Jason Hawkins is a senior application strategist, information architect and digital marketing specialist at KND Digital. His knowledge is based on over 13 years of industry experience in taking online application ideas to reality across a broad range of industries. He is also passionate about helping SME‘s grow their businesses online through delivering seminars and education sessions to Queensland businesses. In 2013, he has put his development philosophy into an eBook for budding entrepreneurs.
KND also developed a free online tool for SMEs to assess their current digital strategy. Take the test at http://www.yourdigitalcompass.com.au to see how you rank online!
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Christo: Hey there folks. Welcome back to the Basic Bananas Small Business Marketing Show. We have another inspiring entrepreneur sharing some insights into a different area of marketing today.
Franziska: Yeah. What we wanted to share with you is something about apps because a lot of people talk about developing apps and using them as a great marketing tool. So we went out there and found a fantastic guy, Jason Hawkins, who is digital marketing strategist and also he specializes in applications – apps. So his knowledge is based on over certain use of industry experience in taking online application ideas to reality across different industries. So let‘s talk to Jason about this whole app thing. So we can show you guys what it is and if you need it and why you need it. So let‘s hear.
Christo: So welcome Jason to the call. Thanks for joining us today.
Jason: Thanks very much for the invite, guys.
Christo: Awesome. It‘s great to have you here. So tell us a little bit about you. Give us a bit about your story and how you‘ve got to where you are at.
Jason: Yeah, well my story starts about 12 or 13 years ago where I was interested in IT and online business I guess as part of the dot.com boom back in the late 90s. So I got very interested in the web and how I could do business in the web and started our journey along that path. Myself and a friend of mine, funny enough I studied music, studied with many years ago. We joined forces and launched a web company about ten years ago. And K&D Digital was born.
We started doing application development; a lot of online training systems as well as what you now called Cloud-based apps as part of that journey. One particular system got around 60,000 instantaneous users at any one time for a period of 12 months or so. So we‘ve had some really good success over the years and we‘ve also seen some pretty catastrophic failures online. I think the business of being in the web space, there‘s success and failure. We‘ve learned a lot over the years as to how to approach different projects or what may work and what may not work based on experience in the space.
Franziska: And one thing that we will focus on today also Jason is apps. So just for the listeners can you give us a very understandable definition of apps? What is that whole thing about apps? What is it? What do they do? Can you make it, what is it, common language?
Jason: That can be a little bit tricky, but I guess in recent years apps has now become a term for mobile applications, small single function or easy to use little tools to use on your mobile phone. Quite often apps extend way beyond just your phone and operate as total systems in an online environment. So the example of one of the biggest online apps out there is Facebook. It‘s a huge, huge system that operates 24/7 with millions and millions of requests per second. So I guess that‘s the full range of what people are calling apps these days.
In our world we do build website style apps that are available in what‘s called the Cloud. So available online via web browser, that either deliver to a mobile phone or someone‘s desktop or laptop or tablet device. So an app is a very common term these days, but it can mean…there‘s so many different variations of them.
Franziska: And talking about small businesses because most of our listeners are small business owners, why would you say that it‘s a great or not a great idea to develop their own app? So what are the benefits for a small business to have an app, to develop their own application?
Jason: Yeah, I guess there‘s two different reasons, two different strategies. One is about marketing your front end of the business. So if you have a logical reason or logical product that makes sense to take time to market for your customers, then a front facing app would be, could be a beneficial thing to your business, that you could sell licenses to or provide to your customers to do other things online, make it easier to interact with your business online. So that might be a service app or might be a product ordering app, might be just an additional funky bit of idea that a business might have in order to attract more clients.
The other side of the coin is apps that allow small businesses to do business better by saving costs. So that might be a project management tool that‘s online. It might be converting your accounting package to an online Cloud-based system, so it allows you to optimize parts of your business that you otherwise maybe crowded with process or paper or people. And it allows you to eliminate some of that cost.
So it really does depend on the type of business you‘re in really.
Christo: Pretty flexible isn‘t it?
