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The Evolution of Application Development: Beyond Mobile and Towards a Multisensory Future
Application development has been a constantly evolving landscape. From the early days of desktop software, we transitioned to web applications and mobile-first designs. In 2023, mobile apps are expected to generate revenue exceeding $935 billion, and the combined number of mobile apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store exceeds 5.7 million.
In today’s episode, our guest is Sardor Akhmedov, co-founder of Jafton, to discuss the changing landscape of app development and how new technologies impact how consumers engage with companies.
Beyond Mobile: Welcoming a Multitude of Interfaces
The rise of smartphones marked a monumental shift in application development. Apps became smaller, more focused, and tailored for touch. Yet, even the mobile-centric model is evolving in this rapidly changing era of technology.
Wearables: Devices like smartwatches, fitness trackers, and augmented reality glasses have brought new challenges and possibilities. Apps for these devices need to be more efficient due to smaller screen sizes and unique UI paradigms, such as the Apple Watch’s crown control or Google Glass’s voice commands.
Connected Devices: As our homes and cities become smarter, devices like thermostats, lights, and refrigerators are getting their apps. These applications often focus on remote control, automation, and efficiency. For example, imagine an app for your smart fridge that tracks expiration dates and suggests recipes based on what’s inside.
Internet of Things (IoT): With billions of devices connected to the internet, IoT is arguably the next frontier. From agriculture to healthcare, devices are being developed to gather data and interact with other devices, demanding new application development paradigms.
Multisensory Connections: Beyond Touch
The past decade was mainly about touch interfaces, but we are now on the cusp of a multisensory revolution in apps.
Virtual Reality (VR): VR offers a fully immersive experience. App development for VR doesn’t just mean considering 3D environments but also thinking about how users will interact within that environment—through gestures, gazes, or controllers.
Voice Controls: Devices like Amazon’s Echo or Google Home are ushering in a voice-first approach. These don’t rely on screens at all. Developing for voice means rethinking user experiences, focusing on natural language processing, and ensuring apps can have meaningful two-way dialogues with users.
AI’s Dual Role in Application Development
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just another feature to be added to applications—it’s revolutionizing how apps are built and function.
AI in Apps: Today’s apps can benefit from AI in numerous ways, from chatbots that offer customer support and recommendation systems like Netflix’s movie suggestions to predictive text and smart replies in communication apps. AI allows apps to learn from user behavior, predict future actions, and personalize experiences at a scale previously unimaginable.
AI in App Development: Development itself is being augmented with AI. AI-powered tools can assist developers by identifying bugs, suggesting optimizations, or even automating routine coding tasks. Moreover, platforms like OpenAI and PolyAPI offer APIs that developers can plug into, harnessing powerful AI capabilities without being AI experts themselves.
Furthermore, with tools like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, developers can create natural language interfaces, automate content creation, or even devise AI tutors to help with learning apps. These tools accelerate and democratize the app development process, allowing more people to participate in the creation process.
Application development is more diverse and exciting than ever. As developers, embracing these changes, learning new paradigms, and always thinking about the end-users is essential. After all, whether it’s a mobile phone, a smartwatch, a refrigerator, or a VR headset, the ultimate goal remains the same: creating valuable, engaging, and user-centric experiences.
Chris Hood (00:00):
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Application development has been constantly evolving. From the early days of desktop software, we transitioned to web applications and mobile first designs. In 2023, mobile apps are expected to generate revenue exceeding $935 billion, and the combined number of mobile apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store exceeds 5.7 million. In this episode, Sardor Akhmedov, co-founder of Jafton, joins to discuss the changing landscapes of app development and how new technologies impact how consumers engage with companies. Grab a copy of my new book, customer Transformation, A seven Stage Strategy for Customer Alignment and Business Value. This is your essential guide for customer success in the digital age. Learn how to adapt to your customer’s ever-evolving needs and revolutionize your business strategies to achieve sustainable growth. Available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or my website, and to support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:30):
Connecting Access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hood’s digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (02:02):
There’s an episode for that. Of course, we’re going to talk about application development today. Sodo, will you mind introducing yourself?
Sardor Akhmedov (02:10):
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me on. Chris, my name is Sardor Akhmedov and I’m a tech entrepreneur. I’ve been a tech entrepreneur for as long as I remember myself. My first business was at age of 10. I started making money with tech, sort of, I was selling video games to my middle school classmates and for as far as I remember myself, I’ve always done either e-commerce businesses, I’ve done traditional businesses with sport, nutrition, distribution and all that, and for about four years now, I’ve been in this business of mobile application development where we have sort of a studio slash an agency that helps other businesses with their mobile application development or other software development, but specializing in mobile app development and we have about 120 people working for us. We work with some large enterprise clients, but yeah, we’ve been helping others build this, build their apps, projects. Some of the apps we’ve built you probably have on your phone. So yeah, that’s a little bit about myself.
Chris Hood (03:18):
Well, in my introduction, I alluded to a classic Apple marketing campaign. There’s an app for that. Let’s look at it in a very generic sense, maybe a percentage. What do you think are your biggest request? Are you getting a lot of people coming to you asking about, say, mobile games or productivity? What’s the average that you’re seeing coming across your desk?
Sardor Akhmedov (03:45):
Yeah, so actually we’ve done the stats last year or around two years ago almost. I have to redo it, but as of then, back when we used to work with more startups than we do now, now we’re more enterprise. Back then, at least. It was number one, social media apps. Believe it or not, everybody wants to have their own TikTok Instagram. We probably can’t count how many versions of TikTok we’ve built in the last five years and Instagram as well. You said there’s an app for that. I would say there’s a social media app for that. All kinds of niche social media apps we’ve built. So we even built a platform that builds other social media apps for those people. So there’s a company that specializes in building social media apps and built a platform for them that will build an app in two days for others.
(04:34):
So that’s how big we’ve gone on that number two category for us has been actually delivery applications. So it can be anything from a copy of Instacart, which we already have. We can build you a copy of Instagram in a matter of weeks as opposed to a agency out there. We have that much code base and everything. And then number three is dating apps. Same deal there. Can’t tell you how many dating apps we’ve built. It’s like dating app for this, dating app for that, right? Dating apps for this feature, for that feature. My dating app is going to be better than your dating app. I hear that every week and happy to serve those clients. We’ve built a lot of dating apps. Those are top three, but of course we’ve built some car rental booking apps. We’ve built other enterprise time management apps, booking apps. We’ve built e-commerce also pretty popular category, so all kinds except gaming. I’m not going to lie. We haven’t done gaming applications. It’s a different beast I would say. I wouldn’t call that an app development agency. Whoever does games, they’re a game studio, right? We’re not in a business maybe one day, but we haven’t done video games. But everything else you can imagine all categories on the app store. We’ve done that.
