailed business plan may help you change their minds and attract ambitious engineers, designers, and managers.
The same works for investors. You won’t attract a significant sum from angel investors if you can’t prove to them that their money will be in good hands. But by presenting them with your business plan, you can prove your intentions to build a successful company and multiply their initial investments.
A correctly done app development business plan makes you a trustworthy employer and a trustworthy investee.
Allocating resources properly
When starting your app business, your resources are limited. Usually, you wish you could invest more time, money, and effort into your business than you actually can. Does this mean you have to postpone the start and wait until you have more time and money? Definitely not. You have to learn how to profit most from the resources you already have.
Creating an app development business plan allows you to analyze all your needs and decide on effective resource allocation. Taking intuitive steps can cause you to waste more of your resources without even realizing it.
Reducing the risks
Writing a business plan for app development is a way to get closer to your goals and ambitions.
When developing a business plan, you identify multiple risks that could impact your business. Being aware of these helps you either change direction to avoid pitfalls or prepare for potential negative outcomes.
Risk mitigation in software development is the strategy that increases the chances of success for your mobile app business.
Managing and delegating effectively
A business plan provides the vision of the critical tasks and helps delegate each of them to the particularly responsible person.
Yes, at first, it seems that you can manage every aspect of the mobile app startup creation on your own. However, if you want to scale and achieve outstanding results, prepare to hire new people and share the responsibility.
With the business plan, you make sure that every team member knows exactly where you head and can choose the most effective strategies within their responsibility to get the company there.
In short, a business plan helps you get the idea out of your head, digitize it, and build a detailed roadmap for startup to achieve the goal.
Yes, some businesses manage to achieve success without any plan. However, they don’t know which of the dozens of chaotic actions actually brought the desired results. And therefore, they are unable to scale this success.
If your goal is to start a mobile app business and achieve predictable and scalable results, prepare a pen and paper and get ready to draft your app business plan.
Is an app business plan different from a business plan for other software projects?
Here, we have to state that all cases are different. There’s no business plan template you can copy for your project. You have to approach the process wisely and define your goals.
What do you expect to achieve with a business plan document?
- Convincing investors to fund the development process?
- Attracting the best talents to build your startup?
- Creating a roadmap to bring your product to the market?
Depending on your goal, the focus of the business plan may shift.
Investors care more about the numbers. They want to see that you’ve done your homework, analyzing the target audience and proving that you will spend the money you attract in the most effective way.
Your potential co-founders and employees want to see the professional challenges and perspectives of their careers at your company.
This way, the business plan may differ according to your needs and goals. But the type of software you are going to build doesn’t influence the process. You still need to answer the same blocks of questions, whether you are building a simple mobile app, launching a SaaS product on the web, or integrating AI into existing processes of your own business.
So, no matter what type of app you are about to build, prepare to work on your business plan.
How to write a business plan for an app?
A business plan is a document that requires a clear structure. You will aim for high readability and intuitive navigation, which is usually achieved through clear formatting.
Writing a business plan is not about telling a chaotic story of how your app will change the world.
To give your target audience a clear vision of the project, you will have to answer many specific questions. We divide these questions into six blocks:
- Executive summary
- Business description
- Market analysis
- Marketing strategy
- Monetization strategy
- Startup costs and funding.
A business plan for an app usually consists of 20 to 40 pages.
Some of the questions in these blocks may require additional research, and some others may be too obvious, but we encourage you to write down everything that relates to your future app business. You will be glad you put these thoughts on paper. Let’s start with the first block.
Block 1. Executive Summary
This is the introduction to your business plan and the very first thing your potential investor or partner will see when getting acquainted with your idea.
An executive summary may become a standalone document for presenting your future app business, so make sure you provide the most important information on the first two to three pages of your business plan. Make it clear and remarkable, and answer these questions in your summary:
What problem do you want to solve?
Even though the market is full of different solutions, consumers always face obstacles and complications. You need to find these problems and identify the ones you can solve. Analyze what your target audience needs at the moment, why the existing solutions do not satisfy those needs, and what you can offer to solve this problem.
What is your solution?
First, make sure your application can address the problem. Then, introduce your idea but do not dive into details: it is not the right moment to introduce the functionality to investors. It is time to highlight what your app will do to make the app users happy.
For whom do you create your solution?
Identify your target audience in the executive summary. Provide basic information on your buyer persona, but keep in mind that you will have to describe it in more detail later in the Market analysis section.
What are the competitors' solutions?
Summarize the current market situation to give your stakeholders an overview of your competitors. Present this information to prove that there’s demand for similar solutions and convince them that there is space for your product on the market.
What goal do you pursue?
The primary goal of any business is financial return. In this section, tell what your goal looks like. Provide your vision of the app’s future; say how many users you expect to download your app and what profit it will bring. Visualize your short-term plans and enhance your answer with metrics.
The executive summary should include your unique value proposition (UVP) - the distinctive benefits and features of the app that set it apart from competitors and resonate with the target audience.
The next blocks after the summary will require more details.
Block 2. Company description
When you know what product you want to release, you have to go one step further. What company is capable of building such a product?
