With the first leg of my app journey complete, I wanted to revisit the original roadmap that I set out at the beginning of this endeavor. As I started the process of documenting my path toward app entrepreneurship, I set forth 3 goals:
1. Launch a Reskinned App in the App Store
(Mission Accomplished! Check out the app: Bluebird in Hell)
2. Acquire Basic Coding Skills
3. Create and Launch a Mobile Game or App from Scratch
While I still believe these goals are worth pursuing and hope to fulfill them, I have learned and experienced a few things along the way that has altered my original plan.
Switching Gears
The aspect that I enjoyed the most about documenting my progress with Operation Reskin was receiving feedback from several of you out there who mentioned that my posts were helpful and inspirational as you set out on your own app journeys.
As I pondered ways to better serve the community I kept coming back to the idea of becoming a ‘crash test dummy’ of sorts for the aspiring app entrepreneurs out there. This is a concept that Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income has explored over the years with online business – one that has provided exceptional value and inspiration to his audience, including myself.
As part of this new roadmap, I will experiment with the many ways in which a person can get into the mobile app industry, including:
- App Reskinning with Licensed Source Code
- Outsourcing App Development
- Becoming a Solo App Developer
- Purchasing the Rights to an Existing Mobile App
- Teaming Up with App Developers
(If you can think of any other methods that would be worth experimenting with, please let me know in the comments!)
On the Road Again
The app reskinning process was illuminating in many ways. As I started the app journey, I felt that app reskinning was an ideal first step for breaking into the mobile app industry because it required the lowest barrier for entry and would provide valuable insights into the app submission process and how the app store works – for the most part, these thoughts turned out to be true.
However, my intention was never to focus solely on app reskinning. It was a first step in the journey toward becoming a full-fledged app entrepreneur. So for now, I will take those lessons learned and apply them toward my next leg of the quest.
This isn’t to say that I am completely abandoning app reskinning. I will still cover this part of the industry and continue to explore app reskinning to further supplement my mobile app income and test ASO and monetization strategies.
So what’s the next stop on the map?
Project Outsource
How can a non-coder such as myself create an app from scratch? Find someone who has the coding skills and pay them to bring your vision to life!
With Project Outsource, my goal will be to document the entire process of outsourcing app development, including:
- Developing the Idea
- Building a Physical Prototype
- Writing a Requirements Document
- Finding a Freelance App Developer
- Working with a Freelance App Developer (Project Management)
I hope you join me as I continue on this long and winding road through the mobile app industry!
Shawn Wu says
Great plans ahead, Shane. I think you might want to try the new 2d tool in Unity3D if you want to try developing 2D games from scratch, it will save you a lot of work and plus it can deploy across all mobile platforms at the same time. Good luck!
Shane K. says
Thanks Shawn! I am considering Unity3d now that it has the 2d tool baked into it. The other options I am considering is Corona and GameSalad. Heck, maybe I will try to make a simple game in all 3 and share the results.
GameSalad seems far improved over what I remember it looking like a few years back when I was looking into it, and it doesn’t require learning code, so it would be easier to start with, then progress to Unity or Corona.
Shawn Wu says
GameSalad is a nice choice, but there is a membership fee for using their pro version. Besides GS, you can opt for other game engines like Stencyl and Construct2, game dev using these doesn’t require any coding knowledge or skills but they charge certain fees for submitting games to Appstore/Google play/Windows. Unity3d is all free (unless you want upgrade to the Pro vs), but there is quite a learning curve to climb up such as C# and JavaScript programmings. The good things of using these game dev tools is there are plenty of templates/resources out there you can grab over to further improve on. That saves you lot of work upfront. Anyways, choices are plenty, but it all boils down to good game ideas and design.