Chris Hood (05:53):
That’s fabulous. That’s very insightful. If you would’ve asked me, probably would’ve come close to what you’re saying. Believe it or not. I have an idea for a dating app. Artificial intelligence is becoming a very popular topic. If you start to think about artificial intelligence and matchmaking, these are the things I believe people are thinking about now, right?
Sardor Akhmedov (06:16):
Totally. Oh, actually, yeah. If you were to ask me this year, if we take that as a separate category, that’s definitely number one. This year, every app we build, they want some sort of AI in there. We even launched a new service called AI Infusion as a service where you come in and you already have an app and we just infuse AI to that, whether that’s in the form of a chat AI or voice ai. We’re doing one project for speech therapy right now where you’re going to be able to do a speech therapy with an ai. So yeah, AI by far is actually the biggest category because it’s something that encompasses every other category. That’s why I didn’t mention that as separate thing, but totally. Yeah, AI dating app. But yeah, we haven’t actually started on one yet. I’m sure if you don’t do it, somebody else will because it’s a low hanging fruit. But yeah,
Chris Hood (07:07):
Let’s actually dissect applications from a different perspective because I think what you’re touching on here, especially with AI, gets us into the realm of interfaces in general. Now, I would argue, and you’ll probably agree with me, when we think about apps, we typically consider an application as something that is on a device, whether it’s our mobile device or a tablet device. We do obviously see apps that are online web connections. You go to a store, you download, it’s on your mobile phone, you engage with it in some way. However, what we’re starting to see is all of these other ways that we can connect to engage with various types of things. For example, when we go to the gas station and we fill up our car, there’s an app that’s on the pump When we start getting into virtual reality, augmented reality, multi-sensory types of connections. You talked about learning voice. That’s an audio type of experience. Podcasting is audio experiences. So how do you think this multi-sensory and third party devices that we are engaged with is impacting application development?
Sardor Akhmedov (08:34):
That’s actually a very good point that you’ve made. This is probably a reason we started receiving recently app development requests for not just phones, but different devices. Literally, we’re working on a kiosk app right now, believe it or not. It’s a physical location kiosk that it’s a touchscreen computer and would never guess that this exists. I had no idea this industry existed, but for example, this client came to us and they own hundreds of these kiosks, and what they do is it’s sort of like an A t M kiosk. You come in, but instead of just withdrawing or depositing money to your bank account, you’re deposit or withdraw money from your account in a video game that is on your phone. But because those are gambling games, a lot of the states don’t allow paying for gambling online. So hence need for physical kiosks, and we’re building an app for a physical kiosk grant.
(09:34):
That’s crazy. And it’s a massive project. I mean big contract year long project, not just run of the mill three month application development that we usually do or six month projects that we usually do, but these are bigger ones. So that’s one example of that we receive here and there. Actually, we do receive requests for other types of devices, not just like iPads. That’s also pretty common, but that’s less rare of course than iPhone, but you’re absolutely right, Chris, there’s going to be a lot of different devices. Devices are going to evolve. I mean, we’re seeing the Vision Pro coming up soon. I’m very excited about augmented reality, but apps aren’t going away anywhere. Your devices will evolve and change, but there’s going to be apps everywhere. They’re just going to be multi cross-platform, which actually emerges a need for coding languages like Flatter, for example, where we focus on, which is super, you can launch an app for any platform with one coding language, which has never been done before, but you’re absolutely right. I mean the dominant one is iPhone, but that’s not constant. It’s going to keep changing and there’s going to be a need for different devices.
Chris Hood (10:43):
I think not only just those different devices, but also how we engage. Typically, again, you would consider a mobile device as I’ve got a physical device that I touch, even a kiosk, you’re going and you’re touching something, but we see now our home devices like Google Home, Alexa, those are all voice controlled. There’s apps that are living inside of our Nest devices and things like that. Our smart homes, our smart cars, all of those are technically apps that are connected in some way. We also have, again, we talked about virtual reality, augmented reality, visual sensory apps, so you don’t actually have to touch anything. Just the concept, not only the device itself, but the concept of how we engage with those apps is also evolving.
Sardor Akhmedov (11:33):
Exactly, and some of them are web-based on a web browser. Those are web apps as well. We just typically tend to think an average consumer thinks to think of an app as it’s something just on your phone. We’re absolutely right. It can be on any device. We’re just, we call ’em differently. Some devices call ‘EM apps or TV, for example. Also, yeah, it calls it apps like Apple TV apps, but some don’t. They call ’em software for the kiosk. We’re calling it software, a Linux based thing, and it’s more of a software, but in essence it’s the same type of app but just for different UX and it gets very interesting by the way, especially with voice ux, I have a little bit of background building for voice ux. We’ve built Alexa skills for our clients as well, and we usually do them as a complimentary because we still position ourselves as a mobile app development.
(12:28):
But if that mobile app wants a complimentary voice app, for example, that we do, which is another very interesting topic, Chris voice I was super excited about. I would say five years ago I was like, Hey, voice is the future and there’s going to be a lot of apps that are going to be just living on the voice. I was very bullish on that. I’m so sad that it didn’t happen. Actually, I was reading an article recently where the division of Amazon Alexa has been cut so many times and the budgets have been cut because it just didn’t take off the way they were expecting the apps, the skills there didn’t become big. I think the issue there is because the AI wasn’t good enough to sustain a good conversation with people, so they kind of got tired of it. That’s a whole different issue, but it doesn’t cancel the point that you made that the apps are going to be in different kind of ux, whether that’s visual only or voice only, or a mix.
Chris Hood (13:22):
I would argue that when we start to introduce smell into our virtual reality, I mean it’s one thing to be able to go and see a tropical beach, but then could you smell the salt in the air and coconuts in the background bananas, those types of senses to make our apps a deeper experience, I think are going to become critical. Heck, I talk about this often, but there is a scientist in Japan that has recently created a taste tv, which basically are senses that are on the screen of the tv. You can go and lick the screen and taste what is on the show that you’re watching. So these multisensory types of applications I think are extremely interesting, but are also going to point us to where I think we’re headed.
