Most conversations we have with a new client start the same way. "We need an app."
Sometimes that is true. More often, when we ask what the app should do, the answer describes something else entirely: orders that get lost between the shop and the store, a manager who cannot tell what was sold yesterday, customers who pay by M-Pesa and then have to send a screenshot to prove it.
Those are not app problems. They are system problems.
The difference
An app is something people open. A system is how work moves through your business: who records what, where it goes next, and who can see it.
You can have a beautiful app sitting on top of a broken system. The customer places an order on their phone, and behind the scenes somebody still copies it into a notebook. The app did not remove the work. It added a step.
Your customers already have an app
It is called WhatsApp. They also have M-Pesa, and they are very good at both.
Asking someone to download something new, create an account and remember a password is a real cost to them. Phone storage is limited. Data bundles are not free. If what you are offering is not clearly better than sending a message and paying a till number, they will not switch, and they will be right.
So before building anything for customers, we ask what can be fixed on your side, where nobody has to download a thing.
What to fix first
- One place where every sale, payment and stock movement is recorded, once.
- Payments that are matched to the customer automatically, so nobody is forwarding screenshots.
- Reports the owner can open on any day without asking someone to prepare them.
- Clear roles, so each person sees and does what their job requires.
Get these right and the business runs better on the first day, even though your customers notice nothing new except that things are faster and mistakes are fewer.
When an app is the right answer
There are good reasons to build one. Your staff work in the field and need to capture information where there is no desk. Your customers come back often enough that a home-screen icon saves them time. You need the camera, the location or offline use.
In each case the app is the front door to a system that already works. That is the order that lasts: the system first, then the door.
A quick way to tell which problem you have
Before you brief anyone, spend a day watching how work actually moves through your business. Then answer these honestly.
- When a customer orders, how many people have to touch that order before it is fulfilled?
- How many times is the same information written down?
- If the person who "knows how things work" were away for two weeks, what would stop?
- How long does it take you to find out what was sold yesterday?
- When a customer pays by M-Pesa, how does that payment reach your records?
If most of your answers describe copying, chasing and waiting, the problem is inside the business and an app for customers will not touch it. That is the point where a system built around how you work pays for itself.
If your answers are tidy and the difficulty really is that customers cannot reach you easily, then an app or a better website may be exactly right. We wrote about weighing that kind of decision in Custom Software or Off-the-Shelf?
What this looks like in practice
We saw this play out with a board game shop in Nakuru. The owner asked for a website. What the shop needed first was to know its own stock. Once that was in place, the customer-facing part was simple to add, and it has stayed accurate ever since because it draws on records the shop already trusts.
If the work behind the screen is still done by hand, the screen is decoration.
The next time someone says "we need an app", try asking a different question: what is the work we wish we did not have to do twice? Start there.
