According to numerous recent studies, nearly 500 million people worldwide own smart phones iPhones, Androids, etc. And that number is expected to double in the next few years, meaning hundreds of millions more tuned in and turned on to the hand-held devices.
Combined with the ever-growing reliance on online commerce, the boom in smart phone use has meant as many challenges as opportunities and potential customers for businesses of all sizes. On the Seacoast, one startup wants to show how creating a business-specific app doesn't have to mean losing money.
Launched in 2011 by local entrepreneur Alex Bakman, Snappii provides creative, custom mobile phone applications for businesses in every sector. To date, the company has spearheaded the development of over 6000 different mobile apps, all from a platform supporting 17 different languages.
With the rapid growth, improvement, and increasing user-friendliness of smart phone technology, more and more people and more and more businesses are beginning to use their phones as a primary means for accessing information. But that still leaves the problem of making sure your business and your brand can be as easily accessible as it is noticeable.
What sets Snappii apart from others in their industry is its platform's ease of use and flexibility. Offering a unique, dynamic, user-friendly app development platform, Snappii allows customers to essentially design, publish, and even build their own business app, and in days instead of months.
Our goal is to help small businesses make mobile apps quickly, easily and the most important affordably, says Bakman. We're giving customers the opportunity to make mobile phone apps without programming skills and in a timely fashion.
Snappii helps businesses create mobile storefronts. Using the PayPal platform as the go-to landing pad, businessesand small businesses in particularcan now put themselves on something of an equal footing with arger competitors, making their products, services, and brands simultaneously more competitive and easier to reach.
Unlike desktop computers, people have smart phones in their hand basically throughout the day, says Bakman, whose company is the first ever certified app-making platform for PayPal Mobile Checkout. So in that sense it's the best consumer engagement device there is, and the perfect mechanism for engaging potential customers.
With millions of customers perpetually online, that means more opportunities for them to engage with, and educate themselves on behalf of, a business product or service.
Says Bakman, We've gone from physical store fronts, to businesses relying heavily on their websites, to now this third channel, the mobile app, that will be more heavily used than even the website. Apps now serve as the primary means by which businesses and customers engage one another.
What's more, Snappii, which services iPhones, iPads, and Android devices alike, allows businesses a pair of options for creating and developing their own unique mobile app.
The do it yourself approach provides those with computer programming skills, the ability to create their own app in minutes. Not only is such an option user friendly; it's easy on the bottom line as well.
The second option is, of course, to have Snappii guide you through the design and development process. But choosing this route by no means necessitates breaking the bank.
It used to be that, if you wanted to create an app, you'd have to pay a professional developer $10,000 or more to work months on end creating one, Bakman exclaims. Snappii allows even those with no programming skills the capacity to do it in a fraction of that time days, even.
We're trying to help businesses engage more with their costumers, and to make it easier to interact with them, says Bakman. With the trends being what they are, it's not a matter of if businesses should have this as a channel, but how, and how to do it affordably.
For more information, go to www.snappii.com, call (603) 651-0066, or email support at snappii dot com.
Current Issue - May 2024