Sardor Akhmedov (14:18):
Yeah, Japan is a whole different world, by the way. Yeah, it’s a whole different planet. Sometimes I’m no surprised it happened in Japan, but they’re asking where are we going with this with the different kind of multicross. Yeah, so I dunno how far away we are from going into other senses of taste and smell. I’m sure it’s going to happen. As a matter of fact, I remember I was probably like 10 years ago, I was a teenager. I went to this four D movie at the time. Three D became a big thing and they released Spike Kids four, which was a big drop that we’ve been all waiting for. Completely changed, but they had this card, so that’s how they called it a four D, because you see the three D, but the fourth dimension, so to say, the fourth sense is the card that you scratch off whenever on the screen you have like six prompts.
(15:06):
Basically you scratch off that and then it gives you that smell, right? There was this fart scene even where you have to scratch off and smell the fart. It’s crazy, but they tried it, I think become a thing. It was just a hype kind of went back, but maybe it will come back. Who knows? We as humans tend to innovate and capitalism forces you to innovate to stay competitive. So I’m sure there’s going to be some new things, maybe not licking the screen, but maybe something like maybe a Neuralink chip that will actually prompt your brain to taste or smell a certain thing without actually having it in presence. That I think is more realistic now rather than actually having a physical thing that you have to lick or smell
Chris Hood (15:50):
Well until we get maybe some scent canisters embedded inside of our iPhone that can be released upon pressing a button. We probably are a little ways from that, but I still think it’s fabulous conversation. When we go back and think about ai, the other area of app development that AI is helping with is programming. We’re starting to see a lot of no-code types of platforms materializing. The ability to go into chat G P T and say, write me a program in Python that does A, B, C, are you taking advantage of that? Are we seeing a decrease in application development request because people feel they can do it on their own?
Sardor Akhmedov (16:37):
Yes. I have an interesting story on this that I’ve posted recently on my LinkedIn where one of our leads at the early days of the Chad G P T hype, she came in and she was discussing an app development with us and everything, and then first meeting we always do a discovery meeting to find out what she wants, and then the second meeting she comes in and says, you know what guys? I don’t need your service anymore. I found out Chad G P T, and I’m going to build this myself, and you know what? You guys are going to go out of business next time probably. Right? Alright, well I want to see how you do that type of thing. And unfortunately or fortunately for us, maybe in a way I still would want her to be able to do it. Of course we’re helping her with it, but she came back and said, oh, crap doesn’t actually get me there as a consumer.
(17:21):
I can’t really do it myself, but are we using it internally to expedite our development? Yes. Right. So the consumer side, no, we’re not there yet where there’s a program, whether that’s Chad g ptt or other generative AI products that are trying to actually help consumers build things on their own. I don’t think we’re there yet. Do I think we’re going to get there? Yes, absolutely. Or there’s going to be a point. What’s missing right now to get there is an AI that can actually sustain a human-like conversation and process thoughts like a human, sort of like a ations, which is a whole different topic. I mean, if we get there, it’s not just app development that’s doomed, but everything else that’s doomed, an AI will be able to process everything. But until then, where are we now and what should people be building for?
(18:09):
It’s not a consumer generative AI thing, but a developer tool for ai. So something that will help developers actually build faster, do more productivity, basically. I mean those in a way, it’s Chad, G p t, but I think something like copilot is amazing. It’s a developer tool and it helps you kind of auto complete your code much faster. I mean, developers that are using it right now in our team are just saying they’re not going to ever come back to that because traditional programming without copilot. So it’s a fantastic tool. So are we using copilot? Are we using low-code? Are we using ai? Yes, and we have a mandatory thing. I mean there was some resistance in the beginning, but we have a mandatory thing where we’re integrating that as a must have because we know if we don’t go there and we don’t do that, our competitors will, everybody else will. We’ll stay behind, right? We’ll not be as competitive as the market is.
Chris Hood (19:13):
I found a program recently called Poly a p i. Now Poly a p i is basically an AI supported platform to help you build and manage APIs. So if you think about it, most of the applications require some level of APIs and then to have an AI service that is intelligently understanding what the experience, what the data feeds are, what you need, what the structure of the A P I is in order to then build and manage those APIs to cut down the development cycle. That’s what we’re talking about. If it takes on average for a company to build one a p I about three months, but if you could get that down to three days because you’ve got AI supporting your A P I development, which is then just going to further accelerate your application development, I think that is great for anybody who’s in that market.
Sardor Akhmedov (20:11):
Totally, totally. Yeah, and everybody must be using that. I mean, another advantage that we have with this is unfortunately or fortunately for us, again, bigger companies in this space are resistant because they’re bureaucracies, they’re big, they already have their standard procedures in place that they’re not changing. They’re lagging behind the billion dollar behemoths of the world. The big consulting companies I know for a fact they’re not using as much AI as they could be. It’s the smaller boutique agencies like us that are adopting it. So we have an edge actually right now, which is why we’re going very aggressive on these tools and trying to take on the do heth now being the David of the golia in the industry, and now is the time to actually show off your David inside.
Chris Hood (20:53):
If you can come to market and say, we can get your application developed X percentage faster, doesn’t matter how you’re doing it. Obviously you’re leveraging AI across that board for the development, the APIs, the testing, the security analysis, consumer doesn’t care, and they’re just going to come who can deliver my application faster and hopefully a little cheaper. That’s all they care about, and does it work at the end of the day, if I have an idea for an app and I go to company A and company B and you’re going to deliver me the exact same application, but one is going to come faster and cheaper, they don’t care. They’re going to take it.
Sardor Akhmedov (21:33):
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it has to work. And two most often common questions that we get asked, timeline and budget, time and budget, be competitive on that, and you got the consumer’s attention and you got the consumer’s money and the contract you’ll get.
Chris Hood (21:48):
Now, I did just touch briefly on security, and I think another area that is really critical today is also privacy indefinitely. When we think about artificial intelligence, we’re also thinking about ethics. How do you look at the evolving nature of privacy and ethics and security?
