The app your own business needs

Small business owners ask the same question in the same words: “Should my shop have its own app, or do I just keep using Google Forms?” The honest answer is that most should not have a customer app yet, and almost all of them should have the small internal tool they are currently running on text messages. Here is how to tell the two apart and build the right one.

1. Start with what you do by text message

List the things you or your staff send by text or group chat every week. The day’s bookings. The pre-orders for Saturday. Who is opening tomorrow. The checklist for closing. Which van is where. Each of those is a screen that nobody built, so a phone’s messaging app is doing its job badly.

The one with the most messages is your first app. Not the loyalty programme, not the customer-facing menu. Those are good second apps, once you have shipped one thing and know what it takes.

2. Check the $30 shortcut first

Before building anything, spend twenty minutes finding out whether a product already does the job for a monthly fee. Bookings, invoicing, rostering and ordering all have mature products behind them. If one of them fits your business the way it actually runs, pay the $30 a month and stop reading. Your time is worth more than the fee.

Build when the fit is wrong: the product assumes a kind of business you are not, charges per staff member when you have twelve casuals, or does nine things when you need one. “Does nine things” is the usual reason. A tool that does your one thing, in your words, beats a platform you have to configure around.

3. The five screens of a business app

Business apps look different and are shaped the same. A bookings diary, a job board, an inspection round and a menu with orders all come down to:

1. Today. The list of what is happening now, in order.
2. One item. A booking, a job, a dish, an inspection, with everything about it on one screen.
3. Add or change. A form, short, with the fields you really use.
4. The people. Clients, members, staff or sites, as a list that opens to one of them.
5. You. Settings, and whatever the owner needs that staff do not.

That is why starter apps work for businesses: the bookings, jobs, inspections and orders starters in the App Builder are those five screens already wired, with real content you replace with your own. Rename “Clients” to “Members” and “Services” to “Classes”, and the gym’s app is the salon’s app.

4. Staff first, customers later

An app your staff use needs no store listing, no reviews, no marketing. Build it, put it on their phones, and improve it on Tuesday when they complain. On Android that can be a direct install. On iPhone it goes through Apple’s testing route, TestFlight, which needs a developer account ($99 a year) and a Mac to build with, but no public listing and no review queue.

A customer app is a different project: a store listing, Apple’s review, Google’s requirement that a new account run a closed test with 12 people for 14 days, and the hard question of why a customer would install it rather than use your website. Earn that with the internal tool first. The staff app teaches you what a working app is, and the customers’ one is a tenth as frightening afterward.

5. Make it yours in an hour

Pick the starter nearest your business in the App Builder, change its name to your shop’s, and go through the five screens renaming things into your own words. Then open it on your phone and hand it to whoever sends you the most texts. If they stop texting, you have your first app. If they do not, their complaints are the next five screens.