Our collaborators have Talent
Interview with Mustapha, Peaks consultant, full stack JS Angular developer and guitar player, who created the Fretboard application, to learn the guitar while having fun.
The application is developed in Angular with ngxs for state management and the Ionic framework for certain UI elements and especially to easily generate a mobile application for the stores. Part of the application to verify payments is made in Node.js and is hosted on Heroku. Finally the pwa and the analytics are hosted at Firebase.
How did you start your project?
At first, my idea was purely personal. So I started by developing my tool to learn notes on the fretboard via a web platform, in a very basic version developed in Typescript using Angular, hosted on Firebase, without any design element and very inaccessible. I shared it as is with the community of guitar players with whom I used to exchange on REDDIT. It is thanks to their very positive feedback that I decided to go further. The encouragement was such that I started from a blank page. I took over the entire code to clean it and facilitate its maintenance over time. I enriched my concept by bringing a playful character and much more design to my tool.
Gamification: the essential ingredient.
If the addition of the "Game" factor in the equation was obvious to give wings to my application, the implementation was going to be much less clear... Indeed, I had to spend very long hours or even nights document myself on the subtleties of the art of mobile gaming to understand them, master them and integrate them into my project. Among them: the implementation of a progression system, the definition of rewards, the possibility of unlocking levels, integrating animations, flashes and fun... Of course, all of this included the necessary reflection around UX associated with these elements. World hitherto totally unknown to me. Indeed, thinking about the UX of a business application is one thing, doing it for a game is another. So there too I trained myself to be more relevant on the design, the choice of colors, the shape of the buttons, the icons... Icons that I even learned to create from scratch, not finding what I was looking for on the Internet. And I would say that they are the ones who fundamentally changed the spirit of the solution. Who would've believed that…?
How did you envision the monetization of your app?
Here too, I discovered an area that was completely unknown to me until then! That of digital marketing and the economic models of apps on Apple. I finally opted for a fairly classic model: a free version of the application that provides access to all the features. In particular the board allowing you to follow your progress. 2 purchase options are possible: a monthly subscription or a one-shot purchase. Since March 2021, I have recorded more than 80 purchases, 80% of which have chosen "one payment". I follow the evolution of subscriptions via Analytics which allows me to analyze the behavior and origin of my users (mainly located in the United States).
What are your plans for Fretboard Learning in the future?
- Put the app on Android Play Store. For the moment it only exists on the Apple Store because of the complexity of designing it in the Androit version, in particular on the purchase management side. But I'm not giving up!
- Put the PWA on Microsoft Store (manage apuements with Stripe)
- Multi-language: at this stage the app is entirely “in English”. Indeed, I preferred to address the English-speaking market as a priority, the most important in terms of “digital”. But I already have requests to translate it into other languages.
- Advertising / Marketing: I will study the possibility of creating advertising slots on Facebook soon to increase the visibility of the application and better target potential users.
Thank you Mustapha for this feedback and long life to Fretboard Learning. And for interested guitar players, it's here: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/fretboard-learning/id1554316449
