How much does it cost to build the world's top 10 products

This article is written by Courtney Boyd Myers, who is the founder of Audience.io. This article focuses on her contacts with some web and mobile development companies, incubators, consultancies, and lab executives to discuss how much it will take to replicate the 10 products that are now very successful in the marketplace:

100,000 dollars and a proper development partner can make you rich overnight? How much resources do you need to replicate a product like Twitter or Instagram? Now, with the rise of mobile development consultants and incubators, there is no shortage of those that can help you build the next Web End or move the end of the product to change the talent.

We interviewed a number of web and mobile development companies, incubators, consultants and lab executives asking what resources were needed to build the most successful applications of our generation. Here's our summary of the cost and time needed to build the world's 10 most successful start-ups.

Twitter

Henrik Werdelin, an investment company Prehype's managing partner who has invested in tradable, Barkbox, Fancyhands, Basno and Path, says it's not a difficult task to build Twitter, But some of these subdivision features take some time:

Creating a Twitter prototype with Ruby on Rails is not difficult, 10 hours is enough, and even some of the more powerful developers will take less time.

This seems to mean that if you know Rails, the cost of creating the next Twitter is almost Nil. If you don't rails,one Month Rails 99-dollar course plus a free Heroku platform, you can learn and build prototypes for one weeks if you're smarter.

But Werdelin then clarified that the matter is not so simple: "Now the completion of product technology is not difficult to build, but the difficulty is to improve the use of experience level, how to make the interactive interface can clearly express the concept of the product is the key." ”

A product without expansion is worthless, entrepreneurship is no longer about building products, but building a business, this process in addition to products, but also involves internal structure, feedback loop, data analysis and user community.

So, if you want to launch an MVP first (Minimum viable product, the simplest possible products), Werdelin says it will take about 5.25 million dollars, mainly to see what language developers and designers you are recruiting.

Werdelin thinks building a successful product is like opening a nightclub: "You need more than a DJ, a stage and a lot of wine, you need the right décor, the atmosphere and the music, and of course the cocktails."

Instagram

"Instagram is a little more complicated than Twitter, especially filters," he said. But you can still build a similar prototype at a price that's not too expensive, and it costs 6 months, 100,000 to 300,000. But even if you have 1 million dollars to spend on the first day, it's hard to Instagram the current rate of growth, Werdelin said.

Instagram's founder, Kevin Systrom, has about 25,000 trial users after the open beta version of 10 in 2010. Two years later, the application grew at an alarming rate, with nearly 150 million active users. Systrom became a multimillionaire after selling the company to Facebook at a price of nearly 1 billion dollars.

"Luck, timing, and social elements have become a key ingredient for many entrepreneurs," he said.

Facebook

About Facebook We asked Happyfuncorp co-founder Ben Schippers,happyfuncorp is a company that provides site services, and its clients include: Teepublic, A Kind, Postography and Y Eah tv!.

"If you let me build a Facebook for you, I need 500,000 dollars and 9 months of design and development time." Schippers said: "Other people may need 1 million dollars or longer, but in fact the problem is more generalized in the province, because the money is not spent on development, but on the operation." ”

When you have the idea of a product, 500,000 dollars need to be evenly distributed in nine months, the first two months focused on the design, the next six months will need to convert the design into products, the rest of the time is testing and updating.

With the server provider in the 2002 market, Schippers said Zuckerberg spent about 3000 dollars a month on the server in the first year of Facebook, and in 2006, it turned out to be 10 million dollars a month, because FACEB The data that ook designed is too massive.

Given Facebook's growth rate, Schippers estimates that Facebook now spends as much as $30 million a month on servers, so that millions of tens of millions of of startups ' financing looks less rosy.

WhatsApp

"In order to launch an MVP prototype like WHATSAPP, at least the basic functionality needs to be done, such as phone number authentication, which costs about 120,000 dollars." Ryan Matzner explains that Matzner is the strategy director for a mobile development company Fueled*, whose users include Elevatr, Ribbon, UrbanDaddy, JackThreads, and so on.

In addition to the 120,000 dollar cost of prototyping, Matzner said another 120,000 dollars would be needed to fix the design and branding, and then add a 25,000-dollar product to test iterations and improve stability.

So in total, WhatsApp alone will cost about 500,000 dollars and 9 months of time.

Uber

As Huge's vice president of engineering, Artem Fishman has helped build nyc.gov, revolt.tv and ted.com redesign. Huge's team studied Uber's data on Crunchbase, a San Francisco company that spent 50 million of billions of dollars, and received 258 million dollars in funding from Google and Benchmark this August. Fishman said:

When people ask you to create a model like Uber at least how much resources, my general answer is not much, according to Uber in the early days, an MVP probably need about 1.5 million dollars of money.