Jason: Yeah, to make those decisions. So we get some people walk into our business saying, “Hey we really want an app, mobile phone app for our business,” but really it‘s not going to make a huge difference to their bottom line. It‘s just because it‘s trendy. So for a small business in this market, you need to be really focused on what is going to deliver to your bottom line. If that‘s a front facing app, that‘s great. Go for it.
Franziska: I completely agree with that. I see a lot of businesses, that just want an app just because it is cool without really having a strategy behind it or without really knowing how to make it functional. But if someone, let‘s just go with a common business that we get a lot; if you had a chiropractor walk into your business, (and maybe you‘ve had some before) and they say, “I want an app.” What would you say?
Jason: Okay. I guess a chiropractor could have a number of reasons to have an app. One might be a reminder system. So the client logs their name and details into the system. They‘ve already been to an appointment. The chiropractor in the appointment says, “I‘m going to give you this set of exercises to do while you’re at home. It‘s really important you do this as a follow-up process to our appointment over a period of a month,” or whatever that might be. The person goes home and they get a daily reminder through the app to do particular exercises, so it‘s a great way for a business to keep your brand and your process and your person in front of your client base for longer.
Christo: Yeah, it‘s a great way to encourage your recurring business.
Franziska: Exactly. That example it is actually adding to their bottom-line because you are constantly in front of your customer to make them want to come back. That is…
Christo: That‘s what I was just thinking, too. Is there other ways of monetizing an app that you‘ve seen for small business to do or that could be relevant for small business? Because I‘m sure there is and I’ve seen the apps, where you buy music lessons or you buy an app and it kind of gives you half functionality and you pay for the upgrade. And that was a good example you gave then to encourage recurring business, but what are some other ways you might have seen along the way for a small business to monetize an app?
Jason: Yeah, I guess there‘s so many different scenarios. The really interesting thing is the entrepreneur gets obsessed with the ability to scale the monetization of it very easily. So they can say, “Hey, I‘ll sell it into XYZ number of people, number of clients, and then they can load up all their clients in the system.” And all of a sudden, I‘ve sold my license 200 times, but I‘m going to sell to 300 of their clients in every situation. So you end up with potentially thousands of users all doing the one, all purchasing from you through the app.
That‘s like massive dollar signs. The dollar signs start rolling on for an entrepreneur when they see that. The interesting thing with apps though is you‘ve got to consider how you‘re going to actually get to that end point and just building it will nearly get you there.
Christo: Yeah, I can imagine. Were any of your catastrophic failures you mentioned at the start, have you seen a few apps…obviously I‘m sure that there‘d be some people come up with some whacky ideas that kind of get some apps produced and then you know…
Jason: Yeah, and they go nowhere.
Franziska: I would love to hear some examples of those whacky ones. Have you got some?
Jason: I don‘t want to incriminate ourselves because we built a couple of them.
Franziska: You don‘t have to name the businesses.
Jason: And came out with the idea at the same time. There‘s a long road to commercialization I guess. There‘s so many successful, I wouldn‘t say so many. There‘s successful stories of I‘ve built an app and it‘s a dollar download and I‘ve sold five million of them. You hear these amazing stories, but for all of those amazing stories there‘s hundreds and thousands of apps that don‘t make it. So it‘s about how you can most easily get to market to sell your app if you‘re going to sell it or if it‘s a giveaway, however that is.
But how are you going to grow that user base? How are you really going to market? We get the occasional entrepreneur come in for their first meeting and all they‘ve got a budget for is the build of the app.
Franziska: That‘s awesome.
Jason: It‘s very, very common.
Christo: I can imagine.
Franziska: That‘s the scenario that we see a lot is build it and they will come. What‘s that saying?
Christo: If you build it they will come.
Jason: If you build it they will come.
Franziska: So I‘d love to know acutely, that‘s a really good point because that is so important. You probably need more money or more efforts, more budget to actually then market that saying, so what are some of your favorite marketing strategies to then market an application once its developed and launched?