Present your current team, as well as the vision of a team in a few years. Pay specific attention to the following:
Mission, vision, and values of the company
In a world of dozens of similar software products, your mission, vision, and values set you apart from other companies in your industry. Consider your organization’s impact on the community; this will help you attract people with similar values.
Basic info about your organization
Your potential partners should know whether your company is an LLC or another entity. The company’s structure defines how the processes will be organized in the future.
Location is essential. If your team works remotely, mention it, too. And don’t forget to emphasize the reasons why you have decided on this location or opt for remote collaboration.
If you decide to delegate some of your operations, such as app development, describe how you choose a software outsourcing company. For example, in one of our articles, we have gathered reasons to hire Ukrainian developers. You can use these to convince your stakeholders that software development outsourcing is a financially rewarding decision.
Team introduction
The mobile app business plan should include details about your team so you can get even closer to the reader. By adding a few words about the company’s founders and employees, you turn a boring description into a real introductory meeting.
Tell the potential investor about your managers and the engineering team. You can specify names, positions, experiences, and even hobbies to make the readers feel like they know the people you talk about.
One more actionable tip is to provide the details about your advisory team. Those experts help you with decision-making, and their names make a difference in the market.
And as we mentioned the market, it’s time to describe it to your potential stakeholders as well.
Block 3. Market analysis
To launch an app startup, it’s essential to conduct market research for a startup. By knowing its past and present, you can impact its future. This stage is a transition from a hypothesis to real statistical data.
How big is the market?
To answer this question, you must analyze the following factors:
- Total Available Market, or market demand for your app,
- Serviceable Available Market, or the number of users you are able to reach out to,
- Serviceable Obtainable Market, or the segment of very first users.
How does the market change?
Analyze the market size five years ago and now. What has changed? How many influencers have broken into the market? How many of them failed? The amount of money spent in the industry will help you see your own potential income clearly.
Who are your direct competitors?
You are most likely entering an established market with players who have a significant impact there. What is their market share, and how did it change over time? How do they obtain new customers and retain existing ones? What services do they provide, and how did their offer change over the last years? Understanding your competitors’ paths will help you plan yours.
What is the customer persona?
The only way to develop a legendary app is to look at it with your customers’ eyes. This is why you need to understand the target audience and create a portrait of a customer. A customer persona is a detailed description of who the user of your app is. Define gender, age, occupation, education, hobbies, and daily challenges he or she faces. It is the portrait of a real person your app will serve.
In this section, you prove you understand the market. But you also have to demonstrate your plan to conquer it. The next block is dedicated to this.
Block 4. Marketing strategy
A solid mobile app business plan should describe the way your app will get to the potential user’s smartphone. Let’s have a glance at how to build a successful marketing strategy:
Decide on metrics
In the beginning, your success will be measured by the number of installations or conversion rates, not by financial revenue. So, decide what metrics will be useful for evaluating your project.
Outline your product launch plan
How do you plan to kickstart your app story? Once the mobile application is ready for release, you have to start implementing your product launch plan. Share your ideas to convince the stakeholders you know how to attract users to your app.
Identify the channels you can acquire customers from
Nowadays, social media marketing is an effective way to promote a product. But will it be enough for your app? Go back to the research phase and find out how many potential users you can meet on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Analyze other possible strategies and provide the stakeholders with the information about which channel may be the most profitable.
Think about collaboration with existing businesses
Referral programs and other types of collaborations may become your growth fuel. Decide on the companies to partner with and explain why you expect this cooperation to be fruitful.
Define the desired marketing budget
Unfortunately, you won’t acquire your users for free. And even if you decide not to use paid promotion methods, you still need to pay your marketing team to grow your brand awareness. How much do you need to spend, to acquire the necessary number of users? Calculate it in advance.
Block 5. Monetization Strategy
At the finish line of your mobile app business plan building, we will discuss the financial part. How do you plan to monetize your app? This question is extremely important, unless you plan to start a non-profit project. If your goal is to turn your app idea into a profitable business, tell the stakeholders how you plan to achieve this. You may choose one monetization strategy or a combination of them, such as:
Charge a subscription
Subscription-based apps are usually affordable and solve a specific need of the target audience. If you believe your service will be useful for your users, you can start with a free plan and charge a subscription for advanced functionality. Investors like the business models that rely on recurring payments as their revenue is more or less predictable. On the other hand, you have to work hard to provide top-notch service, otherwise your users can terminate the subscription and turn to your competitors.
Charge a fee for installation
There are so many free apps on the web. And there are two ways for you to convince them to buy your app:
- to deliver exceptional functionality none of the competitor apps offers
- to build a strong brand and make sure users don’t want any alternatives
Both ways require thorough planning and you have to convince potential product stakeholders that you know how to achieve these results.
Use advertising
You can simply advertise other products within your mobile app. It is a fast and easy way to monetize it; however, you should have an impressive number of active users to implement this strategy.
You can find out about other options to earn money from your digital product from our article on mobile app monetization.
Potential partners and investors will not support your idea unless the monetization strategy is well-defined and clear. So be ready to answer the questions about what financial profit you expect to make of this app.
