Do you really need an app?

Do you know who your customers are, what problems you are trying to solve for them, and what your solution should look like?

How do you know those things? Do you just assume, based on a hunch, your intuition? Or did you validate those hypotheses with your potential customers?

Did you run any experiment before to de-risk your business model? Have you set up a concierge version of your solution to make sure your customers are ready to pay for a solution to the problems you want to solve?

What are some of the things you thought were true about your business originally, but you discovered you were completely wrong about? How did you find that out?

Are you ready for a long-term commitment?

Did you make a list of the things that changed recently allowing for your business model to be interesting now?

Are you waiting for any change in the world that your business model would need to happen in order to be successful?

Did you try and anticipate some of the things that could happen and destroy the viability of your business model? Do you have mitigation strategies in your plans?

What are your values as founders, the core beliefs that you bring to anything you do and that will likely not change any time soon? What is your long term vision for your business, what is your long term goal? What is the mission of your company, what do you plan to do in order to achieve that vision?

Are you familiar with fixed price vs time-and-material contracts? Did you already shop around for agencies and developers and ask them how they prefer to collaborate?

Do you feel ready to write a detailed specification of the functionality of your app? Are you confident that this specification will be stable for at least a few months?

If you have considered off-shoring or near-shoring, are you ready to send someone there to monitor your project on site, or at least go there regularly to have a look at how things are done? Are you familiar with the culture or the country where you are thinking of having your product developed?

When do you need the first version of your app to be released? What are your time constraints in terms of competition, market conditions, opportunities, regulation changes, etc.?

What does your app need?

Does you app need a backend? Do you need a central database? Do you need to store files?

What third-party services do you need to integrate with? Payment processing? Single-sign-on authentication systems? Partner systems? Third-party APIs?

Does your business have to deal with specific constraints like security, compliance, irregular loads, data mining, artificial intelligence, complex integration, 3D/AR/VR, multimedia processing, etc.?

Will your app need to integrate with device capabilities such as geolocation, multimedia sources (photos, videos, audio), other data sources (address book, calendar, etc.), Bluetooth, AR, client-side machine learning, mobile assistant, gyroscope and other sensors, maps, push notifications and so on?

Who is the app for?

What are the different types of users who will interact with your app? Do you have a user persona drawn out for each of those groups?

What kind of device do each of your users typically use? Smart phones, tablets, desktop browsers? How old are their devices? What platform do they prefer (web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.)?

Do you already know if you need a responsive web app, a set of native apps or if you can do with a hybrid app?

Do you need your app to be translated in different languages? Is it just the user interface itself, or do you also need data to be translated? Do you need to support more exotic locales like countries with Righ-to-Left languages or other character sets (Russian, Chinese, etc.)?

How will your app make you money?

What are your revenue streams?

Do you plan to sell physical or virtual goods through your app?

Are your revenues transactional (commission) or subscription-based?

Do you plan to sell your app and/or use in-app purchases?

Will you sell your services primarily to consumers (B2C) or to businesses (B2B)?

Do you need to integrate with a third-party payment processor like Stripe, Paypal, Adyen or other?

Will you handle a lot of micro-transactions that will require accounting automation?

Do you have a lawyer?

How important is your users’ data in your overall business model? Do you plan on exposing it somehow to third parties?

Do you already have a clear idea of which personal information you will need about each of your users, how long you will need it for, what you will do with it, etc.?

Do you have contract templates for collaboration with service providers? Or do you have a lawyer who can help you review the ones proposed by service providers?

Do you already have terms and conditions, a privacy policy and/or a cookie policy?

Are there any other specific legal requirements you have to consider when deciding where data can be stored, for how long, etc.?

What will your app look like?

Do you already have a clear idea of the UX of your app? Do you have a list and a description of all the use cases you need implemented in your app? Who does what? In what order? Who can see what?

Is your list of use cases or features prioritized by business importance?

Do you have wireframes to illustrate the UX of your app?

Do you already have a visual identity (brand) with clearly identified colors, logos, icons, fonts, etc.?

Have you considered working with a designer or a design agency for any of those things or for UI design?