So you’ve had this awesome game-changing consumer app idea for years, and now you’ve finally gathered the chutzpah to make your mobile app dream a reality. You’ve consulted all your friends and family and even gone as far as running it past a few people in the industry. Everyone agrees—it’s a great idea. But a lot more goes into a successful app than just an idea and the development work.

Many consumer apps of all sizes and budgets fail because they overlook key factors that directly impact the success and sustainability of their app. Here are some companies we, at Process Street, have found that did almost everything right—and failed as a result of one mistake.

Ignoring the impact of even one of these five details will prove harmful—if not fatal—to your consumer app.

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This article comes excerpted from Hiten Shah’s SaaS DNA Project: The Anatomy of a SaaS Marketing Site, a 30,000+ word research study on how users actually browse and experience SaaS marketing sites.

Hiten Shah has built products on the web for over 10 years, including Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and now Quick Sprout. He breaks down everything he’s learned about building companies in his weekly email newsletter here.

When it comes to price, customers want to know two things: what they’ll pay, and what they’ll get in return. But too many SaaS companies overcomplicate their pricing pages.

Your pricing page converts traffic into customers. But that only happens if visitors instantly understand what they’ll get from each of your plans, the value it will provide, and how much it’s going to cost them. Otherwise, they’ll never sign up for your service.

In a comprehensive look at SaaS pricing pages, we studied 30 different SaaS websites through 90 different user interactions, totaling over 1,800 minutes of user testing. With help from UserTesting.com, we guided participants to each company’s pricing page and instructed them to read through the plans the company offered.

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On April 18th Zapier announced their newest integration with the Swedish smart button called Flic. I’m not known to go insane when finding out about apps and integrations – in fact, a year ago I probably didn’t know what an app means (no, I’m not kidding). But working for a SaaS startup has made me put on my techy pants and actually follow the news and trends.

However, nothing prepared me for this!

I love Zapier – we all here at Process Street do. (If you don’t believe me just check out Ben Mulholland’s author page, not only are most articles about Zapier, he wrote a 111-page ebook about it — download HERE). But this integration made me drop everything and enthuse to my husband about all the things I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because this didn’t previously exist.

Now don’t get me wrong – I absolutely adore the idea of pressing a button to inform the world of the fancy brunch I’m about to have with my girlfriends. But being a 20-something startup employee with a tech-obsessed husband and a new found interest in apps made me think of all the more everyday uses for this invention.

I’m not going to bore you with the specific details of my personal life but I will let you in on my 19 Flic use cases that might (without exaggeration) change my life, and yours.

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With legions of social activists paving the way, we’ve been dealing with the lack of workplace diversity in America for over a decade. And although you’d think that tech startups—with their productivity solutions and their open office spaces—would be at the forefront of the gender equality movement, the numbers tell a different story.

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Just over a week ago (after about a year of lurking) I decided to give Medium a shot.

There are a lot of guides out there on how to use Medium, but personally, I need to try something myself to fully understand it.

Medium seemed like an obvious choice for a few reasons:

• Medium is a Twitter product. Any Twitter followers you have that use Medium count as Medium followers and are emailed when you publish.
• I have a lot of re-publishable content that already proved itself popular on TechCrunch and The Next Web.
• There’s a huge, excited audience for what I write about on Medium.
• Republishing and promoting takes very little time — 99% of the work is already done by the time you start.

A lot of bloggers warn against setting up your home base on Medium, and they’re right.

You want your main site to be something you can manipulate, and Medium is not one of those places. It is, however, an additional promotion channel. See here for the results I got:

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The Business Process Automation Ebook That Will Save Your Work Day

The day is here and the time is now; we’re proud to announce the release of our Ultimate Guide To Business Process Automation with Zapier!

We’ve created the perfect resource to get you saving time and money by automating your business’ processes.

From basic tasks such as saving Gmail attachments into Dropbox to shipping your Salesforce leads into Mailchimp, the Ultimate Guide will guide you through setting up the perfect Zaps to automatically handle the tasks that clog up your schedule.

Plus, with Zapier’s 500+ integrated apps, chances are that your favorite programs are just waiting to be linked!

Better yet, it’s completely free!
 
 
 
 

What’s in the Ebook?

• What is Zapier – A Brief Introduction to Business Automation
• The Real Power of Zapier – Lookups, Filters and Multi-Step Zaps
• Zapier vs IFTTT: The Best Way to Automate Your Life?
• 222 Zaps You Can Start Using Right Now
• 50 Examples of Business Process Automation from the World’s Most innovative Companies

Still Not Sold?

Perhaps you’re not familiar with just how powerful this tool can be? Well then, allow us to demonstrate the power of this guide right here, right now by giving you the lowdown on some of its juiciest topics!
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Two weeks ago I had a brainstorm with my team to think of how to improve productivity; the 4 ideas we came up with increased my output by 375% and ensured that I no longer resort to 70 hour work weeks. Obviously, this was just too good to keep to the Process Street team alone, so stick around if you want to find out how I did it!

‘Being more productive can have an awesome positive effect on the rest of your life as you start to feel generally more positive due to lower stress levels and more free time to do what you really love to do.’ – Dr Jones

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Yesterday I found out that the average person checks their emails 77 times per day.

Seriously? Is that what people do?

Back in the 90s, computers used to gleefully announce that ‘you’ve got mail’, but now clearing your inbox is cause for celebration.

It’s been said email is evil, a demon, a destructive force or whatever, but actually it’s just ancient.

Email can suck, but you just need a system to handle it and everything will be just fine.

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Everyone on the 9-5 grind fantasizes about working fewer hours. It’s one reason why Tim Ferriss’ The 4-hour Workweek shot to the top of the bestseller list when it came out in 2007. It offered people a chance to live the dream.

So why isn’t everyone doing it today?

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We’ve all had conversations like this:

You: Hey, so I’m going to be writing 3 posts a week now, so I’m handing off newsletter writing to you.

Them: Ok, what do I do?

You: I dunno, go into MailChimp, make the newsletter, check it’s ok and send it to everyone.

Them: Right, I’ll let you know if I have any questions

[Later that week]

Them: [1,000,000 questions, a terrible newsletter and hundreds of complaints from subscribers about broken links]

The informality and laziness of shooting off a few instructions over Slack and ‘let me know if you have any questions’ can kill productivity faster than reddit.

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