Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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Agree in principle, disagree in execution. Pretty much any app maker (whatsapp aside) starts with a skewed market: people with smartphones. iOS makers even moreso. These people trend toward being white and middle/upper class. Now you need to narrow to who buys shit on their phones. Again that demographic skews younger. [1] [2]

So right away, if you want a successful smartphone app in the U.S. then you need to target, urban white men between 18-29 with at least some college and 75000+ a year in income.

I think as you say more people should target international etc... but people build toward the problems they have and the language they know. Whatsapp is killing it because they broke out of the mold. So yes, they should for many reasons, but if you just follow the money then who you target looks very homogenous.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fac...

[2] http://www.voxburner.com/publications/6766-who-makes-in-app-...

What you say makes sense when you're selling a product. With most of these applications, their potential money making product though is the back-office data they collect on the users themselves which they then sell to brokers or data warehousing services, or provide to targeting advertisement firms. From that stand point you simply want the largest installed user base you can get.

A successful smart phone app based on these metrics is the one with the largest user base. You get that user base by providing a simple to use product that quickly addresses a need for the largest number of people, rich, poor, white, black, etc...

Now, if you're talking about targeted applications like certain types of gaming apps. Or apps that provide an extended retail experience? This is when you talk about focused demographics.

You get that user base by providing a simple to use product that quickly addresses a need for the largest number of people, rich, poor, white, black, etc...

Totally agree here.

A successful smart phone app based on these metrics is the one with the largest user base.

This is where we diverge. An app is only as successful as what it can make money from. Having a billion people use something and they don't generate revenue from it is worthless in the long run - bloated investments not withstanding.

A reliable proven to be profitable user base is what consistently makes money - the facebooks etc... are extreme outliers that got lucky with monetization after growing the userbase are not really cases to be emulated.

I'm not sure of what the divergence you're indicating is. I agree that an app with no monitization is worthless for sure. A bloated app user base where you aren't monetizing your users is a money sink.

Granted there are other cases of revenue models that we may not even be aware of that are in play. For instance Twitter initially was making money off SMS bulk transactions. They would buy SMS network blocks in volume and sale broadcasting blocks to marketers at a markup which was lower than outbound texting rates. There was good money in the margins here for a time. They don't like to talk about it publicly but they still admit that the service was built around a focus on SMS... https://blog.twitter.com/2010/introducing-fast-follow-and-ot...

This is why for a while they also tried like hell to push people to take Tweets over SMS instead of having pulling them from the web via a web browser or other web based client. Smartphones unexpectedly gimped this business model for them.

There are boutique companies today that still are trying to eep out business around this model such as this one... http://www.fabit.com/products/mobile/sms/websms/overview.asp...

...now I'm just rambling...

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