Where do you find inspiration for a great app idea? Look to your own life.

This was the case for Martin Mazanec, who co-founded AI-based workout planner Fitify after his experience of back pain and finding relief in personalised exercise plans; Maciej Lobodzinski, who took inspiration from a Steve Jobs quote and created mental health app Stoic; and Balint Orosz, who co-founded notes app Craft.

They talked to us about their journeys to becoming app developers and shared their thoughts on what makes a successful app.

Martin: A great app must be simple and everyone needs to understand it – self-explanatory, so you don’t need to build tutorials. You don’t just want to build a cool app that looks great, but it’s not solving anyone’s issue, then it’s not a long-term business.

Maciej: The product needs to be well crafted. It’s all about the small moments of delight from beginning to end – from the visuals to how quickly it opens.

Balint: To be successful in the long term it needs to provide some sort of lasting value. It needs to be simple, high quality and user-friendly. We’re in a quite complex space and consumers have an increasing threshold of what they deem worthy of their time.

Martin: Branded design is not our number one priority. We’re more focused on having a good functional design, and functional means that the workout planner and the workout builder must be the best possible. Still, they do have a very consistent style that looks pretty cool. We probably need to focus on this more in the future because, in the long term, you definitely have to be building a brand through design.

Balint: Design used to be the major competitor differentiator. Now a great design is part of that checkbox you need to hit. Having a visual style helps you communicate and connect with consumers. Your brand comes alive in that design. So I think it’s very important, but I wouldn’t say it’s a singular secret sauce.

Maciej: We make the app for people and we want them to feel they own it, they can personalise it. If you have an onboarding where you can personalise the app, it influences your emotions towards it.

Balint: Users want to make the app feel their own. Personalisation is a big wave because we’re accepting technology is now a part of our everyday lives. How much AI can drive that personalisation and how much is human-generated options? We’ll see quite soon as it rapidly evolves.

Martin: I wouldn’t think about customising the icon or the fonts in the app. For us it means that you have your personal training plan and our conversational chatbot is increasing our retention and conversion rate by tens of percentage points, so it seems pretty promising.

Maciej: When we added AI features our engagement and retention skyrocketed because the app changed from you’ll have the same thing that everyone else has to everything is prepared just for me. There’s this layer of easy personalisation, but we waited a whole year before adding AI to understand if it’s a hype cycle or not and the privacy rules around it.

Balint: As technology gets more personal in spaces such as mental health, AI implementation gets more challenging. The question is about trust, right? Do we trust AI or a human expert who recommends something. Currently, there’s so much bad news around AI that I think there needs to be a level of trust built around these tools for us to integrate them. That’s the journey the entire industry is on now. How we can build trust in these systems?