Apps are dead... what's the next big thing?

hey Ted later welcome back I've figured out the next big thing so you know I've always been this app developer writing a lot of trends and waves and I've made millions of dollars through apps I've developed in the past year I was in the Facebook app boom I was working on iPhone apps and then after that there's been this long period of stagnation in which people didn't really know what was going to come up next now if you've been a follower of my work then you know that I've talked about this topic in the past and I wanted to expand on this and tell you what is the next big thing after app development for software engineers for programmers all right so here's I like to pose this question let's imagine that you were a master programmer that you could just code like the wind anything you can dream up you can make any iOS app Android app website webpage mobile app any application you want to make given those skills what would you build where do you think is the most opportunity and we're going to exclude some things that are just very high effort or require a huge team like trying to build a cyber can that the course or launching a brand new cryptocurrency coin and so while we've seen a lot of hype about cross-platform technologies like react native or flutter that let you build apps across Android and iOS in my opinion the age of apps is pretty much over by now you know you've got the top 10 apps they're pretty solidified by now they have huge content modes around them all of them are run by huge multi-billion dollar companies and for you to go out and try to compete with that that's pretty tough how many apps do you think a person can open up in a day most people spend 95 to 99 percent of their time just going back and forth between the top 10 apps like YouTube Tech Talk Instagram snapchat Facebook Gmail Messenger whatsapp most of this stuff is messaging or social media related and that's pretty much all the time that people have time for throughout the day they're not going to go out there and try to visit your app or your website so the story goes that after the last decade of apps that spawned this huge generation of would-be app developers struggling to try to code something up and get none of their apps or websites are gaining traction the age of apps pretty much just died out Facebook apps are dead mobile apps are way too competitive and oversaturated and I think that I as a world-class premier app developer have discovered the next big thing decentralized links now this concept of decentralized links is nothing new but it was only until recently that we saw this really come into fruition some examples of this are like patreon Gumroad only fans Shopify stores teespring merchandise or even those Amazon affiliate links and what's unique about a lot of these websites is that they don't have any single centralized destination there's not like a central app that you have to download or destination website that you visit and spend hours of your time browsing and bookmark but rather the destination site is always going to be these social media platforms like say YouTube Instagram Facebook or it could even be email and people just send each other these links and these links go viral and when you can get these large influencers like say get Taylor Swift to post one of your links in her video description you have a startup right there because tons of people are going to start visiting that and in fact if you think about it just like in the old days when apps would go viral let me ask you what is going viral today right now I'm not talking about what's gonna be popular or go viral 10 years into the future I'm talking about right now today what is trending and that is the influencers and all of these people have links on their pages so influencers are the vehicle of distribution and the links that they promote are the modern day apps so how do you take advantage of this and achieve hyper fast growth well think about what would it take to get hundreds or thousands of influencers to just put one custom link on all of their videos or tweets or social media Facebook posts and you know there's a few examples for example we've got patreon patreon exploded out of nowhere when big-name influencers started linking to their website because in return patron gave them a way to monetize their content not because patreon was trying to compete with YouTube or set up some separate destination website the goal is not to try to divert people away from these huge content platforms like YouTube Instagram or Facebook but to complement them and if you can get the influencers to install your app or to post your link in their videos and tweets then you have a hit app right there now one way to do that is if you can provide like vanity URLs custom URLs beside form patreon we've also seen other similar business models like only fans or Gumroad just explode out of nowhere as well because creators were actively promoting those links now in addition to distributed links there's also another business model that Namie so you come to this realization we can take a look at the top 10 apps on the App Store just in your mind imagine that those are going to be solidified and people are just going to use those apps for the rest of time so about half of those are going to be social media related the other half what are they messaging related so what works really well for messaging email for example so email marketing maybe another frontier for app development especially recently as we've seen more powerful email automation services come up that allow you to really create complex chains of email based on triggers and automations the number one app that everybody checks first thing in the morning is email and you can tap into that through email based business some good examples of this are Groupon or travel Zoo those are daily deal websites but even recently I launched daily interview procom which you can check out that sends you an interview question every single day and that has grown to several thousand dollars a month in revenue and the funny thing to me about developing daily interview Pro was most of that was working on back-end scheduled cron jobs and interfacing with email automation software not working on some beautiful app or website with a bunch of menus and buttons now in terms of the product imagining that each