In the digital age, where mobile apps are an integral part of our daily lives, the idea of patenting a unique app concept is both appealing and challenging. Aspiring developers and entrepreneurs often wonder about the feasibility of obtaining a software patent for their mobile app idea. Let’s explore the realism of this endeavor in today’s technological landscape.

Understanding Software Patents

A software patent is a form of intellectual property protection that grants the holder exclusive rights to the use and implementation of a specific software algorithm, process, or methodology. In the context of mobile apps, this would mean securing exclusive rights to a particular feature or functionality within the app.

Criteria for Patentability of a Mobile App

The key to obtaining a software patent lies in meeting certain criteria. Primarily, the idea must be novel, non-obvious, and have a practical application. This means your mobile app idea should offer a new solution or functionality that hasn’t been previously disclosed and must be a significant improvement over existing technologies.

Challenges in Patenting Mobile Apps

The Novelty Factor: With millions of apps already in existence, finding a genuinely novel idea is increasingly challenging. The app must offer something that has not been done before or significantly improves an existing process. Key word there is “significantly”.   

Non-Obviousness: The idea should not be an obvious solution to someone with average skill in the technology field. This is often yet another subjective area and can be a major hurdle in the patent process.

Technical Complexity: Software patents often require detailed technical descriptions. For a mobile app, this means you must clearly articulate the unique algorithms or processes your app uses.  Key word there is “unique”, as in it’s never been done before.  Which leads to the next challenge…

Open Source Issue:  Over 90% percent of the code behind most new apps today is from open source libraries.   While designing the UX/UI of a mobile app is highly unique to every mobile app, almost every basic function behind it can be found in online repositories of pre-written code, irrespective of how difficult it may be to integrate that code into your app. Even if you write the code yourself, that code is almost certainly available already, and thus, is not patentable.

Evolving Legal Landscape: The legal landscape for software patents, especially in the U.S. following the landmark 2014 Supreme Court  Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International decision, has become more stringent. This decision has made obtaining patents for abstract ideas, including certain mobile app software patent applications, much more difficult.

Practical Considerations of a Software Patent

Cost and Time: Patenting is an expensive and time-consuming process. The costs include legal fees for patent drafting and prosecution, and the process can take several years.

Market Dynamics: The fast-paced nature of the tech world means that an app could become obsolete by the time a patent is granted.

Enforcement: Even with a patent, enforcing it can be challenging and costly, especially against overseas entities.

Conclusion

While obtaining a software patent for a mobile application is not impossible, it’s fraught with challenges. The process demands a truly novel idea, significant resources, and an understanding of the complex and evolving legal landscape. Developers must weigh the benefits against the costs, and consider alternative forms of protection to safeguard their innovations in the competitive world of mobile apps.

From our experience, most entrepreneurs are better served by using their time and money to aggressively market their app so that it becomes the de facto app in its space.

At the time, there were already more than 250,000 apps built for the iPhone.

Now, Apple has more than 1.8 million apps available in the App Store that can help you cook, watch TV, exercise, and even track your sleeping patterns.

However, users are not the only ones who have something to gain from mobile apps.

Companies can now access a lot of information about their audience. If you’re wondering how you can find a way to capitalize on it, there is some good news–artificial intelligence (AI) is more than up to the task.

Here’s how you can integrate AI into your marketing strategy going forward.

Personal Content

Users don’t want to be treated as a statistic. So how can your marketing show that you view them as individuals?

AI can make this process incredibly easy for your company by automatically tracking user preferences and behaviors. Purchase history can be used to see what kind of products are more likely to be bought by an individual and you can automatically suggest other similar products to them.

For example, Amazon’s recommendation system helped boost the company’s sales by 30% for an increase of $2.9 billion from the same quarter the previous year. To help drive purchases, one study also found that personalized calls-to-action perform over 200% better than basic CTAs.

They want to be treated like people and the best way to do that is to provide each of them with personalized content.

