Would you turn an app idea you had into an reality for $XXX?

Nice to see you here, Amulya!

While entrepreneurs would love a low-priced app development service, it's not going to make a very sustainable business model. It's generally very hard to make money by offering low-priced services. There are a few issues:

1. if you're charging low prices, your contractors will eat up most of your profits, making it hard to market/hire staff/support yourself
2. a contractor can only manage a few projects at a time, so you'd need to hire more of them as you gained customers; it would become a nightmare to find and coordinate them
3. in addition to this, you'd still need to attract new clients, manage the rest of the business, deal with customer support, etc., but you wouldn't be making enough money to hire another staff member
4. if your clients are successful, they would outgrow your services and hire an in-house team instead

So, while this is a pain point, the cards are stacked against you. But you're definitely onto something: building an app is a huge pain point, and people are willing to spend money to solve it. You might be able to offer something like these instead:

• a high-priced software house with reliable developers (like toptal.com) – this could be a very profitable business
• get a little more experience outsourcing app development, and you can create informational products on it (Tim Ferriss did something similar) – this would be scalable
• locate and vet good contractors, then sell their contact info to successful software houses
• edit: just brainstorming here, but maybe even something like this that would be more scalable

Good idea. Will try it for sure.

The idea is good and is what all the dev shop promise.
My suggestion would be to double down on the MVP part and change a small fee before starting a project to get the idea cleared.

I would recommend reading "Built to sell" by John Warrillow. It covers the kind of problems that people often face building service business and how to combat them.

As an aside, I have been considering paying to have some of my ideas built to MVP by external devs. If you are looking for a first customer, give me a message.

The idea itself sounds great. However, there are plenty of companies that can build apps. Also freelancers, and platforms where to find them.

For what I understand, you will be one more. How can I trust that you will deliver anything better than what anybody else can do?

Great idea. As there are tons of websites and service-based companies which does exactly that, I think it would be great to focus on a niche. Maybe it can be not another service based company which makes your dev work but a platform just for bringing your idea to life with an MVP?

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it a definition of a software house? Here in Poland, we have hundreds of companies like this and more or less this is their offering. Some of them are also outsourcing the repetitive work to Asia for cost-efficiency. There is also a problem of scaling such idea - it's really hard to find someone reliable that will write you an MVP at a low price. Take an upwork, for example, each offer has several proposals, but the best eng. are getting direct invites and are rarely bidding themselves.

Hey Amulya, I think the combination of competitive pricing + speed could attract a fair number of people who might want to test an idea. However, having outsourced in the past, I'd be keen to see pricing transparency; building the app is one thing, but there are associated costs post shipping (server cost, maintenance, etc...) . Also, if you have clients whose market is in Europe, I'd be keen to see there is a privacy/security system in place to cope with GDPR compliancy (even in MVP mode) if dealing with storing perso information. Lastly, would you only offer the build or would there be a prototype design service too or help to write the specs for non-tech entrepreneurs?