Botond Szekely is the CEO of Halcyon Mobile, a full-service mobile agency specialized in the design and development of mobile and web applications. Besides the projects they do for startups and brands, they’ve launched their own products — like Dollarbird, MimeChat, and Tweet7 — and have established their very own research team to work on the applicabilities of artificial intelligence on mobile.
Founded in 2005, the company has grown into a team of more than 100 people, uniting UX/UI designers, iOS, Android and web developers, product and project managers and quality assurance engineers. Their work brought them Webby Awards, three mFWA awards and a Google Play Editor’s Choice app, as well as media features in Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, TheNextWeb, Re/code, Lifehacker, iMore and The Guardian.
If you attend industry events, chances are you’ve already met someone from Halcyon Mobile, as their designers and developers are a frequent presence on the stages of well-known local and foreign tech and design conferences and are happy to chat with passionate industry fellows.
Which is the most important step in developing a product? The one that you can’t skip if you want an exceptional app.
Let’s talk about what an exceptional app looks like today because every product startup aims for that. Mobile has become ubiquitous, and more personal at the same time. First of all, it needs to stand out in an overcrowded market. It needs to bring value to the user, whether that means solving a problem or offering enjoyment and to do this with a personal touch. After all, most people think of smartphones as an extension of themselves. So the bar is set very high.
Now let’s look at the steps of building an app.
You need to start with the research. Knowing your market, knowing your audience and who you’re competing against sets the playing field. This will also shape your business plan: how are your competitors making sure their product is financially sustainable? How can you do it? Will you do it in the same way, or come up with something new?
Then you need to make sure that you put enough emphasis on creating a user experience that makes your product meaningful to the people who’ll download and use it. This translates both in the functionalities you choose and the way you present those, but also in the visual choices you make for the app’s interface. Ultimately, you want your users to keep returning to your app and feel good doing so while getting something of value out of it.
Then you get to the development stage: your app has to always work — since people are using their devices all the time, in all places. And this is one part where you constantly have to invest resources because devices change, updates happen, newly launched features break, and your app still has to always work.
Finally, you get to the part we’re all still working to figure out: how do you successfully launch your product and how do you grow from there? How do you make marketing part of the process, with everything it entails: user acquisition, retention, and offering support to get to know them and their needs better?
With all these in mind, I don’t think there’s one particular step that makes the app exceptional. Instead, it’s the ability to go through this process wholeheartedly that brings the best results. And then you re-start the cycle and do it again, and again, and each time you strive to do better. At the end of the day, that’s what keeps users engaged, you in business, and the product on the market.
Tell us more about your flagship products, for example, Dollarbird or the SmartUp platform that was featured in the Best New Apps section. What challenges have you faced during the development process and how did your team manage to solve them and create a successful product?
The experience behind building, launching and maintaining Dollarbird, our calendar-based personal finance app, was really intense. But we managed to build our concept into a product that users love. We’re currently counting a 6-figure user base and a 4.7 rating in the App Store.
Naturally, there were bigger and smaller challenges along the way. Probably the biggest difficulty we encountered was monetizing Dollarbird. The first monetization model we chose was a one-time payment of $1.99. It was a fee that we soon learned wasn’t going to be enough to ensure sustainability or funds to invest in further development.
So we did what seemed to be the most reasonable step from a business point of view: we migrated to a freemium subscription model. Most of the core features were free, while premium functionalities were available for a monthly cost of $5. At that time, subscriptions were still a new wave to ride. While it proved to be a better model, it was hard to nurture Dollarbird to the level of a sustainable product.
Monetizing directly to consumers in the fintech space is extremely hard. An alternative solution to this would be to establish B2B partnerships that would help us with our overall mission. It’s still an ongoing project for us. However, if you hop on a journey like this, you must be willing to tackle the challenges of traveling to western markets where the tech ecosystem is larger and more evolved. Not to mention the hurdle of hiring local product marketers or product-focused people in general.
Fortunately, we’ve seen some improvements on this front lately. The tech events like Techsylvania, the meetups, and other initiatives sure help. And we’re happy we get to contribute too: we get to send speakers to these events, and mentor young talents, and hold courses at universities, and generally promote product-thinking in our community. There’s a lot the local tech industry can do.
At Halcyon Mobile, you are creating top-notch products and some of them won impressive awards. Tell us more about your accolades and what made you the winner.
I think it speaks to the quality of our team that the awards we’ve received were both for in-house products and client projects. We’ve won a Webby, 3 FWA Mobile App of the Day awards, and had a client product selected as an Editor’s Choice on Google Play. We were humbled to be a Mobile Juror at Cannes Lions 2016, and we’re happy to have our Design Lead as a member of the FWA Jury since 2018.
Being a part of the industry for the last 15 years, we’ve discovered there’s no secret mobile app success recipe. As much as we’d like to, we cannot share that with you. There are, however, a few key aspects that improve your chances of succeeding. It all starts with the deep desire of building a meaningful digital product, followed by great expertise, hard work, and product-first thinking.
At the end of the day, while awards are a lovely validation to get from the industry, the real measure of our success is in the positive feedback we receive from our users and our clients’ users.