Jason: So our rule of thumb, and it‘s in my eBook actually, How to Create a Killer App, is to talk about your marketing budget as being easily as equal to the cost of the build. And if not more. So if you‘re spending 50,000 on an app, then at least allocate 50 grand to marketing. And that‘s really just the start. Those numbers I‘ve read elsewhere your marketing budget should be two to three times your development budget.
So you‘ve got to go in with your eyes wide open as to how you allocate that marketing. And it really does depend again on the type of app that you‘re going to market. I‘m a huge fan of multi-channel. So you‘re going to where you think your customers are. But also, trialing different channels as well. So this one you might be you call a website that‘s marketing your app. The next is your social channels. Do you have a YouTube channel? Do you have a Facebook business page? Do you have a Pinterest, Twitter account, your LinkedIn? You‘re using all those channels on an equal basis until you find what rises to the surface as far as conversion goes. It might be traditional media. It really does depend on the topic you‘re going for, whether it‘s a B-to-B product, obviously you‘d go to LinkedIn. If it‘s consumer orientated, you might focus on Facebook, obviously market it within the app stores if it‘s a mobile app. Trial a whole different lot of strategies. Search strategies as you go and those sorts of things, too. To really get it in front of as many people as you can.
Franziska: Yeah, and one thing that I see a little bit out there is some people do develop an app, and they spend all their time and money on marketing that app rather than seeing the application as part of their business and using the app as a marketing strategy as part of your business. So if a business has already got a big database or other marketing channels out there, they can tack the app onto that and letting people know through their channels that they are already using, rather than starting completely new channels for the app and then forgetting about that they actually have to run a business. And the core business is the one that is making them money at the moment. The app is a little ad on.
Jason: Yeah, it‘s very easy to get blinded by, like if you‘re already in business and you‘ve got a structured business making you money, it‘s very easy to blinded by the entrepreneurial activity.
Franziska: Exactly because it‘s exciting. It‘s exciting to have an app.
Christo: Brand new every day.
Franziska: Plus I can hide behind it. I can throw money at somebody to develop the app and then for a couple of months I can just hide behind it. I don‘t have to do any marketing because the app will be the magic ingredient that is missing.
Christo: What about an app in terms of cost? What do you think in your opinion for a small business owner to create an app, what would they be up for? What would they be looking at?
Jason: Yeah, it‘s a commonly asked question. There‘s many different answers. For really basic functional sort of brochure style app if you like mobile app, you might get around the five grand mark. It‘d probably be a good starting mark. But then if you‘re starting to develop a system that has multiple user types and levels of access and all that sort of thing and it‘s serving particular function for business, then your development budget could quickly jump to six figures. You could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So it really does depend on the functions. I guess a critical part of if you have an idea, start writing it down. Map out what type of users you‘ll have. What personality will those users have? Now, what markets will there be? Is it just one type of user or are there five groups of users you want to service? What can you give away for free to those users and what‘s a good upsell to those users? To get a good momentum with an app what you do see quite often the version, the free version has X number of features. And then the next version up has, for the more serious users will be several dollars for licensing per month or however that rolls.
So yeah, if you‘ve got an idea, start mapping that out because that becomes some of the most complex components of the application build if you like. For example, if you‘ve got public users, then you‘ve got a registered user and you‘ve got an administrative user and you‘ve got a soupy user and you‘ve got a company user, all of a sudden you‘ve got five or six users that all need their all need interactions within the app
Now, those interactions will take time to code. So that‘s where your development budget starts to really wind out.
Franziska: Exactly. Now, you got away before with not telling us any of the horrible failures, but I‘d love to know at least a couple of apps that you really like. It doesn‘t have to be the ones that you developed, but just in general, apps that our audience, our listeners can go and check out to say, “Oh, this is cool. Let‘s check this out.” So what are some of your favorite ones, and maybe one failure?
Christo: And cool ones for small business if that comes to mind, too, any cool.