Sardor Akhmedov (22:10):
If we look into ethics, I never thought about the data security and the ethics as much until I’ve been on the other side of the building as a consumer. I had never cared about my data being entered into Facebook or other apps for that matter, because by default, I mean I’ve never experienced data being leaked. I mean, I’ve heard about the bad stories and everything or the privacy broken, thank God I have not probably everybody’s nightmare and a lot of people have in their life somewhat experienced that or unfortunately will experience that. I mean, cybersecurity is a big, big important issue. So I realized that being on the other side of it, because why? Because when we were starting out, we didn’t look at it from that perspective. So I realized how much actually data can we have by default unless we implement encryption into the data.
(23:04):
Let’s say we built a social media app. There’s all these private messages that these people will exchange. So by default, whatever technology you’re using on the backend to build the chat, for example, most often or something like Twilio, they don’t have that encryption by default. So you as a developer, you can go and look in the admin panel and read all those messages, and obviously we don’t do that, but to me it was surprising that we could even do that when we started doing it, building it. So now we do implement encryption, so even we as developers, we don’t have access to the messages that are being sent in between, but that’s a separate thing that we have to build out. It wasn’t a default state, and the odds are if the app that you’re using is probably built by either a freelancer or a smaller agency that the company outsourced for, they don’t have that encryption in place. So the odds are whatever message you’re sending, that company has access to them and to be careful, even if they’re not going to leak that information, they could be just reading it. So people do that. So whatever reason that is it just always on the internet with your data, you got to be super, super careful with what you enter, especially if it’s not a household name brand, right? Even if it is though, sometimes there’s less trust to the metas of the world that allegedly being leaking and reselling your data.
Chris Hood (24:41):
I teach a course and one of the weeks of the course is in ethics and privacy, and I usually ask the question, how many of you care about this? How many of you actually care about your data and where it’s going when they actually are opposed with this question? They said, oh, I care. I care about my data. I care about my security. I care about where the information is. The next question I usually ask is, what are you sharing on social media? And they all say, well, we’re sharing everything. There’s a complete disconnect between what we actually do with our data versus what we believe is happening with our data, and I think one of the biggest exploits out there is what you just covered, the openness of messaging.
Sardor Akhmedov (25:26):
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. A lot of the times they just may be negligent and just not do anything to protect, because again, it’s not a default state as we would assume, where they do protect your data. It has to be done proactively, which most people don’t, or worse, they may be proactive, but on the other side, negatively impacting that and just using that in their own reselling or just other things that they’re doing with their data.
Chris Hood (25:53):
One final question for you. Let’s look at what happens after we’ve produced an application. Now, I’m also going to assume that you have a lot of people, customers who are coming to you building applications, and then they’re like, now what? Or they have great ideas, we have the best dating app in the world, and then all of a sudden it fails because it’s not really the best dating app in the world. Just provide the audience maybe one or two suggestions as to what do they do after it’s been built? What’s the next step?
Sardor Akhmedov (26:29):
Okay. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Chris. Unfortunately, especially startups that are building those dating apps or whatnot, they’re very much, the odds are against them. The reality is the stats, 95% of apps fail, and just like every business, 90, 95% of them fail in the first year. As opposed to enterprises, for example, we’re about to start building dating app, but for this huge HR company, but their dating app is going to be matching employers with the people that are applying for jobs. I mean, that’s a use case of a company that’s making millions in revenue every year. There’s no big odds of them failing because this is a steady business as opposed to if you’re starting just now and your whole business is around this app, this whole brand new business is your app. That’s difficult, right? As opposed to when you have a business that’s running outside and then you’re building an app for that business.
(27:27):
So if you’re in that situation where you’re building this app and this is your business, then first of all, even before starting, right? Let’s go into that. You have to get a proof of concept. How do you do that? You have to build an M V P A minimum viable product, and usually I’m going to say this against my interest, that M V P doesn’t have to be the app itself. That M V P can be anything that proves the concept, and I’ll tell you, that can be as simple as a landing page that describes what your app is going to do, and that doesn’t cost much As a shameless plug, actually, we are building a generative AI product that’s going to generate landing pages for apps. So you can use something like that, and we’re going to only charge a couple hundred dollars, and your landing page is going to be done in a couple of minutes.
(28:18):
So whether you do it with us or not, I mean regardless, you can build up a landing page with a signup form and a video demo, build a small product prototype on Figma or some other products that help you generate that prototype, put it out there, run some ads, see if people even are interested in that, get some signups and better off make them pay for those signups, even if it’s symbolic, $1. Because one thing is how do people usually validate their ideas? Let’s say they usually go and ask their friends and family, whoever’s in their immediate connection, ask them if it’s a good idea and that’s how they get feedback. That’s not the way to go because a lot of the time, especially asking your friends and family is bad because they like you and they’re going to tell you it’s a great idea and that’s messed up, or they don’t like you and they’ll tell you it’s a bad idea because they don’t like you.
(29:08):
So there’s that bias. How do you eliminate that bias? You go and ask people to pay $1 for signup, early access, signup, what is one up Nothing, but is that vetting if people are actually interested? Yes. Right, so what I would do if I was building an app, I would build a quick prototype on Figma. You can contract us for this or any other freelancer for cheaper. You don’t have to build a full blown app, just build a couple pages of a Figma prototype. A designer can do that in a couple of days, and then you put it out there, you make a demo video on Loom, you build a landing page on Wix or whatever that landing page builder is, put it out there and run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, get a proof of concept and make $1 sign up early, sign up for $1, see how many people actually are going to pay that $1 to sign up, and you tell them once it’s ready, I’ll give you the early access.
(30:02):
So sort of like a mini Kickstarter that’s going to validate your idea and then leave a feedback form as well there, right? So if people want to actually give you feedback, say why it’s a crappy idea, they would actually tell you so you can iterate. So start getting that feedback as early as possible from your customers. I can’t tell you how many startups unfortunately come to us and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to find out the idea was off, or they lose their enthusiasm or money marketing everything by the time of launch and they just don’t end up launching. That happens as well. But the saddest thing is when they built something, we built the great product for them, and it’s not something the market needs, so the validation has to happen before the product has to be built.
Chris Hood (30:44):
I’m glad you touched on that because I think that is so critical, and I work with a lot of companies, a lot of businesses. I talk about Shark Tank often where people come on with their ideas and they’re really just not good ideas. That’s why you’re not getting an investment. But they have such a strong belief. They have such a strong desire to see their ideas come to life with no validation other than family saying, yes, this is a great idea, or Friends, yes, this is a great idea. There’s no validation, and that bias creeps in, and when that is in place, you are unable to see the reality of whether it is an actually valid idea or not. So to do that ahead of time before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on your application, I agree. I would definitely go through the process of validating the idea, looking at market research, asking people other than friends and family, if it’s going to be a successful idea, and then start to build a case study data to support the ongoing development of your idea.