Customer Service

When users have to go through customer service, it’s often stacking one bad experience on top of another. Either something went wrong or customers have a question that isn’t answered on your site.

Now, customers find themselves put on hold after calling or waiting for a reply to an email that they sent. No matter how much you try to cover all errors in your FAQs, there are bound to be other situations that arise.

AI will let you handle a larger volume of customer service inquiries and help you spend less time on each.

An AI-powered chatbot can answer simple questions, saving your employees from wasting time with routine problems. For something more advanced, chatbots can get the process started and figure out who the customer needs to speak with.

An AI program can even give you more contact with customers. Amazon doesn’t just recommend products to its site visitors, but the company will send customers an email with more information about a product they’ve expressed interest in.

Using AI will help your company provide better customer service.

Voice Search

The most recent rise of AI use has come in the form of voice technology.

According to the GlobalWebIndex Voice Search Report, 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. More and more businesses will need to include voice technology in their apps to stay ahead of the curve.

From a marketing perspective, being an early adapter to new technology pays off dividends down the road.

The Echo digital assistant has allowed Amazon to place itself at the front of the voice commerce industry. Customers no longer have to take out their phones or use their computers when they are looking for information.

They can, instead, ask Alexa a question instead of searching for it themselves. Consumers can now make purchases just by telling Alexa to do it for them. If you integrate voice technology, it can allow the voice assistants on user devices to access features of your app.

As the number of voice searches grows, your app will need to adapt or will be in jeopardy of getting left behind.

Market Your App with AI

AI can help make your company’s marketing strategy more effective.

Users will feel like individuals and are more likely to act upon receiving personalized content. When people run into problems, they won’t have to spend hours on hold or waiting for a reply because a bot can help out immediately.

Further, adapting your app to cater to AI assistants will likely prove to be an important step in the future of online commerce.

To see how one of the top app development companies in Denver can integrate AI into your app, contact us or one of the other leading firms in the area today, and visit our expertise page for more details.

To spend money on designing and building a custom mobile app or website, then go live with it and merely wait and hope that users will find you… well, that’s just flushing money down the drain! In order to maximize your efforts to build an amazing app or website, you must be truly committed to finding your user base.  Let’s talk about what that commitment looks like through specific marketing avenues that you can deploy.

First we’ll look at the more common marketing avenues, but those which involve a material amount of marketing dollars to be effective.  How much you spend on any one avenue will obviously depend on your actual budget amount, and the A/B testing results of dollars spent on each avenue during some trial periods.  However, the first thing you want to do before any paid or non-paid marketing effort, is to obtain ratings and reviews of your app. When a potential user is about to download your app, they will often quickly glance to see how many reviews you have, and what star rating your app has earned.  There are many tactics for procuring reviews you can find on the Internet. Ratings, reviews and awards are an integral part of any paid or non-paid marketing campaign.

The three most common, paid ways to promote a mobile app or website are through Google Search, Facebook and Instagram.

Google search through pay-per–clicks (PPC) is a marketing platform and strategy unto itself, with myriad resources to navigate those waters, far beyond what this blog post could attempt to cover.  Suffice it to say that this strategy can be extremely effective for the right website, but the costs range significantly, depending on the type of customer/user you are looking to find.  It’s all priced on supply and demand.

With Facebook, you can greatly target your specific user demographic.  Costs depend on either flat ‘impressions’ or on ‘link clicks’ (e.g., downloads of your app). Costs are also somewhat dependent on the supply/demand of your intended demographic.

With Instagram you can buy advertising that works in much the same way as Facebook (no surprise as they are owned by the same company). But in certain cases, it may make sense to pay a popular Instagram influencer to promote your app with an organic or sponsored post out to all of their followers, assuming your idea aligns with their followers’ values and interests.  Usually this strategy is combined with the influencer leveraging their other media outlets like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog page, etc.  Determining the cost to go this influencer route is often a directly negotiated exercise with either the influencer themselves, or their agent/agency.  Established, well-known influencers work with advertising agents who set prices and vet potential clients for the influencer.  In lieu of a straight sponsorship fee, large influencers will sometimes agree to a very small revenue share of your app’s proceeds if they love the idea, and what it could do for the majority of their followers.

