How I handle my own App Ideas
Most startups fail. The generally held opinion is that 70% of startups are shut down for good in their first 10 years. As an Engineer, I can assure you that the rate is much higher, because most passion projects from 1 or 2 person teams working nights and weekends won’t make it into these statistics. But the point remains that if you’re considering creating a startup, the odds are against you.
Other interesting statistics:
Only 1 in 12 entrepreneurs create a successful startup business
35% of startups fail because of insufficient market need
38% of startups fail because of cashflow problems
If you wanted to build a sailboat, you’d want to understand the types of things that cause them to capsize. Let’s say that 75% of sailboats fail because of two main causes in their first 10 years of life. You wouldn’t even consider building a sailboat unless you felt confident that you could solve for those two main causes of boat-death. Those factors would be front of mind from day one. This analogy helps to explain how I approach new App Ideas.
I am extremely skeptical and paranoid about these two things:
Are there enough people that experience this problem?
Is this problem painful enough that these people will pay for a solution?
Also, note the focus on “the problem”, above. I don’t think about App Ideas in terms of solutions, I think about them in terms of problems to solve. I go into this in much more detail in another blog article: How to approach a new project
Let’s go over a recent example: Stripe invoicing from Toggl time tracking
I’ve been charging some clients hourly in recent months, and I didn’t like how long it took for me to create and send invoices. I’ve been using Toggl.com to track time for well over a decade and continued to use it for tracking billable time for clients. But converting the hours and minutes to decimal values and copy/pasting everything into an invoice was taking me 60-90 minutes per invoice. This is time that I can’t bill for and felt unnecessary.
I’ve also been using Stripe to charge my clients. Be it through the Calendly Stripe integration for one-off meetings where the client pays upfront, or through invoices created in Stripe or in another app that integrates with Stripe. I like that all of my income is in one place and I’d like to keep it that way.
The first thing that I did was upgrade my Toggl account to gain access to their invoicing functionality. Sounds perfect, right? Nope, they seemed to think that an invoice is simply a PDF that you can attach to an email. I think that in 2024, an invoice without “pay now” options is quite lame, and I’m not interested in that. They’ve recently released an integration with Quickbooks Online, but I don’t have any interest in using (or paying for) Quickbooks.
Okay, well, this is why apps like Zapier exist, right? After spending 4-6 hours on a custom integration between Toggl and Stripe, I started to appreciate all of the nuances needed in such an integration. You want to group time entries by some attributes, but not others. You want to match the client in Toggl with the customer in Stripe. You need to consider different rates for different clients or tasks. There were too many limitations in using something like Zapier to build this integration, and I knew I’d spend more time maintaining it than I would creating invoices by hand.
Now I’m thinking about this in terms of an App Idea
A ton of people use both Toggl and Stripe. Maybe there’s something to this! Sure, Toggl may eventually build their own integration and squash 3rd party integrations, but it might be worth building anyway. After all, I feel like I had seen the “billable rates” feature in toggl forever and they’re just now coming out with the quickbooks integration? It might be 4 years before they support stripe, if ever. Plus, I have a lot of ideas on how to handle more than just the basics. Maybe I could make something worth using even as competition arises. I know I can make something much better than what can be built in Zapier or similar custom integration apps.
I spent more time searching for a 3rd party integration. I checked the API docs for Toggl to verify that a 3rd party integration was possible. I wasn’t finding anything.
Okay, so I have a feeling there’s a market for something that solves this problem. It would be worth building in a simple form even if I only used it internally for hourly clients. I found myself asking a common question: what am I missing?
The relief that comes with saving yourself a lot of hassle
I figured out what I was missing. I like Toggl a lot as a time tracker, but time tracking isn’t all that complex. Toggl has competition.
Now, I searched for time tracking tools with Stripe integrations. There’s a bunch! I looked at some lists and some marketing websites and decided to try out Harvest. So far, I’m impressed. They have a lot of those extra considerations that I was considering building! You can track things like expenses. You can create multiple contacts for a client. And if you use it correctly, creating an invoice is just a matter of 2 or 3 clicks.
Apps like this would have been the reason that my simple 3rd party integration would get very little traction. Nearly all of the potential customers would rather 1st party integrations and less subscription fees.
I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that are so married to their chosen problem that they are devastated to learn that it isn’t worth solving. Not me. If an idea is doomed, then it’s doomed. I’d rather figure this out before I’ve spent months or years building something that nobody needs.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this was a pretty trivial app idea. But I get new app ideas like this about twice a month. The last one was in response to the crappy experience that I was having scheduling nannies/babysitters. I know that 10 years ago, I would have jumped into code and started building either of these solutions. It would ultimately be a waste of time.
Don’t waste your time and money. Think about these basic requirements when evaluating new ideas. Research competition, market need, and demand for a solution. There are a lot of other entrepreneurs out there having very similar ideas. Make sure yours is worth building.
The statistics referenced in this article come from Luisa Zhou’s blog, last updated: January 21, 2024.