URL link is an app what is the killer app well I think it's still quite early and everything seems really scattered there's no killer app yet really like the one link that everybody seems to be promoting our Amazon affiliate links that's a pretty weak app I could imagine a world where every single influencer out there will have installed three apps three links on all of their videos it may be for say collecting emails right everybody is going to want that there could be a way to monetize and there could be some fan community quiz interactive type of platform because video these days is so passive there's no way to interact with people it's just me here on my soapbox and there's probably still a lot of opportunity for games social interactivity community quizzes filters and all sorts of things when you think about it what makes an app an app and in my mind you need two things number one is viral distribution exponential growth because that's what makes the field so exciting and then the other thing you need is a custom content product so given distribution and project these two aspects used to be unified they're one and the same because in order to spread your app on say the Facebook app store or the iPhone app store it had to be a digital product it had to be code so the distribution platform only accepted code and therefore code had to be the product so I touched on this concept a little bit over my French press video which you should check out get your custom tag laid French press good stuff but what I'm getting at is that the concept of an app has decoupled into product and distribution so as for product those are the links that I mentioned earlier and they could be anything that scales both the digital or physical we're talking about photos videos recipes PDFs ebooks or even software tools and services that may help facilitate your community and then for the second component that distribution what that's facilitated by either the influencer or emails which is why in my opinion it is so important to have a social media presence and the online brand so you can get distribution of content so reflecting on my own path as an app developer someone who chased rapid growth it seems non coincidental that somehow I would end up on YouTube and by the way I'm starting a new project if you're interested in also learning how to succeed on YouTube I'm starting this learning community YouTube but backstage calm where I will teach you how I prove this YouTube channel into a seven-figure and your business with over 50 million total views so check that out over at YouTube backstage comm I'll be explaining all of my best tips and strategies about how you too can succeed here all right you guys still following me I know that some of this may sound wacky but you know you have to remember back in the days when apps first began nobody knew what an app was either so you may be wondering now well what is the text stack what is the programming language that you would use in order to create such apps well in order to understand the answer to this question you have to take a look at what happens when people click on these links that are being passed around presumably they will go to some beautiful landing page which would be really convincing and get the person to continue further on into your actual interaction and so you may think well you're gonna need strong web design skills Photoshop Illustrator CSS JavaScript HTML and yeah you can do all by yourself but at the same time you could also outsource a lot of this stuff because there's a lot of third-party web services and platforms so you don't necessarily have to do on your own when you think about email marketing software as well like yeah you can go there and build your own smtp mail servers and deal with spam deliverability issues but there are also third-party services out there as well and so you know I think what you really need is it's going to be a mix of these third-party services and micro services and platforms out there that help you create landing pages with email marketing software glue things together in addition to some custom code that you'd be writing in order to also build your own software as a service platform and so as I was looking this up I came across these terms like the low code movement or no code movement which referred to the idea that you don't necessarily have to code every single thing out yourself because there are so many third-party platforms and services out there that can help take the place of several parts of your business I think that combined with custom web code and custom back-end jobs maybe the tech stack of the future and so with that I came to realize that even though traditional apps they feel like they're kind of stagnating and oversaturated it doesn't mean that apps are dead or that viral growth is gone because the people they're still out there consuming more content than ever before actually so they'll do for me but let me know what you think is the next big thing after apps if you like the video please give it a like and subscribe really helps out the channel I appreciate that remember to follow me over on the Instagram at tech lead HD and I'll see you next time thanks bye

Channel: TechLead

Views: 920,437

Rating: 4.5499148 out of 5

Keywords: engineer, technology, amazon, google, developer, apple, googler, tech, swe, software, facebook, computer science, cs, fb, software engineer, software engineering, software engineer life, software engineer intern

Id: wOb0ThditOo

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LillyAtts]

I would say it's Japanese with an American twang.

[u/ehren88]

Sounds like a non-native speaker with a near-native General American English accent.

[u/[deleted]]

Very generic fob asian accent influenced by SoCal dialects, but he speaks with native-passing fluency. He quite noticeably pronounced "dr" the same as "j" and either dropped or voiced a few unvoiced consonants. The American "l" was dropped/replaced a few times as well. His intonation and stress patterns are flat and very choppy compared to most American dialects. Also his "resonant position" is too much to the front. He might have been in the US since high school, but nothing earlier. Guess around 40% of people on the west coast and <10% of people in most of the midwest would actually believe he's native born and speaks English as the only language.