Today I want to talk about the process of going from absolute beginner to having an app in the store making money.
Here are the 5 phases or steps that you need to get an app into the store and make money.

1. Come up with an idea or a business model.
It’s important to make sure that your app idea is good and that you know what kind of business you are building.
You can make sure that your app idea is good through a variety of ways, a lot of it through market research, by looking at the app store and see if there’s anything already, asking people around what they’ve seen working, see what the trends are, and all the stuff that people do to qualify their ideas.
On the business model side is to walk through and see how I’ll be spending the least amount of money, ask questions about how the app will come to life, and then ask how I’m going to make the most amount of money back.
If you’re interested in all this stuff, we have the resources on the site. Go check it out, sign up for the free ebook, The 21-Step App System. Or join the Bluecloud App Formula Course, and we’ll show you how to do all this stuff.
2. Get the app built
Here you have two choices: build it yourself or hire someone, a developer, to build the app for you.
If you want to learn how to code, and want to code it yourself, go for it. We will not teach you how to code because, honestly, I think that’s a very difficult thing to do if you’re trying to build a business.
The other thing is, you need to hire a developer. The best place to do this is at Upwork.com. That’s the best resource we found, and where I hired probably 20 developers.
Whether you decide to do it yourself or hire someone, you go and get it done.
3. Publishing phase
This is when your developer or designer has completed the app. Now they need to upload it to iTunes Connect. It’s the App Store’s mission control center. So they finish the app, now they upload it, put in the icon and screenshots, create a title, write the description, pick the keywords, and add all sorts of information. You put the app into that staging scenario where it’s not live yet, but it’s getting ready for Apple to approve it.
4. App goes live and you start marketing it
Here you start telling people, “Hey, here’s my app, go download it.” You get some press releases or you start to do this App Store optimization or ASO. You optimize for the algorithm. You pick the right keywords, get the right title, test your screenshots and icons. You can look at statistics and analytics and see how your download volume is doing, and adjust and optimize accordingly. You can purchase Facebook advertising.
There are tons of different ways that you can get published by a huge company that can drive hundreds to thousands of people to you, lots of different ways to get traffic to your app.
5. Monetization
This is when you turn users into dollars. Monetization can happen in a variety of ways.