The enterprise app market "goldrush" is both more lucrative and less competitive than the consumer market, according to new research from Vision Mobile.
43 percent of enterprise app developers earn over $10K per month, more than double the figure for consumer app developers.
The report contrasts Slack, the office collaboration app, with WhatsApp, the chatting tool. Even though Slack may only have around 0.1 percent of WhatsApp’s user base, it produces around 100 times the revenue per user.
"It’s very hard to convince consumers to part with their cash for software and digital services," the report argues. "We can see this reflected in the revenues of developers who target enterprises versus those who target consumers."
What’s more, the number of developers primarily targeting the enterprise market is growing, up from 16 percent to 20 percent in the last six months.
The research also suggested that the transition to enterprise-led app production strategy is often impeded by the high overheads of installing a sales team. However, the report advised that the market is far less competitive, which might attract more players than the saturated consumer market.
"A common complaint from consumer app developers is that selling to enterprises requires a sales team, which is both expensive and difficult to scale", the report states.
"This is true, although demand for good mobility solutions for enterprises outstrips supply at the moment and really well-executed products and services are getting a lot of word-ofmouth marketing. Also, the competition for consumer attention is sofierce that getting a large user base for any app is often prohibitively expensive."
The report surveyed over 8000 developers in 143 countries.
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