Developers love cramming features into apps like clowns into a tiny car.
The app is dead after six months, with twelve downloads, six from the team. No one knew its purpose.
This happens constantly. Some eager founder decides their app needs every feature their competitors have, plus twenty more for good measure.
The result? A confusing mess. Trying to do everything makes these apps ineffective.
Planning Beats Building Every Time
Here’s what successful app creators know: the boring stuff matters most. Those weeks spent arguing about user flows?
Critical. The endless debates about which problem to solve? Essential.
That spreadsheet mapping out six months of development? Pure gold. Yet most teams can’t wait to start coding.
Planning feels like procrastination when you could be shipping features. Investors breathe down your neck.
Your competitor just launched something new. Moving fast can overshadow smart decisions.
Rushing without a map means you’ll get lost. You’ll build fast, sure. You’ll also build the wrong thing.
You’ll regret it in three months, but now you’re committed. Fixing basic problems after release is risky, like an engine change mid-drive.
Avoid planning, and face the consequences.
Understanding Users Before Building Anything
App creators often build for fictional people who live in their heads.
These imaginary users love complexity, never get confused, and coincidentally want exactly what’s easiest to build.
Real humans? They are not like that. Real users are frequently messy, impatient, and distracted.
They download your app while they’re getting coffee, spend twelve seconds with it, and then don’t use it again.
If something confuses them even slightly, they’re gone. No second chances.
This is why research beats assumptions. Go watch someone struggle with existing apps. Don’t interrupt. Don’t explain.
Just observe the pain. Notice how they mash buttons randomly when stuck. See them abandon tasks that should be simple.
Feel their frustration when nothing works as expected. These observations are worth more than any brainstorming session.
They show you what people actually need versus what they say they want. There’s always a gap between the two. Always.
The Discipline of Saying No
Every unnecessary feature is a paper cut that slowly bleeds your app to death. That cool animation? It’s slowing things down.
The advanced settings menu? Nobody will find it. The social features you added because everyone else has them?
They’re making your app worse, not better. Developing a focused product strategy means choosing what to leave out.
The experts at Goji Labs have mastered this approach by helping teams identify their core value proposition before adding any secondary features.
Their process strips away the noise until only the essential remains.
Testing Ideas Before Committing Resources
Why assume when you can know? Put your idea on paper. Show it to strangers. Watch them try to use it.
Their confusion will teach you more than any design meeting. Mock up the basic flow with cardboard if necessary.
Run tests with five people, not five hundred. You’ll spot the major problems immediately. That clever gesture nobody understood?
Kill it. The menu structure that made perfect sense to you? Redesign it. Each test saves you from expensive mistakes.
Finding problems now costs nothing but time. Finding them after launch costs everything.
Conclusion
Apps don’t fail from too few features.
They fail from too many features built on shaky foundations. Skip the planning phase and you’ll join the millions of abandoned apps nobody remembers.
Take time upfront to understand problems.
Study users and test assumptions. Focus on quality, not quantity. Great apps come from patience, discipline, and the guts to keep it simple.
