The Fruit Fly Product Lifecycle

Fruit flies live for an average of 45 days from the moment an egg is laid. It really is not very long, but here is something that in reality has an even shorter lifespan – an app.

According to a number of specialists in the area apps including Josh Clark who shows in his book Tapworthy that the life of the average app on the average user’s phone is less than 30 days. In that 30 days the user is likely to open the app up to a total of 20 times on average.

And this has what to do with the price of onions?

Well think of it this way. Most of you know about Moore’s law of computing that essentially says speed doubles every two years, well what if there was a similar one for some markets?

The app market is one, where hundreds if not thousands of hours go into developing apps before they launch. When they do launch they have a finite amount of time to make it into the charts and make it big before something better comes along. The worst part of it is that all of this is measured in days now, especially when you consider that there are now more than 19,000 new apps released in the Apple App store every month

Part of this may well be the hype around becoming rich on the back of apps, so there is a kind of ‘app rush’ as everyone tries to get their share.

However I think more fundamentally the desire for new and exciting things in the market is such that consumers in particular are happy to buy and discard purchases in a cycle shorter than the life of a fruit fly.

The point of this little article is to suggest that you might want to ask yourself a question. Do I sell products and services that are not serious investments and will this kind of fruit fly lifecycle start to affect my business?

If it will what does that mean for your products and your business?  What can you do to turn the fruit fly product lifecycle to your advantage?

Next week, I’ll be posting 3 entries on the blog to help you with some ideas about how to turn very short product lifecycles to your advantage. In the mean time I hope this helps and it would be great to hear your thoughts and ideas on the subject.

How Prejudiced are you?

This is a really important concept for anyone that intends to start a business, because we are all prejudiced.

This can get a little ‘new age’ for a lot of people, but it is absolutely true and something you  always bear in mind when you are thinking about your market, because you will be applying your prejudices.

So what do I mean by prejudice?

Well, I personally think that all mobile phone network operators are useless, at the same time a lot of my friends think they are wonderful organisations.

So why is this important?

Think of it this way. If I chose to start a business that focused on solving the problem of useless mobile phone network operators it would only appeal to people like me that think the same about mobile phone operators. This is great if there are lots of people like me, or would my prejudices be leading down a blind alley purely because my personal prejudices about mobile phone operators. As I have already mentioned more than half my friends think mobile phone operators are wonderful so they would see no need for my business. If my friends are any kind of representative sample of the market then my business would struggle to find traction and make sales except as an expensive niche product.

I hope this makes sense because prejudice as I have already said is something we all have, we can’t help it because we all experience all the highs and lows of life, from which we build up our outlook on everything in our lives. All of that would be fine, if everyone had entirely the same prejudices and outlook, but they don’t. Our prejudices and experiences are all unique and as a result they are both a very positive thing and also a powerful negative.

They are positive because it is likely that your experiences and prejudices may well give you the unique insight that helps you come up with a winning business idea. At the same time they can just as easily lead you down blind alleys that go nowhere.

The trick is being able quickly test all your ideas against a measurable model of the market in order to discard the duff ones and harness and focus on the good ones.

“Easier said than done,” you cry.

Actually the whole point of Backwards Business is to give you a framework, a way of easily understanding markets and how they work so you can test your ideas quickly in their target market and without the risks associated with having to build product.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not how you perceive a market, it is how the majority of the people in the market perceive the product or service you want to sell to it. 

To get that information you cannot afford to allow your prejudices to skew your views of the market. We cover this in a lot of detail with you when you go through the programme, but I thought it would be good to give introduce you to the idea in the blog.

By Tim Sandford