Rormix Startup Diary - Tips to build a killer app

by Startacus Admin

Rormix is an emerging music video discovery platform who are sharing their startup tale on Startacus. Last week Rormix gave us all 5 tips for finding your dream developer and it's back over Over to Agi, the PR and marketing team member of Rormix with their tips on building a killer App...

#discover: Tips to build a killer app

Hi everyone, I’m back and I’m about to suggest different ways to keep your dream developer busy.

Our first idea was to build an online platform, but that didn’t seem like the right move. Plus, we already had the YouTube channels for that. However, they weren’t so mobile friendly – and no one can deny how important mobile users are. From then on it was a no brainer that we should build an app.

Building an app by itself isn’t such a big deal; building something unique, something that addresses a gap in the market makes all the difference. To us it was a good opportunity to add more genres to our platform and further divide the ones we already had. Let’s be honest, country and metal don’t exactly sit well together, but it’s still too early to dedicate separate channels for them. Also, there are many blogs out there that promote unsigned artists, so we needed to make sure we really stood out from the crowd.

Long ‘brainstorming sessions and sleepless nights’ story short, Chris came back with the killer “Discover” idea – the feature that lets you type in your favorite artists and the search results return unsigned, up and coming artists who sound similar. Lesson learned: always jump on every opportunity to talk about your idea with friends and family, you never know what they will say that sets the wheels in motion.

Once you have that awesome idea, time to build. We used PhoneGap for that – it is the perfect tool to get your MVP out there without spending months building it. The trick is to have a few people constantly testing and providing you with feedback, and always, always have people testing major changes who haven’t seen your product before.

Ask for, and be prepared for, constructive criticism. What you think is a crazy good idea might not be feasible in real life. Take notes, ask people to explain what they mean exactly, and, most importantly, listen to what they have to say. Chances are, they will point out things that you’d never think of otherwise. To give you an example, we thought it would be good to have our “Discover” section in Rormix red, so that it would draw attention to the menu. Instead, people didn’t think it was clickable in general, or worse, they thought they weren’t meant to click it because it was red, putting people off our key feature.

This is not the entire story, but I don’t want to give it all away just yet. If you want to hear more, make sure to check back next week. A little teaser – we had been downloaded in over 100 countries in the first 3 weeks after we launched.

#discover the free app:

http://ror.mx/ios
http://ror.mx/andorid

#discover us on Twitter: @rormix

If you want to read more of Rormix's startup diary - here's a handy link to some of their previous startup diary posts.

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Published on: 1st December 2013