With more competition than ever, it’s harder than ever to build a product company that supports itself through App Store sales. It’s especially difficult these days to come up with app ideas that have the earning potential needed to sustain a business over the long term. Far too many developers have a great product idea, build it, and then are disappointed when sales don’t follow. But a lot of these products fail in the market not because they’re bad apps, but because their creators were thinking like programmers, and not like entrepreneurs. In this presentation, we’ll explore the typical “product first” approach to app development that most developers employ, and why it so often leads to disappointment in the marketplace. Once we understand what doesn’t work, we’ll turn our attention to a “market first” approach that holds much more promise in creating app ideas that result in profit. You’ll learn the most important factors in the success of a product (Spoiler alert: Your app’s feature list isn’t one of them.) and why niches are the name of the game. Along the way, you’ll learn a framework for evaluating potential markets, and how to identify product ideas that customers are happy to pay for.

This talk was recorded at AltConf 2015. Watch all the videos!