(31:58):
I would add in one more thing, since you didn’t say it, would be to also iterate on that idea. Start small. If your proof of concept or your minimal viable product is just nothing but a landing page, then what else can you build that has bare bones, nothing in it, and then how do you iterate in a way that you can continually grow that product as opposed to spending all of the money all for everything, every single feature you want has to be done before you launch. It’s just a waste of money. I’m assuming you would agree with me on that?
Sardor Akhmedov (32:38):
A hundred Percent. Yeah.
Chris Hood (32:39):
How can they get in touch with you?
Sardor Akhmedov (32:40):
Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m most active there. My first and last name, sdo Rock Meadow, I’ll come up on search. You’ll see me with the title of co-owner of jin.com mobile development agency, or you can find me on Instagram at my last name, A K H M E D o v.co. Dot co. That’s my handle on Instagram and follow me there, follow me on LinkedIn, or if you want to book a private consultation with me, you can go on one of the apps we built actually called ect, the combination of Minute and Connect, and we can talk 1 0 1.
Chris Hood (33:16):
Well, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. This has been a fabulous conversation.
Sardor Akhmedov (33:21):
Thank you. Likewise. I really enjoyed it, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hood (33:24):
And thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve, grow, and reach a wider audience. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show or chris hood.com, and please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Application development has been constantly evolving. From the early days of desktop software, we transitioned to web applications and mobile first designs. In 2023, mobile apps are expected to generate revenue exceeding $935 billion, and the combined number of mobile apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store exceeds 5.7 million. In this episode, Sardor Akhmedov, co-founder of Jafton, joins to discuss the changing landscapes of app development and how new technologies impact how consumers engage with companies. Grab a copy of my new book, customer Transformation, A seven Stage Strategy for Customer Alignment and Business Value. This is your essential guide for customer success in the digital age. Learn how to adapt to your customer’s ever-evolving needs and revolutionize your business strategies to achieve sustainable growth. Available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or my website, and to support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:30):
Connecting Access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hood’s digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (02:02):
There’s an episode for that. Of course, we’re going to talk about application development today. Sodo, will you mind introducing yourself?
Sardor Akhmedov (02:10):
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me on. Chris, my name is Sardor Akhmedov and I’m a tech entrepreneur. I’ve been a tech entrepreneur for as long as I remember myself. My first business was at age of 10. I started making money with tech, sort of, I was selling video games to my middle school classmates and for as far as I remember myself, I’ve always done either e-commerce businesses, I’ve done traditional businesses with sport, nutrition, distribution and all that, and for about four years now, I’ve been in this business of mobile application development where we have sort of a studio slash an agency that helps other businesses with their mobile application development or other software development, but specializing in mobile app development and we have about 120 people working for us. We work with some large enterprise clients, but yeah, we’ve been helping others build this, build their apps, projects. Some of the apps we’ve built you probably have on your phone. So yeah, that’s a little bit about myself.
Chris Hood (03:18):
Well, in my introduction, I alluded to a classic Apple marketing campaign. There’s an app for that. Let’s look at it in a very generic sense, maybe a percentage. What do you think are your biggest request? Are you getting a lot of people coming to you asking about, say, mobile games or productivity? What’s the average that you’re seeing coming across your desk?
Sardor Akhmedov (03:45):
Yeah, so actually we’ve done the stats last year or around two years ago almost. I have to redo it, but as of then, back when we used to work with more startups than we do now, now we’re more enterprise. Back then, at least. It was number one, social media apps. Believe it or not, everybody wants to have their own TikTok Instagram. We probably can’t count how many versions of TikTok we’ve built in the last five years and Instagram as well. You said there’s an app for that. I would say there’s a social media app for that. All kinds of niche social media apps we’ve built. So we even built a platform that builds other social media apps for those people. So there’s a company that specializes in building social media apps and built a platform for them that will build an app in two days for others.
(04:34):
So that’s how big we’ve gone on that number two category for us has been actually delivery applications. So it can be anything from a copy of Instacart, which we already have. We can build you a copy of Instagram in a matter of weeks as opposed to a agency out there. We have that much code base and everything. And then number three is dating apps. Same deal there. Can’t tell you how many dating apps we’ve built. It’s like dating app for this, dating app for that, right? Dating apps for this feature, for that feature. My dating app is going to be better than your dating app. I hear that every week and happy to serve those clients. We’ve built a lot of dating apps. Those are top three, but of course we’ve built some car rental booking apps. We’ve built other enterprise time management apps, booking apps. We’ve built e-commerce also pretty popular category, so all kinds except gaming. I’m not going to lie. We haven’t done gaming applications. It’s a different beast I would say. I wouldn’t call that an app development agency. Whoever does games, they’re a game studio, right? We’re not in a business maybe one day, but we haven’t done video games. But everything else you can imagine all categories on the app store. We’ve done that.
Chris Hood (05:53):
That’s fabulous. That’s very insightful. If you would’ve asked me, probably would’ve come close to what you’re saying. Believe it or not. I have an idea for a dating app. Artificial intelligence is becoming a very popular topic. If you start to think about artificial intelligence and matchmaking, these are the things I believe people are thinking about now, right?
Sardor Akhmedov (06:16):
Totally. Oh, actually, yeah. If you were to ask me this year, if we take that as a separate category, that’s definitely number one. This year, every app we build, they want some sort of AI in there. We even launched a new service called AI Infusion as a service where you come in and you already have an app and we just infuse AI to that, whether that’s in the form of a chat AI or voice ai. We’re doing one project for speech therapy right now where you’re going to be able to do a speech therapy with an ai. So yeah, AI by far is actually the biggest category because it’s something that encompasses every other category. That’s why I didn’t mention that as separate thing, but totally. Yeah, AI dating app. But yeah, we haven’t actually started on one yet. I’m sure if you don’t do it, somebody else will because it’s a low hanging fruit. But yeah,
Chris Hood (07:07):
Let’s actually dissect applications from a different perspective because I think what you’re touching on here, especially with AI, gets us into the realm of interfaces in general. Now, I would argue, and you’ll probably agree with me, when we think about apps, we typically consider an application as something that is on a device, whether it’s our mobile device or a tablet device. We do obviously see apps that are online web connections. You go to a store, you download, it’s on your mobile phone, you engage with it in some way. However, what we’re starting to see is all of these other ways that we can connect to engage with various types of things. For example, when we go to the gas station and we fill up our car, there’s an app that’s on the pump When we start getting into virtual reality, augmented reality, multi-sensory types of connections. You talked about learning voice. That’s an audio type of experience. Podcasting is audio experiences. So how do you think this multi-sensory and third party devices that we are engaged with is impacting application development?