Block 6. Startup Costs & Funding
Did you know one of the key reasons why do startups fail is financial issues? According to CB Insights, 29% of companies simply run out of cash; 18% of companies have different types of cost issues.
Now when you are as close to your first technology startup business plan as never, consider the importance of costs and funding for your business.
Why is the financial component of planning so important?
- It is vital for you to understand what type of funding you need to get your app up and running;
- It is necessary for your potential partners to know how much money you plan to spend.
The startup’s financial model should reflect the forecast for the next 3-5 years. Add the following data to your plan:
What are the one-time costs?
If you have an offline office, include the setup costs. Estimate your initial recruitment budget to get the core team on board.
If you decide to outsource app development, you can count it as a one-time expense as well. An experienced software development partner can precisely estimate the cost to build an app MVP according to your requirements. Add the figure to your mobile app business plan.
What are the recurring costs?
Here, you will have to estimate the costs to maintain the office space and your equipment.
Also, you will need to calculate the salaries of your full-time employees, or the ones you hire according to the staff augmentation model.
Usually, outsourcing all startup development stages is a better choice as it is more predictable and requires less project management activities from your side. This means, you as a startup founder can focus on strategic tasks.
Think how you can reduce the costs
Creating a software product is never cheap. However, in your mobile app business plan, it’s important to demonstrate to your potential investors that you can allocate financial resources wisely. There are various ways to reduce the overall development costs without compromising quality in any way:
Leverage outsourcing
Outsourcing can significantly cut costs. Instead of hiring in-house specialists to complete certain tasks within your project, you can partner with a reliable vendor and
tap into the expertise you need. In this case, you will pay only for the work outlined in the contract, not for the working hours of your employees. Just ensure you choose a partner with proven experience to maintain quality while reducing expenses.
Opt for remote work
If feasible, consider a remote work model. By eliminating the need for physical office space, you can save on rent, utilities, and office supplies. Remote work also allows finding skilled professionals at lower rates than local hires.
Use open-source solutions
Incorporate open-source software and tools wherever possible. Many high-quality open-source solutions are available for development, project management, and marketing. Utilizing these tools can reduce software licensing fees and other related costs.
Start with MVP
Building an MVP means focusing on developing core features first to test your concept. This approach not only reduces initial development costs but also allows you to gather user feedback and iterate efficiently. Avoid adding unnecessary features in the early stages that can increase both time and expense.
Being proactive about financial management helps you identify potential overspending areas and address them promptly. By thinking strategically about cost reduction from the outset, you can ensure that your resources are used efficiently, giving your mobile app startup a stronger chance of success. Remember, the goal is to maximize value while keeping expenses under control.
Review your mobile app business plan
Reviewing and updating your business plan for an app is essential to ensure it remains relevant and effective. Here’s how you can approach this process:
- Set regular review periods
How long does it take to develop an app? It’s difficult to answer this question. You may get all that is necessary right away, or you may need some time for it. Regular intervals, such as quarterly or bi-annually, allows you to assess your progress, make adjustments, and stay aligned with your goals. Regular reviews help you stay agile and responsive to changes in the market and your business environment.
- Update market analysis
The market is evolving constantly. Your initial market analysis might become outdated at some point. Revise the latest industry trends, competitor activities, and customer preferences. Staying informed can help you ensure that your strategies remain competitive and relevant.
- Reevaluate finances
Your financial projections are based on assumptions that may change over time. Reevaluate your revenue forecasts, cost estimates, and funding needs to ensure they reflect your current situation.
- Assess your marketing strategy
Are you reaching your target audience? Are your acquisition channels performing as expected? Use data metrics and analytics to measure the success of your campaigns and refine your marketing strategy accordingly.
- Reflect on achievements and setbacks
Take time to reflect on what you have achieved and the challenges you have faced. Identify the strategies that worked well and the areas that need improvement. Learning from your experiences helps you refine your approach and avoid repeating past mistakes.
- Engage your team
Involve your team in the review process. Their insights and feedback can provide valuable perspectives and help identify areas for improvement. Collaborative reviews also encourage a sense of ownership and alignment within the team, helping you in achieving your business goals.
- Adjust your goals
Based on your review, adjust your goals and objectives if necessary. Setting realistic and achievable targets ensures your mobile app business plan remains not a theoretical but practical tool for guiding your startup.
- Document changes
Keep a record of the changes made during a review. Documenting updates ensures transparency and provides a clear history of your business plan’s evolution. This can be particularly useful when communicating with stakeholders and tracking your progress over time.
If you are planning to put your application into the list of top fast-growing startups, regularly reviewing your business plan for an app is essential to ensure your strategies remain aligned with your vision. By staying proactive and adaptable, you can navigate the dynamic landscape of the industry.
In conclusion
Unless you have started bringing your plans to life, a well-structured business plan is your main tool for archiving success. It not only provides a clear roadmap for your startup but also helps attract investors, allocate resources efficiently, mitigate risks, and manage your team effectively. By thoroughly addressing each of the blocks we have mentioned - executive summary, business description, market analysis, marketing strategy, monetization strategy, and startup costs & funding - you can present a comprehensive and compelling vision of your app’s potential.