While it’s nice to have a fat marketing budget to promote your digital creation through social media, there’s actually many more non-paid, free, tried-and-true gorilla marketing routes that have been around well before paid social media exposure became the norm in the mobile arena.

Create print collateral, and don’t be above hitting the streets to distribute it.  Got an app that targets sports enthusiasts? Slap the print flyer on the windows of thousands of cars at the appropriate sporting events.  Got a local website that helps single family homeowners?  Canvas neighborhoods with front door leave-behinds.  Got an app that targets millennial females? Drop your flyers outside of a Grimes concert.  You get the idea!  The key is to be creative and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience to determine where they are, and how to reach them.

Create and constantly update your organic internet presence.  At the very least, create a web landing page with the best-targeted keywords for your app or web platform.  Your landing page should usually have a direct link to download your app, a demo video, an email newsletter sign-up, and most of all, a section where you can blog, blog, and blog some more!  Blogging generates pure SEO Juice to get your app or site found.  Create and frequently update your Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, Reddit, LinkedIn and other social media accounts.

Look for small-to-medium-sized bloggers and vloggers (video bloggers).  To find them, simply enter a Google search with keywords similar to what your site or app would have.  Often the first page will show links to quality blogs around that search term.  Bloggers will sometimes add a free link or mention of your platform on their blog, in exchange for free mention of their blog on your social media or website.  To stay relevant, they often need to reveal new ideas and meaningful resources to their audience, which your mobile app or site might just provide.  If the blogger has a very large audience that is perfect for your digital product, it’s often money well spent to even pay for a sponsored blog post.

Volunteer to work at large industry conventions, or pay the nominal fees to attend where applicable.  Conventions are often a huge pot of attendees that are the perfect demographic for your idea.  Design business cards that tease the target to visit or download what you have created.  Simply drop your cards to anyone and everyone that you are able to briefly talk to about your idea.

Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone!  With certain digital platforms, there’s a very industry-specific enterprise type client that is the target user.  Call those companies and follow up by sending them a way to sign up for a free trial period.  This is also a great way to get user feedback in the early versions of a mobile app or website platform.

If you have a mobile app, make sure it follows solid App Store Optimization (ASO) principles.  This is basically your SEO for Google Play and the App Store.  Your developer should be a huge resource in making sure that your app is properly optimized on the app stores.  ASO is an easy and free form of marketing.  Don’t just set your keywords and descriptions upon initial launch, and forget about it.  Change it up periodically, as you discover and refine exactly what your intended users are searching on.

The amount of free or close-to-free ideas to market your app or website are endless.  As long as you remember to put yourself in the shoes of your intended demographic, you will continue to find ways to reach them.

An idea’s founder will spend months, or even years, building a team, writing a pitch deck, attending pitch fests, calling and, hopefully, meeting with angels and VCs in the hopes of raising money.  With that much time trying to get in front of interested money, founders must ensure that the investors they sit down with have a very clear understanding of the opportunity.

The Pitch that Most Entrepreneurs Give:

We’ve had the privilege of working with many bright and motivated entrepreneurs since starting Epic.  In that time, we heard a lot of pitches and explanations about the digital platforms they want to create: “It’s a cross between the popular app called X and the hot new app called Y”.  “It’s just like the Uber for this other industry, and it’s NEVER been done.” “It’s a digital platform for doing X, and it will have umpteen features and functions”.   Throw in myriad bullet points around the idea, add a hockey stick pro forma projection, and you have the typical PowerPoint pitch deck that most entrepreneurs spend time explaining to prospective angel investors during a meeting.

