What To Know When Building An App For Your Business With Eric Colbert
Table Of Contents
The Future Of Technology
There are so many factors that go into creating a positive user experience and visually pleasing design for a business website and e-commerce. It is hard to know where to begin.
Recently, our CEO Stacy Jones sat down with an expert in e-commerce platforms and the future of technology. In this blog post, Hollywood Branded learns how to find success with eCommerce marketing from Eric Colbert, the COO and partner of SPARK6.
A Little More About Eric
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: I'd love to have you start off by sharing what got you to here today, where you're doing technology and app building and websites, and you're really helping drive how people see businesses?
Answer: Yeah, well, it definitely hasn't been a linear adventure to get here. So my background actually back in college was in psychology where I studied at UCLA and I graduated from there and made my parents incredibly proud by working at Tower Records right after that. That dates me a little bit. Maybe some of your listeners don't know what Tower Records is, but hopefully they do. Because I got into the music industry, I was a performer in a band and you get to travel all over the country and I needed a job that afforded me that kind of flexibility and I was in music. So it kind of made sense. So kind of after pursuing music for several years and kind of getting my taste of what that is like and kind of being on the road, I realized that really wasn't for me and decided to kind of go back to school and work on my masters.
Question: When you're working with a company. And you've certainly ... Sesame street or Melinda and Bill Gates foundations, you are certainly working with companies that are a little different than necessarily your brick and mortars, who do care about perception and who do care about how they too are impacting the world. How is the approach different for you when you're looking at how they can develop technology, websites and apps, and what is it different versus the general normal? Or is it not?
Answer: Yeah, I mean, I think so many companies whether it's their main objective or not obviously have an awareness and to it's in a box of like greenwashing, when being environmentally friendly was a huge initiative for a lot of companies and they just kind of had this checkbox. Like, all right, we recycle our office paper and stuff like that. But I think as companies mature and as public awareness is becoming more keen. And obviously with some of the cancel culture, I think companies are really afraid to make some missteps. And so they take their values seriously and where they can obviously make an impact they do. But for us, it's a little easier cause we go after and try to work with, or attract clients that are just already doing that.
Question: So when you're working with one of these companies, what's your first step, what's your first approach? How do you start off the relationship?
Answer: Well, we really want to understand the business objectives, because we are entrepreneurs at heart, both myself and my business partner. We really just take a very collaborative approach. We treat our clients like our partners and obviously they have their domain expertise and have an idea for what this digital product is going to be. And then we just try and massage that and try and draw out like, well, what are the business objectives? How are the users, the people that are going to be on your platform, how are they going to want to interact? And so that's really important. We take a lot of time when we're designing and building a platform is to really get inside that user's head, the personas. And that's where I get to geek out from my old psychology days of behavior and understanding the motivations and how someone's going to feel when they are interacting with your digital product.
Question: What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people make when they're like, Eric, I want to make an app. I want to build a website. Where does it kind of go off the rails?
Answer: It goes off the rails with just so many assumptions that go untested. So, again, it kind of goes back to let's scale back to what is an MVP, what is the challenge or the problem that you're solving and testing it even before we move into building or designing, there's a lot of ideas that are out there that people think can be solved. If I just had this mobile app, it would be great. And we encourage people to like to go out in the real world with just a pen and paper and try and accomplish the same thing, whether it's like, oh, I want to build like a dog-walking app for example.
Question: You have your own app that you've designed as well. So of course you're the tinkerer, you work on everyone else's, but you have to tinker away at your own. How has this been a different experience for you, because it is different working on your own versus on a client's?
Answer: It is. This is my very first product taking it from ideation all the way through development and through launch. It's really exciting. It kind of humbles you in terms of the painstaking of getting your ideas onto paper and in design. Then we have clients obviously that are changing their minds all the time, even when we're in development, which is the wrong time to do that. But I find myself doing that too, because it's different once you start using it. That's the whole thing about being agile is like, just get it out there, start trying it. You will come up with different ideas and ways and things don't always materialize the way you thought they would once you're actually out there.
Check Out The Podcast!
Eric has SO MUCH great information from his experience with leveraging technology to help drive business goals, so check out the full podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from his advice and expertise!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
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- How To Effectively And Efficiently Grow A Startup With Hamlet Azarian
- How To Build Your Expertise By Providing Education With Terry Hale
- Sharing Your Brand Story with Jude Charles
- Getting Real About Real Estate Investing with Lane Kawaoka
- Obtaining Corporate Credit To Grow Your Business With Andrew Rey