Sardor Akhmedov (08:34):
That’s actually a very good point that you’ve made. This is probably a reason we started receiving recently app development requests for not just phones, but different devices. Literally, we’re working on a kiosk app right now, believe it or not. It’s a physical location kiosk that it’s a touchscreen computer and would never guess that this exists. I had no idea this industry existed, but for example, this client came to us and they own hundreds of these kiosks, and what they do is it’s sort of like an A t M kiosk. You come in, but instead of just withdrawing or depositing money to your bank account, you’re deposit or withdraw money from your account in a video game that is on your phone. But because those are gambling games, a lot of the states don’t allow paying for gambling online. So hence need for physical kiosks, and we’re building an app for a physical kiosk grant.
(09:34):
That’s crazy. And it’s a massive project. I mean big contract year long project, not just run of the mill three month application development that we usually do or six month projects that we usually do, but these are bigger ones. So that’s one example of that we receive here and there. Actually, we do receive requests for other types of devices, not just like iPads. That’s also pretty common, but that’s less rare of course than iPhone, but you’re absolutely right, Chris, there’s going to be a lot of different devices. Devices are going to evolve. I mean, we’re seeing the Vision Pro coming up soon. I’m very excited about augmented reality, but apps aren’t going away anywhere. Your devices will evolve and change, but there’s going to be apps everywhere. They’re just going to be multi cross-platform, which actually emerges a need for coding languages like Flatter, for example, where we focus on, which is super, you can launch an app for any platform with one coding language, which has never been done before, but you’re absolutely right. I mean the dominant one is iPhone, but that’s not constant. It’s going to keep changing and there’s going to be a need for different devices.
Chris Hood (10:43):
I think not only just those different devices, but also how we engage. Typically, again, you would consider a mobile device as I’ve got a physical device that I touch, even a kiosk, you’re going and you’re touching something, but we see now our home devices like Google Home, Alexa, those are all voice controlled. There’s apps that are living inside of our Nest devices and things like that. Our smart homes, our smart cars, all of those are technically apps that are connected in some way. We also have, again, we talked about virtual reality, augmented reality, visual sensory apps, so you don’t actually have to touch anything. Just the concept, not only the device itself, but the concept of how we engage with those apps is also evolving.
Sardor Akhmedov (11:33):
Exactly, and some of them are web-based on a web browser. Those are web apps as well. We just typically tend to think an average consumer thinks to think of an app as it’s something just on your phone. We’re absolutely right. It can be on any device. We’re just, we call ’em differently. Some devices call ‘EM apps or TV, for example. Also, yeah, it calls it apps like Apple TV apps, but some don’t. They call ’em software for the kiosk. We’re calling it software, a Linux based thing, and it’s more of a software, but in essence it’s the same type of app but just for different UX and it gets very interesting by the way, especially with voice ux, I have a little bit of background building for voice ux. We’ve built Alexa skills for our clients as well, and we usually do them as a complimentary because we still position ourselves as a mobile app development.
(12:28):
But if that mobile app wants a complimentary voice app, for example, that we do, which is another very interesting topic, Chris voice I was super excited about. I would say five years ago I was like, Hey, voice is the future and there’s going to be a lot of apps that are going to be just living on the voice. I was very bullish on that. I’m so sad that it didn’t happen. Actually, I was reading an article recently where the division of Amazon Alexa has been cut so many times and the budgets have been cut because it just didn’t take off the way they were expecting the apps, the skills there didn’t become big. I think the issue there is because the AI wasn’t good enough to sustain a good conversation with people, so they kind of got tired of it. That’s a whole different issue, but it doesn’t cancel the point that you made that the apps are going to be in different kind of ux, whether that’s visual only or voice only, or a mix.
Chris Hood (13:22):
I would argue that when we start to introduce smell into our virtual reality, I mean it’s one thing to be able to go and see a tropical beach, but then could you smell the salt in the air and coconuts in the background bananas, those types of senses to make our apps a deeper experience, I think are going to become critical. Heck, I talk about this often, but there is a scientist in Japan that has recently created a taste tv, which basically are senses that are on the screen of the tv. You can go and lick the screen and taste what is on the show that you’re watching. So these multisensory types of applications I think are extremely interesting, but are also going to point us to where I think we’re headed.
Sardor Akhmedov (14:18):
Yeah, Japan is a whole different world, by the way. Yeah, it’s a whole different planet. Sometimes I’m no surprised it happened in Japan, but they’re asking where are we going with this with the different kind of multicross. Yeah, so I dunno how far away we are from going into other senses of taste and smell. I’m sure it’s going to happen. As a matter of fact, I remember I was probably like 10 years ago, I was a teenager. I went to this four D movie at the time. Three D became a big thing and they released Spike Kids four, which was a big drop that we’ve been all waiting for. Completely changed, but they had this card, so that’s how they called it a four D, because you see the three D, but the fourth dimension, so to say, the fourth sense is the card that you scratch off whenever on the screen you have like six prompts.
(15:06):
Basically you scratch off that and then it gives you that smell, right? There was this fart scene even where you have to scratch off and smell the fart. It’s crazy, but they tried it, I think become a thing. It was just a hype kind of went back, but maybe it will come back. Who knows? We as humans tend to innovate and capitalism forces you to innovate to stay competitive. So I’m sure there’s going to be some new things, maybe not licking the screen, but maybe something like maybe a Neuralink chip that will actually prompt your brain to taste or smell a certain thing without actually having it in presence. That I think is more realistic now rather than actually having a physical thing that you have to lick or smell
Chris Hood (15:50):
Well until we get maybe some scent canisters embedded inside of our iPhone that can be released upon pressing a button. We probably are a little ways from that, but I still think it’s fabulous conversation. When we go back and think about ai, the other area of app development that AI is helping with is programming. We’re starting to see a lot of no-code types of platforms materializing. The ability to go into chat G P T and say, write me a program in Python that does A, B, C, are you taking advantage of that? Are we seeing a decrease in application development request because people feel they can do it on their own?