The Pitch that Raises Capital:

Now imagine those same entrepreneurs showing up to an initial investor meeting with a graphical prototype of their idea on a smartphone and/or laptop.  In this scenario, the investor can ascertain several things that are key to deciding whether to take the conversation to the next level, and potentially invest some money. They no longer have to hope that their vision of the app is different from what your intended vision is. Furthermore, you show them that you know a thing or two about modern app design and user experience; Otherwise know as UX/UI.

The Keys to Creating your Prototype:

There are many levels of prototype, from crude storyboard mock-ups inserted into a mobile web app, to working prototypes with clickable, designed screens pulling data from a semi-functional database.  For purposes of attracting investors, we’ve found the most relevant, cost-effective prototype is one that just centers around the graphical user experience.  This entails approximately 10-20 clickable screens, each designed with close to what the initial user experience and user interface (UX/UI) is going to look like.  It’s important that it show a first attempt at your branding look/feel … color scheme, logo and even tagline.  These branding elements will, of course, evolve and change over time, but the investor wants to see that you understand the basic importance of designing a modern-looking, focused digital brand.

Creating a graphical representation of what a user will experience using your platform may sound easy enough.  Hire a good graphic designer and have them whip up what you want your app to look like.  In reality though, getting the main screens designed for your web or mobile platform first requires an in-depth understanding of the architecture of the platform, as well as how your targeted user will best engage with the app.  Going through that UX/UI exercise, and executing it through the initial graphical prototype, is exactly what most investors need to see you can accomplish, before they ever lend money for the development and/or marketing stages.

The great thing about a graphical prototype is that it’s relatively affordable to create, as compared to the later coding and development stages.  At Epic, we can help you through the entire ideation and architecture stage, and then design and prepare the prototype which will help you raise the money for development.

There are plenty of founders who have brilliant ideas, amazing resumes, and years of experience, often in the industry for which they want to create their digital platform.  But investors know that executing their idea into a scalable, highly engaging digital form is where ‘the rubber meets the road’.  Demonstrate (graphically!) that you understand this, and you will have a much better chance they invest more of their time and money with you.

At Epic Apps, when we initially begin discussing app design and development with a prospective client, we always try to make sure they understand the steps that are involved and how those steps inform the final cost of a mobile app.

We want you to go in with eyes wide open, so we stress the importance of everything from discovery to user experience (UX) to quality assurance (QA) to marketing. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through some of the key advice we offer most frequently.

You’ll grow to appreciate the discovery phase

Building an app is exciting, so it’s easy to understand why some companies want to dive right into the process. However, we require a discovery phase, and we’re not alone. A recent survey by Clutch, a ratings and reviews firm based in Washington DC, found that nearly 70% of app developers view the discovery phase as a step that’s not optional.

We find that the discovery phase is an essential piece to understanding the client’s concept, audience and how their app will fit into their particular industry or organization.

We want you to invest in an app that’s truly going to work for your business, while keeping the app development process efficient and cost-effective, and the discovery phase provides that crucial insight.

We’ll help you understand how to market your app

At Epic, we specialize in app design and development. That being said, when it comes to marketing, we make sure our clients are aware that marketing the app is just as important as creating it in the first place.

To help your app succeed once it’s launched, we’ll help you understand the cost and effort associated with marketing your mobile app.

We’ll also inform you of the various avenues you can use to build users, including:

• Brochure sites highlighting the app
• How to leverage your current personal networks
• Paid marketing using AdWords, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms
• Optimizing your App Store description, keywords, screenshots and SEO

Overall, word of mouth won’t be enough to ensure your app’s success. By taking full advantage of marketing opportunities, you’ll be able to help users find and download what you’ve built for them.

You’ll become more tech savvy than the average company

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions about making an app among first-time clients. By working with Epic, you’ll emerge from the app development process with newfound know-how that will help you tackle future projects.

The biggest misconception we encounter is how easy many first-time clients think it is to create an app from scratch.

What they don’t realize is that the easier an app is to use and the more seamless it appears to be, the more difficult it was to design and code. Although app builder software might provide solutions for companies looking for simple apps, you’ll need to hire a mobile app development company to deliver a highly customized design or advanced features.

