In a room lit by a table lamp, a bespectacled, handsome man in his early 30s introduces himself as James. Looking unflinchingly at the camera, in voiceover he tells us that his Apple Watch alerted him that he was having a cardiac arrest.
We switch to James in a forest, the camera looking up at him surrounded by life, forest life, then we cut to mobile phone footage of him smiling with his baby, thanking the device and app for saving him.
This ad is one of many in the same vein from Apple as it makes a continued push into the health app space. It’s big business.
On the Android app store last year alone, fitness app Fitbit made $2.1m, weight loss app Calorie Counter $1.8m and meditation apps Calm and Headspace $1.4m and $1.1m.
The healthcare apps market size was $24.93 billion in 2020, and it’s forecast to reach $314.60 billion by 2028 by fetching a whopping CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 34.8 per cent.
Healthcare is a domain where apps have helped both patients and professionals.
There’s enhanced patient convenience and engagement, and everyday we find new examples of apps transforming how medical services are provided in terms of treatment, prescriptions, consultations, etc.
No wonder that mHealth entrepreneurs across the world are investing heavily in healthcare-related technologies.
Opportunities abound in diverse categories from pharmacy delivery apps to scheduling apps, medical training to nutrition, fitness to mental health and many more.
Just in the growing global wellness and fitness market – the money people spend on non-medical products and services to get and stay healthy – there are flexible entry points for businesses considering ways to shake up the health industry. But is an app the right way to do it?
Sleeping your way to success
At Fortnight Studios, one of the clients my team and I worked with was Simba Sleep. They had flipped the sleep industry on its head with their innovative products, but wanted to go beyond sleep products and into a holistic sleep service.
Would an app be a useful way to do this? Certainly increased consumer adoption of wearable technology lent itself to an app solution.
We worked with them to generate ideas in the early stages that would add value to both Simba and their customers. From this we designed and developed the app from concept to a successful consumer-ready solution for users who had trouble sleeping.
We are still partners to maintain and iterate the current platform, constantly improving the experience and functionality. The app was used by the England Rugby World Cup 2019 team to enhance elite athlete performance, as well as ordinary consumers alike.
In just 6 weeks after launch, the app made it into the top 20 in the health & fitness category with a 4.8/5 score and over 10K downloads.
The app was right for Simba, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for every health tech company.
So how do you know if you need an app or not? Here are four questions you need to ask to help find out.
Four key questions you need to ask to help find out if you need an app for your health tech business
1. Can your goals be achieved through another platform?
This might surprise you but many people build an app just because it’s the popular thing to do. As we know, apps are popular, health apps in particular, but it might not be right for your health company.
You have to take a step back and assess what problem you are going to solve for your customers, and how exactly you go about that in the most accessible ways for them.
Would a website suffice, or a progressive web app? Or is a mobile or wearable app the best way to solve the customer problem?
And, more importantly, will your customers absolutely love it in this form, more so than any other form?
Thinking about Simba, we did some ‘what if?’ ideation: what if they could go beyond their amazing sleep products and become their customers’ own personal sleep coach?
We tapped into their receptive customer base and discovered the issues people have with their sleep.
When we finished our initial research, it became clear that the core functionality of the app would need to be tracking the users’ sleep performance and guiding them to improvements that would become habitual. That was the customer issue to resolve and an app was the most effective solution.
2. Are you prepared to start small and iterate frequently?
There’s this saying in the app world that if you don’t feel uncomfortable with the first version of the product you launched then you’ve launched it too late.
I agree with that.
Sure, I get it: as a founder you have a vision of more than two million downloads, in excess of a million active users, all healthier than they ever were using your fully realised, all-singing, all-dancing version of the ultimate health app.
But avoid starting big and instead begin with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
This allows you to test early with real users and understand quickly the sort of problems to solve. By starting within an MVP you not only learn how to bring the user experience and vision together, but you also have smaller problems to solve than major ones.
This allows you to keep building and iterating and improving to get to the ultimate vision.
3. Will you be in it for the long run?
The business of apps moves fast, but that doesn’t mean build a short term business. Apps require a short attention span for users, but a long term one for its producer.
So many projects fail because the founders or initial stakeholders lose interest or get distracted or drop the project.
Resilience pays off. It’s not always going to be a straight line from A to B, so if you take a long term view, you’re more likely to be successful as winning takes many, many years.
Equally, apps that focus on managing specific diseases now make up 47 per cent of the market offering (compared to 28 per cent in 2015), and these require ongoing maintenance, updates and so on at the very least.
Users of mental health, diabetes and cardiovascular disease apps now account for almost half of disease-specific apps, and will want you to stay with them over the long term.
Though we launched the sleep health app we created some time ago, we continue to monitor and improve it continually.
The app achieves around 15,000 monthly downloads, and tens of thousands of monthly active sessions.
46 per cent track their sleep every night using the app, and its daily retention rate is a large 52%. Simba are now in front of their audience daily, compared to only when someone wanted to buy a new mattress.
4. Do you have enough budget for quality design and software development?
The saying goes, “buy cheap, pay twice,” and it applies to apps as much as it does to anything else.
In these days of self-serve and Fiverr-type services, the best apps dominate, and the worst disappear fast. In roughly four years, a third of healthcare apps have actually been kicked off the App store.
More than 80 per cent of health apps have fewer than 5,000 installations, and the 110 dominant apps have more than 10 million downloads and make up 50 per cent of the market. So making quality apps that truly engage users is mission-critical.
Quality needn’t break the bank, however. You can spend wisely and save money by starting small. Indeed, I think it’s vitally important that you start small. What does that look like?
It could be an initial design exploration, or creating clickable prototypes without necessarily building the full product.
Indeed, there are all sorts of cheaper and quicker solutions, even with quality designers, than squandering money by jumping straight into building your software product.
Clickable prototypes, for instance, are so advanced nowadays that it often seems like the real product, without the onerous build cost.
So you can get quality design and development, to get the best product for your budget, and without breaking the bank, if you’re smart about it.
