Turn Your Inside View Outward

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This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.

One of the most common questions I get at my company, is why don’t we have a mobile app. We are in the age of mobile, how can we possibly survive without a mobile app?

There are a lot of reasons why we don’t yet have a mobile app. We are still iterating on our web service. We have a small team. Many of the actions our members take aren’t yet feasible on a mobile device. We are still working to identify which components of our service might work best on mobile. And of course we have about a dozen other priorities that rank higher on the list.

However, when people ask this question, I always ask them why they think this is so important. And I always get a response that assumes one or more of the following:

• everything happens on mobile these days
• college students (our audience) don’t use computers
• a mobile app will help us grow
• we can’t possibly survive without a mobile app

But how many of these assumptions are true? How can we find out? Let’s focus on the third one, “a mobile app will help us grow”, to find out.

It’s really easy to get caught up in the mobile hype. If you look at the top apps, they each have millions of downloads. Think of how many new members you could add if millions of people downloaded your app. All you’d have to do is promote it, get featured placement in one or more of the app stores, and you will be on your way to hockey stick growth.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works for most app developers. This Forbes article breaks down the app store numbers. Using the Apple iOS numbers, the average app gets 40,000 downloads. But that’s an average. That means to offset the dozens of apps that are getting millions of downloads, there needs to be many apps that are getting far fewer than 40,000 downloads. And downloads aren’t the whole story. In this Localytics article  they found across their apps that 26% of downloads are only used once.

So how much growth can you reasonably expect from your mobile app? Do you have specific reasons to believe that your app will perform above the average? Do you have an unfair advantage compared to other mobile apps? Or are you just hoping to be better than everyone else?

The Inside View vs. The Outside View

By looking narrowly at how our own app might perform without considering how other apps perform, we are once again falling prey to a decision-making mistake. It’s common to focus on the specifics of the situation without taking into account the performance of the overall category.

The Heath brothers, in Decisive, help us understand this mistake by distinguishing between the inside view and the outside view. The inside view draws from your perspective, looking at the details of your specific situation. The outside view, on the other hand, doesn’t consider the specifics of the situation and instead looks at the general class of situations, asking how does this work in general. The outside view is typically more accurate.

Avoiding the Inside View

So what can you do to help shift your focus to the outside view?

Just like we did in the above example, you need to find appropriate base rates. Ask yourself, how can I understand how this general category performs? For example, if you are starting an email newsletter, MailChimp provides great base rates. If you can’t find published base rates, ask a few peers at other organizations. What was their experience? What types of results did they get?

From there, ask yourself, what makes us different from the average case? Can we expect to be better? Worse? Be realistic. You aren’t doing yourself a favor by being optimistic here.

Hope is a powerful emotion. It’s really easy to hope that your app will be featured in the top app list. It’s even easier to hope that if you build it, they will come. But this isn’t the Field of Dreams. So don’t rely on hope and go find yourself some base rates to start from.

What do you do to avoid the inside view? Please share in the comments. 

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.