Should you make an app?

Tom Scott is one of my favorite YouTubers. (I know a lot of nerdy YouTube channels these days.) He is clear, knowledgeable, and a bit like what I’d make on YouTube if I’d started eight years ago and was British.

And since I think that a lot of WordPress folks may either be app-dreamers, or dealing with app-dreamers as clients, I found a great excuse to link to a YouTube channel which is mostly about very-other topics.

The series is a great summary of interviews and conversations about the marketing and other realities of making an app that too rarely succeeds. I think the series is great. It’s not over-optimistic “you can do it!” cheer-leading, but nor is it fatalistic “all apps are garbage” time wasting. There’s a lot more to building an amazing app than a few hours of video (even from someone as concise and clear as Tom) can cover, but so far from my watching it’s a great start to previewing the reality of what a successful app would take. He covers a lot of things–prototyping, validation, technology choices, etc–in enough detail that you’re getting off to a good start.

Here’s the trailer for the (totally free) playlist: