Building Digital Products

How Apps Make Money: 8 Proven Strategies

It's not a secret that app development costs a lot of time and money. But when you see how much revenue free mobile applications can generate, you understand the development expenses justify themselves.
So, how to get into the Top 200 free apps market? Usually people are willing to spend more when they have a free opportunity to try the app rather than to pay for it when they haven't opened it before. People go inside your app, they see the value, they can receive some emotion from using the app, and then they are ready to spend some money in it or on it.
When users get this pleasure from using your applications, they're actually ready to spend a few bucks on some perks that your apps give. When it comes to the app categories, the most popular one is games, making the biggest amount of money revenue. And still non game apps make good money too, a good example is Tinder, a dating application with a freemium model.
00:00 Intro
00:35 Do your free mobile applications make money? Or even, how much do they earn?
04:43 What's about app category?
09:47 Advertising
12:21 Referral marketing
14:33 Sponsorship model
16:36 Freemium
19:47 Subscription
22:44 Crowdfunding
24:26 Collecting and selling data
28:20 Four steps to approach your app and find the best way to make money out of it
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/how-do-free-apps-make-money-8-proven-strategies/

App Development and Design: 4 Reasons to do at the same software house

Why it’s important for your designers and developers to help each other in their work and how it all helps to save you money and deliver your product to the market faster.
In the software development world, not only developers play important roles. Without clever and attractive design, people will simply not know how good the product is. Design is what gives unique user experience, holds user attention and translates the philosophy and objective of the business.
It is not as a simple task as it may seem from the first glance. But it’s less difficult and more effective if your design and development teams work within one company. And here we’ll explain why.
00:00 Intro
00:44 Meet Co-founder and CDO at LinkUp Studio - Natalia Sambir
01:49 What the digital product design is?
02:53 The case where our client suffered losses due to neglect of design
04:20 First benefit: onboarding process
06:05 Second benefit: technical background
10:03 Third benefit: level of responsibility
12:15 Fourth benefit: team flexibility
16:10 Conclusion
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/4-reasons-to-design-and-develop-your-app-at-the-same-software-house/

Сreate marketplace: what technical challenges you might face

Marketplaces are surely a sea of great opportunities and dangerous challenges. In our previous article on the subject, we talk about what it is and how it works. But apart from the features and the types of marketplaces, there are many things you should take into account before creating one.
Like, which payment method to choose, why it’s important to synchronize all the data, and how to make business logic secure.
LinkUp Studio has worked on more than 20 marketplaces, so here’s a piece of advice based on our experience.
- Which payment method to choose
- What escrow services are
- What you should know about the laws in different countries
- What data challenges you might face
- Why it’s important to synchronize all the data
- How to engage new vendors, satisfy old vendors and make money on them all
- Why you should think about security of the business logic
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/marketplace-development-what-technical-challenges-you-might-face/

What is a Marketplace: Definition, Features, Models

Marketplaces are surely a sea of great opportunities and dangerous challenges. In our previous article on the subject, we talk about what it is and how it works. But apart from the features and the types of marketplaces, there are many things you should take into account before creating one.
Like, which payment method to choose, why it’s important to synchronize all the data, and how to make business logic secure.
LinkUp Studio has worked on more than 20 marketplaces, so here’s a piece of advice based on our experience.
Which payment method to choose
What escrow services are
What you should know about the laws in different countries
What data challenges you might face
Why it’s important to synchronize all the data
How to engage new vendors, satisfy old vendors, and make money from them all
Why you should think about the security of the business logic
💻 Read the text version on the blog 
https://linkupst.com/blog/marketplace-development-what-technical-challenges-you-might-face/

What is a QA engineer and how they help to save money

Does it make sense to expose the business to large losses, when you can eliminate most mistakes in advance? This is exactly what QA engineers do in digital product development.
Quality Assurance engineers are professionals who focus on improving software development processes and preventing defects.
Their job scope embraces a number of duties: analyzing and reviewing documentation, creating their own documentation, making addressability metrics to show the test coverage to the product owner, performing manual and automated testing, designing, developing, and maintaining automation scripts (like API and UI), checking the platform to find weaknesses and so on.
In this episode we talked to Taras, a chief quality officer at LinkUp Studio, to discuss:
00:00 Intro
00:54 What Taras`s work is?
03:26 Common myths about QA
05:30 What QA engineers do in project development?
06:55 Does every project needs all types of testing?
10:05 Can you test your project by your own?
14:10 Should QAs be cheaper than developers?
16:49 What is the difference between unit testing by developers and automotive testing by QA?
19:21 QA team structure
21:18 Some cases from practice
24:08 Does QA is the easiest way to start work in software development?
26:15 Conclusion
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/who-are-qa-engineers-and-how-they-help-to-save-money/

Business Analysis of New Product Development

Business analysis is finding a solution to the business problem considering all the context like business needs, the target audience and the state of market. Business analysts are responsible for these solutions being well thought and analyzed.
The full cycle of business analysis starts with analyzing business itself, finding a solution and describing the full product specification. Specification document is a big document describing all products, all system functionality with all the details how it operates. It is a step-by-step description of what should be done to achieve the ultimate goal, namely to deliver a product that will meet the business needs and vision of the customer.
Today we talk about business analysis to find out:
00:00 Intro
00:47 What BA is?
01:14 What is specific of BA in software development?
02:16 Specification documents - what it is?
05:42 Do you really need the professional Business Analyst to write documentation?
07:15 How to check - is the documentation wrote correctly?
09:21 How does the BA workflow look like?
11:52 About cooperation between BA and designers
13:28 Why should customer pay for BA?
15:59 Some loss statistics
16:59 About BA mistakes
18:05 Conclusion
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/business-analysis-of-new-product-development/

The superpower of a word: how to communicate with a partner?

Communication is not just the ability to talk, to exchange opinions and thoughts. According to the survey, which was conducted by LinkedIn, communication holds about 58% of the importance of all the soft skills. In terms of business, communication skill is a key to success. This is a tool for achieving goals.
That's why communication is actually being paid so much attention to in our company. During our new podcast, we talked to Julia, our communication tutor, to find out what she teaches our staff during her classes.
00:00 Intro
00:37 What communication exactly is?
02:46 Communication: the bridge or the wall?
03:55 What Julia, as a tutor, teach in her lessons?
06:19 About the client's pains we encountered at work
08:49 A little of practice ;)
11:09 What is the most challenging in communication?
13:36 How often communication suppose to happen?
15:20 How to be with shy communicators?
19:49 Why do introverts are the best communicators?
21:25 Hacks to be better in communication
23:42 Conclusion
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/the-superpower-of-a-word-how-to-communicate-with-a-partner/

Product ownership: how not to lose intellectual property rights to software

One of the things you should think of in advance is the possibility of losing intellectual property rights to software that was built for your project.
Starting a project, you probably want to know as much as possible to reduce stress and avoid potential problems. One of the things you should think of in advance is the possibility of losing intellectual property rights to software that was built for your project.
Let’s focus on the product ownership and some aspects of code ownership that you need to know about to be sure that things you will work on and invest in will actually belong to you, not someone else.
00:00 Intro
01:23 Why people neglect the point of copyrights for the software.
05:38 Who is the owner of code?
11:13 Documents that will affect your rights of product owner
15:55 Tips to protect you from any issues with the copyrights
16:57 How to keep the codebase in your repository
19:22 Again, read the contract carefully
20:22 How does this relate to the open source?
28:01 Сonclusion
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/product-ownership-how-not-to-lose-intellectual-property-rights-to-software/

Software Development Partner: The art of evaluating

Once we've talked about where and how to find a software development partner in the previous episode, it's time to move on to the next step. Let`s deal with the companies proposals
The first thing you should take into account is actually what the company has to offer you.
1) Is it full cycle development or not?
2) Do they include quality assurance?
3) Do they offer design?
4) Is there some kind of support and guarantee afterwards?
00:00 Intro
00:31 How to analyze proposals
02:32 What questions do proposals have to give answers to
04:15 If they should include money
06:45 Why you should read it thoroughly
11:43 What is a technical dept and how to avoid it
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/the-art-of-evaluating-software-development-partner/

Software Development Partner: How to choose the right partnership

Choosing the right software development company for your product is like hiring a construction crew to build your new house. As this decision may result in your failure or success, we want to give you 1, 2, 3-steps-guide that will allow you to find exactly your partner. Today, we will talk about the first step: searching and filtering the companies.
We have 4 steps of searching and filtering the process:
1) Making a shortlist from searches of efficient companies on platforms.
2) Choosing the criteria by which you will filter them (budgets, location, portfolios).
3) Personal attitude, culture synergy.
4) Shortlisting to 10 companies by checking them.
💻 Read the text version on the blog https://linkupst.com/blog/down-the-ra...