But the road to expansion is costly, both at the technical and market levels, but the problem of local vehicle regulation is far more important to Uber this type of service than the cost of expansion.

Pinterest

Sam Mathews thinks that the core function of the picture Weibo Pinterest is relatively simple. Mathews is the founder of Neverbland, a brand promotion company, and in his eyes, a four-person team can develop Pinterest prototypes in 4 months, costing only 120,000 dollars.

But when Pinterest's users grew to 1 million to 75 million, the cost began to stop, and it was not about the scale of Pinterest, but about its economies of scale. Mathews estimates that the current Pinterest needs about 150 employees and spends nearly 2 million dollars a month to keep its current product scale.

Shopify

In order to replicate the e-commerce platform shopify,mathews tasks cost at least between 250,000 and 300,000 dollars, and if you already have very powerful designers and developers.

Some, such as the maintenance of Shopify APIs and the cost of providing a server for users to build stations, are not counted, Mathews says:

Usually a product like Shopify, you need to consider user fees and development expenses in the process of making a decision, but if you just copy the Shopify product model completely, you only need 4-6 months.

Using Paul Graham's article "How to Start a", Mathews said: "In order to create a complex product, you first have to create a simple prototype, if you want to skip this step, it is absolutely unworkable."

In fact, to create a product like Shopify, the problem is that it was created over 7 years of continuous updating iterations, with too much user feedback and market changes, and even if you really copy the product that looks like Shopify, its internal operating patterns and systems That you can never copy.

Angry Birds

This is the only game app on our list, and we invited DJ Saul,istrategy Labs CMO to answer the questions. IStrategy Labs is an online consultant to help create products like Grandstand and Social Rogue. Saul said:

First you need to take into account the cost of time, including branding, even logo design color matching, and a very important UX user experience, especially for the game itself. You need some very experienced cross-platform game designers and engineers, not to mention the cost of testing your compatibility after you've entered the Android platform.

Saul expects that if, in order to replicate an angry bird, he needs 20 teams and more than a year, each person's annual salary is 110,000 dollars, a total budget of 2.2 million dollars plus other costs. Not to mention that if you want to rely on the outside consultancy, it will cost 0.5 times times more.

Tumblr

According to Saul's point of view, TUMBLR is easier to replicate than Angry Birds, and you don't need designers and developers in the direction of the game, but the final Test update task is no different.

TUMBLR now has a total of 140 million blogs, Saul says:

The biggest problem is the server, the other is mainly in the product promotion, I need about 15 cross-platform developers and a year to complete, an average of 110,000 dollars per person, a total of at least 1.65 million dollars.

Vine: What is an MVP?

When people have been accustomed to the "MVP", we have a different position on it, MVP in fact, we think is good enough to be able to put the market to attract users of products, the purpose is to accumulate early users.

Mobile User experience and design consulting company worry free Labs CEO Paul Choi said. To build a Vine Mvp,choi said he estimated that it would take 125,000 dollars to 175,000 dollars, and 4-6 months of design development time:

For Vine, you need to develop a back-end system to store users ' videos and a front-end interface to make it easy for users to socialize with video.

So those who are now considering creating a video product must take into account the cost of the server. But there are also some back-end service providers like Amazon Web services and Parse that can help you reach the 40 million user phase as quickly as possible. Brain Badillo, vice president of business worry free, expects products like Vine to cost more than $50,000 a month on the server.

Summary

All of these web-end and mobile-end products have been in the market for a long time, short for a few months, and a few years long. The calculation of the cost of copying them is very complicated, because it needs to be refined to a designer, developer, or product manager recruiting, and each company has a different strategy in this area, so the cost of the server alone is not much representative.

On the other hand, the distribution and promotion of products is also a huge expense, but it is also very difficult to estimate that each product is very different. Now the steps of entrepreneurship are actually very low, many entrepreneurs with 100,000 of dollars to start a good, but they are faced with the same problem: how to make the brand, and in the right time to find the user, the previous distribution channels have always been the key to product success. Paul Murphy, vice president of Betaworks, said:

The cottage is simple, the hardest part is not the technical side, but how you can find a pattern that matches your own, and we could create an MVP of any of these products, using the existing open source SDK, framework, and basic design that can be done in a weekend programming marathon.

Sure, even if you have 1 million dollars now, you can't replicate Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, but you can build on them and spend millions of on a completely different product, which is common.

As a passionate entrepreneur, you want to create disruptive products that have newer and better features than simple replication, which is the next Jack Dorsey (Twitter), David Karp (TUMBLR), Kevin Systrom ( Instagram) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) will do.

"Good ideas come from countless ideas, you just have to throw away the bad ones"--linus Pauling