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This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders. The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by

This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders. The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that. I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples: 1. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app before. 2. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem - so they have either a better marketing or a better solution. Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.

marwann 11y ago
The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Wait, what? Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously". Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.
  - eljimmy 11y ago
    I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.
    - marwann 11y ago
      It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories. But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.
      - DominikR 11y ago
        One suggestion: Start thinking about details like foreign laws once you actually start to generate significant profit. Before that no one on earth will even care about your product enough to sue you. On top of that it's quite expensive to go to France and sue you there as a foreigner.
        rdancer 11y ago
        I'd think they meant the state going after them. Not everyone wants to be a carefree outlaw.
        DominikR 11y ago
        I'm not an outlaw because I am ignorant of the laws and regulations of every single state on this planet. I put an app into the store that mainly follows Google/Apple policies/guidelines and does not break any laws in my country and that is sufficient for the start. These policies are reasonable and by following them you will rarely get into trouble in Western countries. Of course some other country might object, then the app might be modified by me for this country or removed. How many apps or website would exist today if checking every law everywhere would be the standard procedure? Probably around 100 websites and 25 apps in total would exist because only big corps can afford this.
        rdancer 11y ago
        If you choose to sell your app in a particular App Store, you're submitting to the law of the jurisdiction it operates in.
  - rambambam 11y ago
    Just a question. You say the following is obvious. How is that obvious? "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously"
    - throwawaymsft 11y ago
      "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps with a max penetration of 1% of the global population" seems pretty obvious. Other variations: "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps only usable on Blackberry".
      - rdancer 11y ago
        France is a massive homogenous market with high penetration of their target platform, and large comfortable middle class. It's probably easier to pilot in France than it is in most other markets. And launching globally has non-trivial implications for cashflow & risk.
        throwawaymsft 11y ago
        I'm sure there are some strategic advantages. But when a French-only mobile app languishes, the lesson isn't necessarily "don't make a mobile app". And it's not something you casually forget to mention in your postmortem (ctrl+f for "France" and "French" in the original article).
markbnj 11y ago
I agree with your feelings about the article. It read like an exercise in denial. We also use Concur and it works quite well, and therein probably lies part of the author's problem: many people who care regularly about capturing expenses are doing so for business reasons and are told what app to use by their employer. Market research for the win.
- mpeg 11y ago
  It's a pretty easy market too, you don't even need an app, just contact any senior sales person and pitch them on a solution to do their expenses, they just have to send all their receipts and a sample expense report sheet to expenses@mycoolcompany.com. You do a few manually, then put together scripts to automate each user with the correct sheet format, cover pages, currencies, categories, etc. by using the manual ones as a template. Charge them a fee (maybe a flat fee for each report, say $40) and ask them if they'd like you to include that charge in the report from now on. This is a tech solution for a services problem, imho.
uxwtf 11y ago
Productivity apps are never in top 10 on app store. The efforts you spent building your app did not pay, but I don't think you should blame app store for that. I would suggest not to take it as a failure of the mobile app concept. Learn form your experience and think about what you can improve.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  PDF Expert and Notability are in the bestseller lists right now. There have been productivity apps in the charts, although they don't dominate.
win_ini 11y ago
1) I have never heard of you. Does this mean anything? No. He just admitted his app failed, they do no marketing and they have problems getting people to use the app. If you HAD heard of them - you would likely be spewing off "it's a mobile app with no desktop web app WTF". So - your first point is really just a jab - centered around you, not the app he wrote about. 2) concur is another provider in the space who existed before the rise of mobile apps. They are implemented across fortune 500's and many more. They have a huge install base. They are used by companies and imposed upon their employees. They have 'distribution' - which is what Birdly needed from my reading of the post. I can assure you, as a former user of concur - many people hate it. Or try TriNets incredibly terrible expense app. I was surprised there was no mention of Expensify - which I suspect is the business they were looking to disrupt - their UI is not awesome. BUT the UX is great. Take a picture of you receipt and done, email receipts handled, etc. but I use it mostly on desktop to submit reports - and use my mobile to take pictures of receipts. Anyhow - your last line is a bit of a doozy. Are you suggesting that someone who wrote 2000 word post about their pivot to a better solution (this slack idea is great IMO) should just shut up because it might dissuade others from making the same mistakes he did? Based on your "counter examples" - I think he did the right thing. I hope OP keeps sharing his learnings - because it encourages me to keep trying different approaches. AND I'm going to install his slack bot for my whole company (giving them distribution). I hope you can hide under a rock so you don't get dissuaded from doing something. Sharing is caring, even if they failed.
nodamage 11y ago
That sounds harsh but is more or less accurate. It sounds like the developers fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of productivity apps on mobile. They fell into the trap I've seen a lot of others fall into, which is taking a task normally done on a computer and building a mobile app out of it, without considering why users would want to actually perform that task on their phone. Expecting someone to create and file their expense reports entirely on a phone is absurd. Most workers would prefer to do this kind of thing at a computer, being on a phone will simply slow you down: lack of a real keyboard, tiny screen, poor multitasking, etc. There's no reason to prefer a mobile app for this task over a desktop version. Mobile productivity apps are generally best served as companions to existing web/desktop apps. Either to provide access to your data when you're not at a computer (not really relevant for this app), or to improve the workflow of something that would normally require a computer. For example, you might consider it a pain to have to save your receipts so you can later scan them into your computer and import them into your expense tool. A mobile app can improve this workflow by allowing you to immediately take a photo of the receipt when you get it, and having that receipt automatically synced into your expense tool. Off the top of my head I can name two companies (Expensify and Shoeboxed) that provide this ability. That these guys dismissed their competitors as "heavy and complicated" seems to have missed the point. Taking this experience and concluding that you shouldn't build a mobile app is simply throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