Clients are also sometimes surprised to learn that we spend weeks on user experience (UX) alone. Although some clients are taken aback by how much time we spend on this foundational step, we believe great UX is the most important part of the app development process. After all, you’ll want your users to navigate your app seamlessly.

Finally, we encourage clients not to underestimate the importance of a great launch and marketing plan. The “build it and they will come” mentality, a la Field of Dreams, just isn’t going to deliver the results most companies want. Once the app is completed and live, there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure people know about it and will use it — and Epic will help you make a plan for success.

It takes vision, funding, energy and dedication to launch a successful mobile app. It’s not easy, but we’re here to guide and help every step of the way.

With the bootstrapping entrepreneur, we have yet to see one who is not energized by an unlimited amount of drive and ideation. But sadly, what’s usually not in abundance are the cash funds to seed their brilliant ideas!

So where can an early stage, cash-strapped company turn to find grassroots funding?  Maybe a place that connects everyday people who could really use or engage with what the entrepreneur’s app or website provides…

Let’s talk crowdfunding!

On traditional crowdsourced funding sites like Kickstarter.com, ordinary folks (not accredited investors) can pledge small amounts of money to a startup that usually has a product or service in development.  If the company meets their funding goal, they can later return the favor to the backers in the form of a finished product or service equal in value to the small amount which was pledged by each backer.

This type of crowdfunding can work miracles for the right type of company who has tangible goods, services or some form of art which has a relatively definable value that can be given to backers at a later date if they get funded.  However, if a startup is either in need of a larger amount of cash, say up to a million dollars, and/or has a concept that’s more centered around an intangible app or website platform, they traditionally have to rely on a very lengthy process of building their own syndicate of angel investors to back a large initial seed round of investment.

However, on May 16^th, 2016, a brand new funding option became available for that type of startup!  In 2017 we have been seeing some amazing mobile/web startups tap this new funding route, referred to as Title III of the JOBS Act and also known as Regulation Crowdfunding, or Reg CF.

Without getting into a long discussion about securities laws and federal statutes, suffice it to say that since 1933 it was illegal to invest in a private startup offering unless you were an accredited investor, as defined by the SEC (must have a net worth of at least $1 million dollars or an annual income of over $200K for the past two years).

Title III / Reg CF funding became law last year, and is part of the federally approved JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act that was originally signed into law in April of 2012.  Title III essentially allows, for the first time in 83 years, ordinary people – not just the super rich – to invest in the next Facebook or Uber.

It’s important to note the basic requirements for an issuer (i.e., the company raising funds) about Title III, such as; you can only raise up to $1M during a rolling 12-month period, you must be a U.S. entity, and you may raise funds from both accredited and non-accredited investors.   But what’s historic about Title III is that it specifically recognizes a new type of intermediary for CF transactions, called a Funding Portal.  Funding Portals are essentially websites connecting issuing companies with investors, all of which are regulated by the SEC and FINRA.  These sites act not only as connectors, but they are set up in a way that makes it much easier for entrepreneurs to raise their capital without the worry of violating any of the host of regulations that govern Title III.

To get started in this fast growing method of obtaining crowdsourced equity funding, there are over 30 CF portals that qualify under Title III which your startup can access.  However, if you are brand new to raising money this way, we recommend you stick with one of the more established CF portals, which we’ve listed below.

Keep in mind, there are myriad ways to fund your startup.  However, which method you choose completely depends on the type of company you have, the network you have (or do not have) available already, the time you have to raise capital, and the amount of equity you are willing to give up.   For upstart mobile app and website-based concepts who can demonstrate strong early engagement with their platform, Title III / Reg CF has created one of the most powerful sources of capital raising that we’ve seen in a long time!

Recommended Title III / Reg CF funding portals:

MicroVentures

Wefunder

SeedInvest

StartEngine

Republic