Sardor Akhmedov (16:37):
Yes. I have an interesting story on this that I’ve posted recently on my LinkedIn where one of our leads at the early days of the Chad G P T hype, she came in and she was discussing an app development with us and everything, and then first meeting we always do a discovery meeting to find out what she wants, and then the second meeting she comes in and says, you know what guys? I don’t need your service anymore. I found out Chad G P T, and I’m going to build this myself, and you know what? You guys are going to go out of business next time probably. Right? Alright, well I want to see how you do that type of thing. And unfortunately or fortunately for us, maybe in a way I still would want her to be able to do it. Of course we’re helping her with it, but she came back and said, oh, crap doesn’t actually get me there as a consumer.
(17:21):
I can’t really do it myself, but are we using it internally to expedite our development? Yes. Right. So the consumer side, no, we’re not there yet where there’s a program, whether that’s Chad g ptt or other generative AI products that are trying to actually help consumers build things on their own. I don’t think we’re there yet. Do I think we’re going to get there? Yes, absolutely. Or there’s going to be a point. What’s missing right now to get there is an AI that can actually sustain a human-like conversation and process thoughts like a human, sort of like a ations, which is a whole different topic. I mean, if we get there, it’s not just app development that’s doomed, but everything else that’s doomed, an AI will be able to process everything. But until then, where are we now and what should people be building for?
(18:09):
It’s not a consumer generative AI thing, but a developer tool for ai. So something that will help developers actually build faster, do more productivity, basically. I mean those in a way, it’s Chad, G p t, but I think something like copilot is amazing. It’s a developer tool and it helps you kind of auto complete your code much faster. I mean, developers that are using it right now in our team are just saying they’re not going to ever come back to that because traditional programming without copilot. So it’s a fantastic tool. So are we using copilot? Are we using low-code? Are we using ai? Yes, and we have a mandatory thing. I mean there was some resistance in the beginning, but we have a mandatory thing where we’re integrating that as a must have because we know if we don’t go there and we don’t do that, our competitors will, everybody else will. We’ll stay behind, right? We’ll not be as competitive as the market is.
Chris Hood (19:13):
I found a program recently called Poly a p i. Now Poly a p i is basically an AI supported platform to help you build and manage APIs. So if you think about it, most of the applications require some level of APIs and then to have an AI service that is intelligently understanding what the experience, what the data feeds are, what you need, what the structure of the A P I is in order to then build and manage those APIs to cut down the development cycle. That’s what we’re talking about. If it takes on average for a company to build one a p I about three months, but if you could get that down to three days because you’ve got AI supporting your A P I development, which is then just going to further accelerate your application development, I think that is great for anybody who’s in that market.
Sardor Akhmedov (20:11):
Totally, totally. Yeah, and everybody must be using that. I mean, another advantage that we have with this is unfortunately or fortunately for us, again, bigger companies in this space are resistant because they’re bureaucracies, they’re big, they already have their standard procedures in place that they’re not changing. They’re lagging behind the billion dollar behemoths of the world. The big consulting companies I know for a fact they’re not using as much AI as they could be. It’s the smaller boutique agencies like us that are adopting it. So we have an edge actually right now, which is why we’re going very aggressive on these tools and trying to take on the do heth now being the David of the golia in the industry, and now is the time to actually show off your David inside.
Chris Hood (20:53):
If you can come to market and say, we can get your application developed X percentage faster, doesn’t matter how you’re doing it. Obviously you’re leveraging AI across that board for the development, the APIs, the testing, the security analysis, consumer doesn’t care, and they’re just going to come who can deliver my application faster and hopefully a little cheaper. That’s all they care about, and does it work at the end of the day, if I have an idea for an app and I go to company A and company B and you’re going to deliver me the exact same application, but one is going to come faster and cheaper, they don’t care. They’re going to take it.
Sardor Akhmedov (21:33):
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, it has to work. And two most often common questions that we get asked, timeline and budget, time and budget, be competitive on that, and you got the consumer’s attention and you got the consumer’s money and the contract you’ll get.
Chris Hood (21:48):
Now, I did just touch briefly on security, and I think another area that is really critical today is also privacy indefinitely. When we think about artificial intelligence, we’re also thinking about ethics. How do you look at the evolving nature of privacy and ethics and security?
Sardor Akhmedov (22:10):
If we look into ethics, I never thought about the data security and the ethics as much until I’ve been on the other side of the building as a consumer. I had never cared about my data being entered into Facebook or other apps for that matter, because by default, I mean I’ve never experienced data being leaked. I mean, I’ve heard about the bad stories and everything or the privacy broken, thank God I have not probably everybody’s nightmare and a lot of people have in their life somewhat experienced that or unfortunately will experience that. I mean, cybersecurity is a big, big important issue. So I realized that being on the other side of it, because why? Because when we were starting out, we didn’t look at it from that perspective. So I realized how much actually data can we have by default unless we implement encryption into the data.
(23:04):
Let’s say we built a social media app. There’s all these private messages that these people will exchange. So by default, whatever technology you’re using on the backend to build the chat, for example, most often or something like Twilio, they don’t have that encryption by default. So you as a developer, you can go and look in the admin panel and read all those messages, and obviously we don’t do that, but to me it was surprising that we could even do that when we started doing it, building it. So now we do implement encryption, so even we as developers, we don’t have access to the messages that are being sent in between, but that’s a separate thing that we have to build out. It wasn’t a default state, and the odds are if the app that you’re using is probably built by either a freelancer or a smaller agency that the company outsourced for, they don’t have that encryption in place. So the odds are whatever message you’re sending, that company has access to them and to be careful, even if they’re not going to leak that information, they could be just reading it. So people do that. So whatever reason that is it just always on the internet with your data, you got to be super, super careful with what you enter, especially if it’s not a household name brand, right? Even if it is though, sometimes there’s less trust to the metas of the world that allegedly being leaking and reselling your data.
