Speed to Market: Main Strategies and Their Advantages

Have you noticed how fast everything around changes and how hard it is to keep up with all these changes? Artificial intelligence, robotics, Internet of things, all new inventions became inseparable parts of our life. If this decade had a motto, it would be “Don’t wait, catch the wave!” And it relates to all spheres of life, especially to the technological one. When it comes to innovations, you should not think too long but instead proceed with actions. Nowadays the freshness of any new idea quickly diminishes and if you don’t develop and monetize your app on time, you’ll simply lose the uniqueness of concept. 

Many successful companies reached the top because they invested in innovations and never neglected the STM (Speed to Market) strategies. So let’s take a closer look at all of them and discover what can help you make an idea a successful functional solution that many users will appreciate. 

Trends that provoke the rush 

It is interesting, that only a couple of decades ago there was no such urgent need to begin the transformation of your concept into a project as soon as possible. Startupers took their time and considered all details before attracting investors and starting the development of their project. At that time speed to market was not as important as the product itself and its quality. 

But nowadays some fresh trends have appeared and started to dictate new rules. There are many factors that make all startupers and business owners rush into the development of an app, and here are the crucial ones:

• The excess of open source technologies. It is easier than ever to take a pre-developed solution and create your own one on its basis. Open source technologies reduce the production time drastically and allow to release a completed project much faster. This creates a tough competition on the market and abundance of apps with the same functionality. Therefore, you may face a situation when you will have to resort to additional app promotion or invest money in improving your app to make it stand out from competitors. It is always better to create something one-of-a-kind than to try surpassing something that already exists. 
• Easy access to crowdfunding platforms. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Start Garden and many other services let you overcome all financial obstacles if your idea is attention worthy. You simply register, describe your concept, and raise necessary amount of money in a short period of time. You can quickly proceed with the development of your project, like any other startaper with a good idea, which, in turn, leads to a growing competition. Chances are that you may face such issue as the so-called “mutual discovery”.
• Demanding clients. Digital market is full of various apps and it is really hard to impress the crowd nowadays. People use apps every day for ordering food, booking tickets, learning, reading, playing, communicating, etc. The problem is that there are too many similar solutions offering the same functions and only the apps with unique set of features can win users’ attention. Many startapers spend a lot of time researching the market and gathering information about target audience, their pain points and key needs. However, it is way more important to start the development as soon as possible, because all research results can quickly become outdated due to the influx of solutions on the digital market. 

Best strategies to create and release your app faster

The development cycle is quite complex. It includes many steps starting from idea shaping and prototyping and ending with developing, testing and releasing the app. It usually takes up to 6 month to create a high-quality solution which is quite long period of time. That is why speed to market strategies should be applied. They all grant your business numerous competitive advantages and options for attracting more users. So here is  what you can do to make the app production faster and conquer the digital market: 

1. Develop a thoughtful roadmap. When you’ve selected a team and started working upon your idea, it is the right time to make a detailed plan of actions and take into account all possible risks. You should understand that during some stages of the development some unpredictable things may happen, but strategy is the key factor that helps to preserve time frames and key priorities.
2. Organize your team. Effective communication and convenient task tracking systems can speed up all stages of the development process. Well-organized workflow ensures fast production without the loss of app quality. Task trackers, planners and managers like Trello or Jira are must-have. 
3. Automate the development. There is no better way to reduce the time spent on building the app than utilizing automation. The development team can  use a common single code repository, write scripts for certain actions, automate testing, use third-party integrations, streamline communication, etc. 
4. Outsource the development. Sometimes even the most skilled team can struggle with implementation of certain features due to the lack of experience. In this case it is better to stop vainly writing and changing the code numerous times and outsource the development of some app features to other team. This practice helps to save money and release your solution as fast as possible. 
5. Benefit from pilot releases. Always leave time for pilot releases because they help to check your audience’s preferences  and needs, and show initial reaction to your solution. When you know what your users like, you can make some changes, create additional features or remove unnecessary ones, and alter your app in whole so that after final release it can easily gain users’ attention and loyalty. 
6. Develop MVP. Investing in minimum viable product is the best possible way to speed up the launch of your app. While usual development processes require up to 6 months of work, MVP can be built within 2 month or sometimes even less. Such solution will include major features and will allow you to understand if your app has the potential to succeed and if it can be a decent competitor for other solutions on the market. Such business giants as Facebook, Airbnb, Amazon and Instagram all started with MVP. After gaining the attention of users these applications keep getting better and more popular. Their creators started to expand functional and monetization options of the apps. So MVP can be a major helper if you strive to launch your project fast. 
7. Invest in marketing. Before your app is released you should prepare a landing page with the corresponding announcement. This will attract users’ attention and make them try your solution when it’s ready. Special discounts, presentation, mailing and other marketing tricks are no less important than the app itself. 

Why is speed to market so important?

For those who tend not to rush into the decisions, speed to market approach may seem unreasonable. However, it offers many advantages over other startup models. Faster time to market lets you:

• Be ahead of all competitors. There are many examples when someone has created a successful app and then many similar solutions started to appear. Faster launch of an app helps to create a monopoly in a certain niche. 
• Save resources. If you hire an experienced team of developers, they can make a holistic research of the market for you and build a unique app using some ready-made elements. Therefore, you can reduce time and cost spent on the development of your app but preserve the solution quality and performance. 
• Learn your users better. If you consider launching MVP, you will have a chance to get firsthand information about real user experience. If some functions are not useful or can influence your solution’s life cycle, they can be fixed or removed in a timely manner. Moreover, you can progressively extend functionality of your app in accordance with your users’ needs and keep your profit stable at the same time.   

FAQ

To sum things up

The misconception that the faster production leads to the loss of quality is no longer relevant. Nowadays every startuper should strive to win a top place on the market and offer the best possible app in a shorter amount of time. There is no better way to do this than to resort to such an effective strategy as speed to market. If you have a great app concept in mind and find a right developers team to build it, the success will be forthcoming.