marwann 11y ago

The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice

RyanZAG 11y ago
Wait, what? Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously". Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.
- eljimmy 11y ago
  I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.
  - marwann 11y ago
    It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories. But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.
    - DominikR 11y ago
      One suggestion: Start thinking about details like foreign laws once you actually start to generate significant profit. Before that no one on earth will even care about your product enough to sue you. On top of that it's quite expensive to go to France and sue you there as a foreigner.
      - rdancer 11y ago
        I'd think they meant the state going after them. Not everyone wants to be a carefree outlaw.
        DominikR 11y ago
        I'm not an outlaw because I am ignorant of the laws and regulations of every single state on this planet. I put an app into the store that mainly follows Google/Apple policies/guidelines and does not break any laws in my country and that is sufficient for the start. These policies are reasonable and by following them you will rarely get into trouble in Western countries. Of course some other country might object, then the app might be modified by me for this country or removed. How many apps or website would exist today if checking every law everywhere would be the standard procedure? Probably around 100 websites and 25 apps in total would exist because only big corps can afford this.
        rdancer 11y ago
        If you choose to sell your app in a particular App Store, you're submitting to the law of the jurisdiction it operates in.
- rambambam 11y ago
  Just a question. You say the following is obvious. How is that obvious? "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously"
  - throwawaymsft 11y ago
    "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps with a max penetration of 1% of the global population" seems pretty obvious. Other variations: "If you want mass adoption, don't build apps only usable on Blackberry".
    - rdancer 11y ago
      France is a massive homogenous market with high penetration of their target platform, and large comfortable middle class. It's probably easier to pilot in France than it is in most other markets. And launching globally has non-trivial implications for cashflow & risk.
      - throwawaymsft 11y ago
        I'm sure there are some strategic advantages. But when a French-only mobile app languishes, the lesson isn't necessarily "don't make a mobile app". And it's not something you casually forget to mention in your postmortem (ctrl+f for "France" and "French" in the original article).

markbnj 11y ago

I agree with your feelings about the article. It read like an exercise in denial. We also use Concur and it works quite well, and therein probably lies part of the author's problem: many people who care regularly about capturing expenses are doing so for business reasons and are told what app to use by their employer. Market research for the win.

mpeg 11y ago
It's a pretty easy market too, you don't even need an app, just contact any senior sales person and pitch them on a solution to do their expenses, they just have to send all their receipts and a sample expense report sheet to expenses@mycoolcompany.com. You do a few manually, then put together scripts to automate each user with the correct sheet format, cover pages, currencies, categories, etc. by using the manual ones as a template. Charge them a fee (maybe a flat fee for each report, say $40) and ask them if they'd like you to include that charge in the report from now on. This is a tech solution for a services problem, imho.

uxwtf 11y ago

Productivity apps are never in top 10 on app store. The efforts you spent building your app did not pay, but I don't think you should blame app store for that. I would suggest not to take it as a failure of the mobile app concept. Learn form your experience and think about what you can improve.

Tloewald 11y ago
PDF Expert and Notability are in the bestseller lists right now. There have been productivity apps in the charts, although they don't dominate.

win_ini 11y ago

1) I have never heard of you. Does this mean anything? No. He just admitted his app failed, they do no marketing and they have problems getting people to use the app. If you HAD heard of them - you would likely be spewing off "it's a mobile app with no desktop web app WTF". So - your first point is really just a jab - centered around you, not the app he wrote about. 2) concur is another provider in the space who existed before the rise of mobile apps. They are implemented across fortune 500's and many more. They have a huge install base. They are used by companies and imposed upon their employees. They have 'distribution' - which is what Birdly needed from my reading of the post. I can assure you, as a former user of concur - many people hate it. Or try TriNets incredibly terrible expense app. I was surprised there was no mention of Expensify - which I suspect is the business they were looking to disrupt - their UI is not awesome. BUT the UX is great. Take a picture of you receipt and done, email receipts handled, etc. but I use it mostly on desktop to submit reports - and use my mobile to take pictures of receipts. Anyhow - your last line is a bit of a doozy. Are you suggesting that someone who wrote 2000 word post about their pivot to a better solution (this slack idea is great IMO) should just shut up because it might dissuade others from making the same mistakes he did? Based on your "counter examples" - I think he did the right thing. I hope OP keeps sharing his learnings - because it encourages me to keep trying different approaches. AND I'm going to install his slack bot for my whole company (giving them distribution). I hope you can hide under a rock so you don't get dissuaded from doing something. Sharing is caring, even if they failed.

nodamage 11y ago

That sounds harsh but is more or less accurate. It sounds like the developers fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of productivity apps on mobile. They fell into the trap I've seen a lot of others fall into, which is taking a task normally done on a computer and building a mobile app out of it, without considering why users would want to actually perform that task on their phone. Expecting someone to create and file their expense reports entirely on a phone is absurd. Most workers would prefer to do this kind of thing at a computer, being on a phone will simply slow you down: lack of a real keyboard, tiny screen, poor multitasking, etc. There's no reason to prefer a mobile app for this task over a desktop version. Mobile productivity apps are generally best served as companions to existing web/desktop apps. Either to provide access to your data when you're not at a computer (not really relevant for this app), or to improve the workflow of something that would normally require a computer. For example, you might consider it a pain to have to save your receipts so you can later scan them into your computer and import them into your expense tool. A mobile app can improve this workflow by allowing you to immediately take a photo of the receipt when you get it, and having that receipt automatically synced into your expense tool. Off the top of my head I can name two companies (Expensify and Shoeboxed) that provide this ability. That these guys dismissed their competitors as "heavy and complicated" seems to have missed the point. Taking this experience and concluding that you shouldn't build a mobile app is simply throwing the baby out with the bathwater.