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How to build your business app – lessons from Jack’s Flight Club

Closeup side view of group of late 20’s multi ethnic team of web designers working on a project. They are divided into small groups, some working on a computer and some testing mobile platforms on digital tablets and smartphones.
Make sure that you have a market for your app before investing in development, as the upfront and ongoing costs can be considerable. Photograph: gilaxia/Getty Images

When starting up a small business, one of the first considerations is building a webpage – a one-stop shop where consumers can engage with you and your product or platform. But, as the online world moves more towards mobile, apps are becoming another essential part of growing a small business.

So far in 2018, Statista estimates there have been 205bn app downloads worldwide. And in the UK, a recent Ofcom report revealed Britons check their phone at least once every 12 minutes. But just how easy is it to jump on the trend and take an idea for an app to the app store?

First, it is a consideration of why an app is right for a particular business. Is it to build reach, give customers a better user experience, make money, or simply stay competitive in the market? App development can be costly – running into tens of thousands of pounds – and time consuming, not just to build but to maintain as well. So making sure it is right for a particular audience and having a clear goal in mind is worth researching.

For Jack Sheldon, his customers were demanding an app. He is the founder of Jack’s Flight Club, a freemium platform that sends out cheap flight deals from the UK and northern Europe to anywhere in the world. At first, it started out as a newsletter that went out to friends and family and word spread gradually to about 3,000 subscribers. Then, in November 2016, it made it on to the front page of Reddit, prompting 40,000 people to sign up almost overnight. “Things really blew up and word spread a lot faster,” says Sheldon, whose service now has more than 1m subscribers. “Cheap flights were even more viral than I would’ve ever imagined.”

At first, he tried to overcome the costs of sending out a free newsletter to more than a million people by creating a paid premium version. But, there was another hurdle: sending emails en-masse means there can be a delay of up to five hours from the time of pressing send until the time it lands in a recipient’s mailbox. The nature of flight deals, lasting only between 12 and 24 hours at times, meant he had to come up with another approach.

In early 2018, Sheldon and his team launched their app. “We can send a push notification that’ll reach everybody in about 15 minutes,” he says. “It’s also another touch point with our customers, it is something they can talk about and share. If you’re in the middle of conversation and you get a push notification about an amazing flight deal, you’re much more likely to share it than you are to check email during conversation and share that.”

To go about building an app, small business owners can either outsource, learn how to code themselves or use an app building service. Sheldon used React Native to build the Jack’s Flight Club app. “It allows you to create something that’s suitable for both Android and iOS without building two separate apps,” says Sheldon.

React Native is a JavaScript framework for building cross-platform apps but still requires someone to do the coding. “We found a developer that we were happy with and they built it for us and still work with us today,” says Sheldon. “I think if you launch an application these days, you have to build for both platforms so React Native, where you can adapt it to both, is a big time saver.”

Once the app is built and ready to go, it is important to know how to market it. Sheldon’s first step was easy: his subscribers already wanted an app. He could ask his audience to download the app, review it and identify any bugs that needed to be fixed. Now, he can track how many users come from his website and other sources and how many people come through the app store. “There’s definitely a constant upwards trajectory of people who find out about us through the app rather than Google,” he says. One way to bump it up app-search ratings is to get users to rate it, encourage organic downloads and use an optimised description and keywords within the app, much like you would building a website. “There’s a billion websites out there and no one is going to find yours on Google unless you push it to the top of Google and that’s the same with an app store algorithm,” says Sheldon.

For Sheldon, the app has been a great success and has even opened up doors to growing the business in new ways. With Jack’s Flight Club looking to grow its territory beyond the UK and northern Europe, Sheldon also wants to start to create more of a community among his subscribers. “A lot of our members already feel like they’re part of a club but we don’t have many features that allow them to actually be part of a something yet,” he says.

For other business owners considering developing their own app, he gives a word of caution: “Even though our app is pretty simple, the amount of effort that goes into quality control does add complications to a business. So I would definitely keep that in mind and value that,” he says. “In our case, it has provided the value that we expected it too.”

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