Chris Hood (24:41):
I teach a course and one of the weeks of the course is in ethics and privacy, and I usually ask the question, how many of you care about this? How many of you actually care about your data and where it’s going when they actually are opposed with this question? They said, oh, I care. I care about my data. I care about my security. I care about where the information is. The next question I usually ask is, what are you sharing on social media? And they all say, well, we’re sharing everything. There’s a complete disconnect between what we actually do with our data versus what we believe is happening with our data, and I think one of the biggest exploits out there is what you just covered, the openness of messaging.
Sardor Akhmedov (25:26):
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. A lot of the times they just may be negligent and just not do anything to protect, because again, it’s not a default state as we would assume, where they do protect your data. It has to be done proactively, which most people don’t, or worse, they may be proactive, but on the other side, negatively impacting that and just using that in their own reselling or just other things that they’re doing with their data.
Chris Hood (25:53):
One final question for you. Let’s look at what happens after we’ve produced an application. Now, I’m also going to assume that you have a lot of people, customers who are coming to you building applications, and then they’re like, now what? Or they have great ideas, we have the best dating app in the world, and then all of a sudden it fails because it’s not really the best dating app in the world. Just provide the audience maybe one or two suggestions as to what do they do after it’s been built? What’s the next step?
Sardor Akhmedov (26:29):
Okay. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Chris. Unfortunately, especially startups that are building those dating apps or whatnot, they’re very much, the odds are against them. The reality is the stats, 95% of apps fail, and just like every business, 90, 95% of them fail in the first year. As opposed to enterprises, for example, we’re about to start building dating app, but for this huge HR company, but their dating app is going to be matching employers with the people that are applying for jobs. I mean, that’s a use case of a company that’s making millions in revenue every year. There’s no big odds of them failing because this is a steady business as opposed to if you’re starting just now and your whole business is around this app, this whole brand new business is your app. That’s difficult, right? As opposed to when you have a business that’s running outside and then you’re building an app for that business.
(27:27):
So if you’re in that situation where you’re building this app and this is your business, then first of all, even before starting, right? Let’s go into that. You have to get a proof of concept. How do you do that? You have to build an M V P A minimum viable product, and usually I’m going to say this against my interest, that M V P doesn’t have to be the app itself. That M V P can be anything that proves the concept, and I’ll tell you, that can be as simple as a landing page that describes what your app is going to do, and that doesn’t cost much As a shameless plug, actually, we are building a generative AI product that’s going to generate landing pages for apps. So you can use something like that, and we’re going to only charge a couple hundred dollars, and your landing page is going to be done in a couple of minutes.
(28:18):
So whether you do it with us or not, I mean regardless, you can build up a landing page with a signup form and a video demo, build a small product prototype on Figma or some other products that help you generate that prototype, put it out there, run some ads, see if people even are interested in that, get some signups and better off make them pay for those signups, even if it’s symbolic, $1. Because one thing is how do people usually validate their ideas? Let’s say they usually go and ask their friends and family, whoever’s in their immediate connection, ask them if it’s a good idea and that’s how they get feedback. That’s not the way to go because a lot of the time, especially asking your friends and family is bad because they like you and they’re going to tell you it’s a great idea and that’s messed up, or they don’t like you and they’ll tell you it’s a bad idea because they don’t like you.
(29:08):
So there’s that bias. How do you eliminate that bias? You go and ask people to pay $1 for signup, early access, signup, what is one up Nothing, but is that vetting if people are actually interested? Yes. Right, so what I would do if I was building an app, I would build a quick prototype on Figma. You can contract us for this or any other freelancer for cheaper. You don’t have to build a full blown app, just build a couple pages of a Figma prototype. A designer can do that in a couple of days, and then you put it out there, you make a demo video on Loom, you build a landing page on Wix or whatever that landing page builder is, put it out there and run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, get a proof of concept and make $1 sign up early, sign up for $1, see how many people actually are going to pay that $1 to sign up, and you tell them once it’s ready, I’ll give you the early access.
(30:02):
So sort of like a mini Kickstarter that’s going to validate your idea and then leave a feedback form as well there, right? So if people want to actually give you feedback, say why it’s a crappy idea, they would actually tell you so you can iterate. So start getting that feedback as early as possible from your customers. I can’t tell you how many startups unfortunately come to us and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to find out the idea was off, or they lose their enthusiasm or money marketing everything by the time of launch and they just don’t end up launching. That happens as well. But the saddest thing is when they built something, we built the great product for them, and it’s not something the market needs, so the validation has to happen before the product has to be built.
Chris Hood (30:44):
I’m glad you touched on that because I think that is so critical, and I work with a lot of companies, a lot of businesses. I talk about Shark Tank often where people come on with their ideas and they’re really just not good ideas. That’s why you’re not getting an investment. But they have such a strong belief. They have such a strong desire to see their ideas come to life with no validation other than family saying, yes, this is a great idea, or Friends, yes, this is a great idea. There’s no validation, and that bias creeps in, and when that is in place, you are unable to see the reality of whether it is an actually valid idea or not. So to do that ahead of time before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on your application, I agree. I would definitely go through the process of validating the idea, looking at market research, asking people other than friends and family, if it’s going to be a successful idea, and then start to build a case study data to support the ongoing development of your idea.
(31:58):
I would add in one more thing, since you didn’t say it, would be to also iterate on that idea. Start small. If your proof of concept or your minimal viable product is just nothing but a landing page, then what else can you build that has bare bones, nothing in it, and then how do you iterate in a way that you can continually grow that product as opposed to spending all of the money all for everything, every single feature you want has to be done before you launch. It’s just a waste of money. I’m assuming you would agree with me on that?
Sardor Akhmedov (32:38):
A hundred Percent. Yeah.
Chris Hood (32:39):
How can they get in touch with you?
Sardor Akhmedov (32:40):
Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m most active there. My first and last name, sdo Rock Meadow, I’ll come up on search. You’ll see me with the title of co-owner of jin.com mobile development agency, or you can find me on Instagram at my last name, A K H M E D o v.co. Dot co. That’s my handle on Instagram and follow me there, follow me on LinkedIn, or if you want to book a private consultation with me, you can go on one of the apps we built actually called ect, the combination of Minute and Connect, and we can talk 1 0 1.
Chris Hood (33:16):
Well, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. This has been a fabulous conversation.
Sardor Akhmedov (33:21):
Thank you. Likewise. I really enjoyed it, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hood (33:24):
And thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve, grow, and reach a wider audience. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show or chris hood.com, and please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.