Why Mobile-First Strategy May Not Be The Right Strategy For You.
I learned the hard way that a mobile-only strategy or a mobile-first strategy may not work in all cases. I was rebuilding StoryTruck two years ago and there was everything going in favor of taking the mobile-first approach.
Given that I was trying to create a Netflix-like service with StoryTruck except that it carried children's books that were to be read instead of movies to be watched, I took the mobile-first approach while considering the following points:
- Mobile devices and Tablets are a better fit over desktops and laptops to read bedtime stories.
- We could launch our service quickly if we focused all our resources on the mobile app. This was important given that I was bootstrapping my startup.
- If the mobile app took off, I could launch the website in a couple of months.
It took about seven months to get our first mobile app which was an iPad app in the store. I could write a separate blog post sometime on the naive assumptions I made on building an iPad app and getting it approved. It then took us another six months to launch the Android app. While we were busy building apps, negotiating content and uploading them, we didn't have enough time to market our app. So, for more than a year our apps were only discoverable through a search in the app store and that wasn't good.
In taking the mobile-first approach I realized that I lost the most important thing - Free Traffic via search engines. It's important to build a website even if it's not a fully functional website and does not have feature parity with your mobile app because:
- If your user is looking for something, chances are that they go to a search engine first before visiting the app store.
- There is more information on optimizing your site for search engines than optimizing your app's meta data for app-store searches.
- It's easy for people to click on a shared link and see your website than download an app.
it took me two years to get this fact and I created a search engine optimized site. Today, organic searches delivers the biggest traffic to our site.
What is your experience? Share your thoughts.