Jason: Okay. We‘ve built a bunch of those. One of my favorite is a client of ours actually who is a law firm who has built an application for lawyers and financial planners. This is quite a large app. It‘s not your little every day mobile app. But it scans the web and newspaper sources and everything for funeral and death notices. It‘s quite a morbid topic. But it‘s really important for lawyers to know whether anybody on their database has passed away, they hold the will.
So they go through a process, every law firm around the country goes through a process of scanning the newspapers every day to see if any of their clients have passed. So this app gives law firms the ability to be able to do that in five minutes. It does cross checks of percentages of matches to their database to live feeds of that information from around the country.
Christo: Wow, that‘s amazing isn‘t it? Crazy the information you can get.
Jason: Oh absolutely. And this is the fantastic thing about cloud applications is its capability to bring a whole bunch of different data, general information together to do something really, really beneficial.
Franziska: And I like this example because this is obviously an example just as an internal tool to use an app as an internal tool to save money and save time which saves money and be more efficient in doing that process which is a great example. Do you also have an example of an app that you like that is more customers focused; it adds value to the customer?
Jason: Yeah, we‘re just about to start…I can‘t mention the company name, but we‘re in the process of building a tool for consumers for when they travel overseas to do searches on what vaccinations are required for the country they‘re visiting in. And it‘s by a health company that specializes in this sort of field. So they can provide an additional resource to their customer base as a mobile phone app while they‘re travelling to gleam all that information that they need to travel and store that data in their phone. So really quite powerful use of quite an extensive database again of country and vaccine requirements.
Franziska: That‘s interesting. That‘s a great idea. What about a failure?
Christo: She‘s being pressing for these failures.
Franziska: So persistent this woman.
Jason: We started a project years ago and it‘s a good example of why apps fail, why apps can fail. It was a tool called Stop Looking. And my business partner back when I did this is not listening, but it was a great idea we thought at the time. We were advertising al la carte sales journals, trading posts and that sort of thing. And we‘d say, you haven‘t found the car you‘re looking for, stop looking. StopLooking.com and you could put in the exact car you wanted to buy.
Now, that would all feed through to a clearing house where we would have 50 car brokers waiting to pick up the lead. Then we would sell that lead on to the broker. So if they had a car that matched the inquiry then they would purchase that lead for like $30.
Christo: Sounds like a good idea. What happened?
Jason: Well, we think it was way ahead of its time.
Christo: The people weren‘t ready for it, were they?
Jason: Well, this was seven years ago. We had no trouble getting leads. This is I guess a good lesson for your listeners. Sometimes you‘ll think what will work will work really, really well. Then other parts of the equation may not work as well. So for us, we were getting hundreds of leads a day through this site. Awesome. We thought this was happy days. Then the other side we needed the brokers to first of all log in or be willing to use technology to generate a lead. Then second of all, be willing to pay for that lead.
We thought they were willing to pay for the lead because they were paying the leads from CarSales.com that you know what. So we thought what we might do is an extension of that, but that proved to be very, very difficult. So we didn‘t really have control over the transaction. It all got a bit complicated. The system worked. Everything worked, but the market wasn‘t quite ready.
Christo: Yeah, that‘s a good lesson like you said. You might have originally thought the challenging part‘s going to be getting the leads and then selling them shouldn‘t be a problem because that‘s what you‘d imagine. But it‘s interesting. It‘s a good point that you‘ve brought that up. It‘s good for people to be aware and to I guess be prepared as possible before going ahead and developing an app. What do you do for being a successful business owner that needs inspiration? Are you reading any particular book at the moment or what are you doing for inspiration?
Jason: I‘m always on the net. Being an internet business I guess that‘s not surprising, but I‘m always talking to my network of people as well. We have a pretty solid client base so we built over ten years. So we‘re always chatting to them what they think trends are. There‘s various ideas in the market. I wouldn‘t say yes the market for apps is growing, but now there‘s I guess people still coming through the GFC. Small business. So there‘s still not a lot of free cash out there on an entrepreneurial project. So we‘re very upfront with prospects that come through about what we think is commercial or not and whether something is commercializable.
