Hi Entrepreneurs of Reddit! I'm a 17 year old kid who dreams of running his own businesses in the future. Right now I'm in the 'learning phase' and aim to read a lot of books and learn sales and digital marketing.
I am pretty confident that I want to run a tech-focused business in the future, and my main problem is whether I should learn web app development or app development as although I have many ideas of what I want to do I don't want to make a commitment until I have the skills and knowledge necessary to make an informed decision. I used to think that I could just find a technical CEO in the future and focus on building my Business skills, but I think it would be wise to understand the tech-side of things in order to better lead a tech-centered team and to not heavily rely on my cofounder, if I get one.
TLDR: Should I Focus on Web App Development? Mobile App Development? Or neither for now?
Should I learn Web App or Mobile App first?(Question is for Successful Tech Entrepreneurs)
byu/GTXG inEntrepreneur
Posted by GTXG
5 Comments
Honestly? Start with web dev.
It’s way easier to learn, and you can build things faster without dealing with app stores or two different codebases.
Most startup ideas begin as simple web apps anyway. It’s the quickest way to test if your idea actually matters before you invest months into it.
Once you get the hang of building for the web, picking up mobile later feels way less intimidating.
The biggest skill when running a tech business company is building something people want. This dictates the platform or distribution by which you fulfill that want. In other words, one of the problems with your approach right now is your focussing on the technology first rather than the business case it needs to be the other way around.
If you’re selling a consumer software product, there’s a high likelihood that you would be building a mobile app because in a B2C market, the primary venue of computing which most people consume is through their mobile phone. Whereas if you are building a B2B product like a treasury management application you’re probably going to want to focus on building a comprehensive web application and then a nice to have mobile app at some point.
The problem in both of these cases is that we haven’t been able to validate the business case to validate that the product is actually necessary or desired before we build anything. Technology always serves the business case.
If you’re looking to understand at a high level, how a software product works from a technical perspective because you hope that will give you better vantage point for decision-making in a business context, then just focus on building any form of software. In other words, try to build a basic, CRUD application or mobile application to understand the mechanics of how these pieces of software work, rather than saying because I know X technology I’m going to build Y business.
Many people building software products today are using vibecoding platforms like lovable.dev to build basic MVP’s of their application so this can shortcut the need to learn to build something if you’re just trying to sit in the business role make some deals and get going.
Start with a web app and after a while once you become comfortable create a mobile app similar to it to get used to the process.
Web first, no question. You can validate your idea and get paying customers faster without waiting for App Store approvals or dealing with platform-specific builds.
web dev,
bcz playstore is really nice