Most advice on choosing a mobile app development company leaves you with a generic checklist covering things like:
- Look at their experience
- View their portfolio
- Make sure they communicate well
- Ensure they fit your budget
All these matter, yet at the same time, they’re all useless for telling two mobile development agencies companies apart, because every company on your shortlist will have some nice case studies, communicate well, and try to say what you want to hear during the same process.
The question that’s often overlooked, but actually predicts whether your project will be a success is much simpler: Are you hiring a team that builds what you spec, or a team that owns the product with you?
I've spent more than a decade building products and leading teams for founders and Fortune 500s, including Apple, MGM Resorts International, HBS, QVC, and Crunchbase.
Below I'm sharing the framework I use to choose the best partner for your project. From how to tell a dev shop from a real product partner, how a strong team kicks off a project, the ways development plans go wrong, and the handful of questions that expose a weak partner before you've signed anything.
A Dev Shop vs. Product Partner
When you search for a mobile app development agency you'll get two kinds of businesses showing up - their websites will often look the same and use the same copy, but they're completely different beneath the surface.
- A dev shop builds what you spec. You hire them, share what you want to build, and get a working app in return. Simple.
- A product partner owns the outcome with you. A true partner will work with you to figure out what to build, how to build it, and guide you on technical decisions - essentially operating as a CPO and CTO in one.
The difference matters to the outcome of your project. A dev shop does exactly what you ask, which can work wonderfully if you know exactly what you want to build on day one. If you don't have a fully validated app idea, a good dev shop will build the wrong product on time and on budget, and you won't find out until it's live.
A product partner on the other hand will work with you to ensure you’re building the right solution for your target audience.
What Kind of Partner Do You Need?
The kind of partner you should be working with depends on how much product capability you already have in house. Three situations cover most people:
- Technology is not your core competency. You're a founder or an enterprise leader, and you don't want to build an internal product team. You need a full partner who will own the roadmap, because a dev shop will faithfully build whatever you hand it, even if it's not the right solution for your problem.
- You have engineers but not the specialty. Maybe you have an engineering team and need your first mobile app, or your full-stack team has never designed for iOS and Android. This is a fairly common scenario. We one had a well-known productivity startup with an established engineering team come to Studio because they didn't do mobile dev and wanted to launch a best-in-class product.
- You're technical and you just need hands. Then a dev shop is fine, and you shouldn't overpay for strategy you'll do yourself. If you're an engineer starting a company, or you're an established product team with strategy and design expertise in-house, you don't need a product partner.
Domain and platform fit matter no matter which bucket you land in. You should look out for a team that has shipped in your industry, whether that's healthcare, fintech, fitness, or sports, will skip mistakes a generalist repeats. When it comes to building a mobile app, you also want a team with real native iOS and Android depth, instead of one that hands your mobile app to web developers.
Do They Start With the Problem or Your Feature List?
An easy way to understand how an app development agency thinks is to describe your app to them in the first meeting and to see what happens next.
The first type of agency will start scoping instantly, looking at how they can deliver exactly what you've described. The second (the type of agency you want to hire), will pause, and ask what problems you're solving, how people handle the problem today, and why you're the right business to build this app.
Here's an example to illustrate the difference...
Years ago a large hotel and casino group came to me wanting to build an app to book rooms. But nobody wants an app from an individual chain to book rooms when dozens of websites and apps already offer that. After we completed interviews and user research, we found the real problem wasn't booking rooms, it was checking in. Guests would drive four hours to get to town, then wait 90 minutes at the front desk to get into a room. That's what created a negative experience. So instead of a booking app, we built a real-time mobile check-in app. A dev shop would have built the booking app they asked for and called it a success.
How Do They Approach Your Project?
Knowing what good looks like before you sign with a partner helps you to understand what to expect, and when something is off.
If you don't have mobile development expertise in house, you should look for a partner who can work with you to define the problem you're solving, research pain points, and turn those learnings into a tight feature set.
On most of our projects the main user journey is designed inside three to four weeks, and code starts by week four or five. We design the center of the app first, the one thing it has to do well, and move on to things like error states and onboarding later.
What Does Post Launch Support Look Like?
At Studio, we see launch is the midpoint, not the finish line. We find that often, the most valuable work happens after an app is launched and you can learn how real users are engaging with it.
You need to consider whether you're looking for an agency to build an app, hand you the keys, and more on. Or a partner that stays along for the ride, keeps iterating, and builds alongside you.
Before committing to anything, ask potential partners what month six post-launch looks like. If they don't have a good answer right off the bat, look elsewhere. You don't want to be left with bugs to fix, updates to ship, and no momentum.
Who's Actually on Your Team?
A mobile agency leadership time might be very impressive, what matters more, though, is who you’ll be working with day-to-day.
On projects at Studio there's always a designer, a product manager, and a project manager running point, alongside the developers. The product manager runs the engagement like the CEO of the project, ensuring that all teammates are delivering their work and driving the app forwards.
If you’re building a best-in-class product, you need more than just a couple of developers in a connected Slack channel with your team.
Why the Cheapest Bid Costs the Most
Price shouldn’t be the defining factor in an engagement. Over the course of my career, I’ve found that the cheapest bid is almost always the most expensive choice.
You'll no doubt end up with quotes that are wildly different. One may come in at $50k promising to deliver everything you asked for, while another could be several times that. The cheaper option might look best on paper, but it's usually the wrong call.
Product quality is hard to see. If you're in a car showroom, you can look at two models and figure out which you like the look of easily but understanding how that car performs and how it fits with your needs is a much more considered decision. The same is true of product teams.
I've watched this play out many times. A founder takes the cheap route and eventually ends up rebuilding the app because the first version didn't meet the demands of the market. Cheap twice is more expensive than right once.
With app development, you're not really paying for engineering. You're paying for a team that can get a product to market and keep improving it once real users show up. It's a process and very many, if any, teams can build a product that's 100% right the first time around. What you need is a partner who's committed to your vision and wants to figure it out alongside you, not a partner who can get your idea to market cheapest.
The Four Ways App Projects Fail
After more than a decade building apps, I've seen firsthand what causes most app projects to go south. Here are the top four things to watch out for when you're hiring an app development agency:
- Scope creep: Building can be addictive and it's easy to convince yourself the perfect version of your app is just one feature away. But most features pull focus from the core thing you're trying to build. A good partner knows when to tell you no.
- Going cheap. Opting for the lowest cost often ends up being more expensive in the long-run. Pick the partner that's the best fit, not the cheapest option.
- Thinking you can run it yourself: Founder and leadership time is expensive, you don't want to get bogged down in the granular details of product development and turning ideas into functional requirements.
- Design by committee: This one commonly slows down progress within big companies and can be an issue at startups too. If there are too many internal stakeholders you can end up building products that keep internal departments happy rather than serving the needs of your users.
Questions to Ask a Mobile App Development Company
Generic questions get generic answers. Here's what you should ask a mobile app development company before you decide to sign an agreement:
- What problem do you think we're actually solving, and how would you validate it? You want to hire a team that has a point of view and perspective, not a team that'll just say yes to every request.
- What would you cut from our MVP? One of the most valuable skills in app development is the ability to cut scope.
- What does our first 30 days look like? Every agency should be able to tell you what the start of an app development process looks like.
- What happens six months after launch? No clear plans to address post-launch feedback could leave you stranded with an app that doesn't deliver what you wanted it to.
Read the Behavior Before You Sign
Every company on your shortlist will have great experience, case studies, and a sales process designed to get you over the line.
But because every agency has those things, they aren't really differentiators.
The best agency to build your app is about what you discover underneath the surface. The things like:
- How they approach projects
- Who will be working on your app (plus their individual roles and experiences - you don't want to be sold by the CEO and managed by the most junior person on the team)
- Are they brave / experienced enough to take the lead and drive your product forward (you don't just want a team to say "yes" to you)
- Do they truly get the problem your app solves? The best teams will fully understand the problem before they get stuck into the feature list
Every company on your shortlist passes the checklist. Experience, portfolio, communication, budget, support. None of it separates them, because all of them claim it.
The questions you ask before you sign are the cheapest due diligence you'll ever do, so take your time, go deep with partners, and pay attention to the details in the answers a potential partner gives you.
At Studio, we build industry-leading mobile products. Our team will take the reins from both a product and tech perspective, acting like a combined CPO and CTO - backed by design and engineering teams. We'll own the problem, help you land on the ideal solution, and support you from idea to launch and beyond.
If you're weighing how to choose a mobile app development company and want to see what Studio would do with your product, talk to our team here.