Christo: Yeah, that‘s great – very upfront.
Jason: Yeah. You got to be otherwise you get six months down the road and you‘ve got this app and don‘t have anyone using it. And they realize that wow, this is more challenging than what I thought. No application that we‘ve developed over the years has ever had a really smooth journey. There‘s always challenges that come on.
Franziska: And normally one of the first starting points for our listener if they want to read your eBook, where can they grab it?
Jason: If you go to our website K&D.com.au pretty much on every page is a link to download the eBook.
Franziska: Excellent, so the website is K&D.com.au and where else can they find out more about you and your business mainly the website? Do you have any Facebook, Twitter?
Jason: Yeah, all our Twitter links, Facebook links are all over that website as well. The other thing that I guess that we really try to encourage is not even from an app perspective, but just from a digital positioning perspective, when you have a look at our site you‘ll see we are a sort of full service style business because we‘ve been in the game for so long we like to find out where you‘re at. It‘s important you‘ll see on our homepage there‘s a digital version of the London Underground as our “logo thing” if you have a look on our homepage. It‘s got the colored tracks with stations and it‘s all about mapping out a journey for small businesses. Knowing where you are on that digital journey, if you like. So what we try and do is nail the business down to finding out where realistically they‘re at on that journey. Do they need to establish core and is that core a really good website, is it commerce store. Is it app, whatever that might be? Then to move forward with all the other digital options as you go through a business life cycle, if you like.
Franziska: Excellent, and the last question and we‘ll wrap this episode up is do you have your own app? Hopefully, and if so, where can listeners find it.
Jason: Yeah, we have our own app. It‘s called ‘Our Disk’. We launched it about the same time as ‘U Send It’. And it‘s a very similar sort of application to ‘You Send It’. Businesses can share files with clients and other businesses or firms, use it to share discovery documents. We use it to share big files and project files. It‘s a little bit different to the ‘You Send It’s and ‘Dropbox’ in the sense that it‘s brandable. So you‘ve got your own business branded little area where you can upload your images and distribute your files across the planet. We‘ve got clients in the US, Canada, India, Indonesia, New Zealand.
Franziska: Cool, what‘s it called?
Jason: It‘s called Our Disk.
Franziska: Okay, listeners, go check out ‘Our Disk’. Go check out K&D.com.au if you want to know about Jason and apps. Thank you so much, Jason, thanks for joining us today.
Jason: Not a problem. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Christo: Thanks mate. It‘s been great.
Jason: Cheers.
Franziska: Wow, what an episode. Big techy. I trust you guys loved it. I definitely took away a few things and also a couple of call to actions for you. So if you are thinking about developing an app, think about whether it‘s really a useful tool for you or whether you‘re just wasting your money and have a bit of a strategy behind it before you go about spending money on developing an app.
Christo: It was a very honest interview, wasn‘t it? I liked the fact that he kind of pulled it apart and it is such a broad thing. It can be so many different or have so much different functionality. So really cool and obviously the sky is the limit.
Franziska: Exactly. And what‘s happening here at Basic Bananas?
Christo: Basic Bananas we‘ve got some cool things happening. Recently we‘ve done a bunch of new video marketing tips that would be really handy for small business owners, some really practical stuff that you can apply. So check out the four nightly video tips because we‘ve been having a lot of fun producing those. A bunch of new videos coming up. Also, the summit, the experience is called which we have in April 2014 we‘re putting together the content at the moment and it‘s going to be really productive, two day event for business owners. So something that you wouldn‘t want to miss. There‘s going to be limited numbers, but we‘re just going through and finalizing with some really amazing speakers, presenters and some really great…it‘ll be a hands on couple of days for business growth. So you‘ll hear more about it in the future. We look forward to hearing questions through these podcasts. Please click like. Give us a comment over on iTunes, share it with the world and post any questions, any interaction we love and we‘ll look after and of course answer any of those questions on the podcasts.
Franziska: See you on the next one.
Christo: Bye for now.