The Elusive Female: Developing for Women

Females have long been an untapped market when it comes to tech and software.  Game publishers know this better than anyone, but nearly every corner of entertainment software would like to attract more female customers.  Glowdot Productions “Zen Jar” app for the iPhone seems to have accidentally stumbled onto the secret.  I’ll take a look at why the app appeals to women.

There are several reasons why you might want to develop software for a female audience, not the least of which is that they comprise 50% of the population.  I used to joke when I was younger that some day I would invent something that every single person in China would need, and sell it for a buck.  At the time, that would have meant $1 billion in revenues.  It would have been a better comment to create something every woman needs — currently you’d bring in $3.25 billion.

The actual audience, of course, is much smaller, but the principle is the same.  While men are already spending themselves dry buying software, gadgets, and the like, women still typically spend their money elsewhere.  It is still an untapped market.  Make a game that appeals to women, and you’ll pretty much be the only player.

The iPhone, however, is a much different playing field.  Women are buying apps like crazy.  And yet most developers I talk to still have a very male centric view.  They conjure up ideas that will appeal to male (or at best, neutral) buyers, largely because they, themselves are male.  We typically sit down and think, “what would I want?” when we brainstorm, right?

A month ago I released an app in the app store called Zen Jar.   It’s a simple concept, really.  Compose a short text message and stick it in a virtual jar.  Someone else pulls the message out, and replies to it.  And a conversation ensues.  There is nothing inherently feminine about that concept, and yet 90% of Zen Jar users are women.

Why is that?

First a little back story.  I’ve been developing software independently for around 7 years. Most of those years were spent on the web, where I would come up with an interesting idea for a web community, build it the way I wanted it to work, and then either watch it immediately fail, or watch it become overrun by males who, eventually, wandered off when it was clear there were no females around.  This is the way things work.  I always had it in my head that you need to build a community of women and then alert the males.

Online communities are like ladies night.  Fill the house with women, and the men will eventually line the street waiting to get in.  Problem for us guys is, we generally have no idea what kind of club a woman wants to spend time in.

Zen Jar, I think, is appealing to women for two reasons: it is simple, and it is deep.

Now simple isn’t just a quality women look for, and it took me 7 years to figure this out.  Men want simple too.  You can build an app with every bell and whistle you can imagine, and it’s just going to look like some alien clock to your users.  People want simple.  They’ll tell you they want features x, y and z, but when you give those features to them, they’ll get irritated by the complexity.  This is so key to modern software development: Simple is better.  Less is more.  Think of the big successes in recent years — they have all been stripped down versions of much more complicated systems.  Twitter is the most banal thing you could possibly imagine — in fact, it is stupid beyond belief if you think about it.  And yet you can’t go out for a gallon of milk without hearing someone talk about tweeting.

But depth is the thing that is uniquely female.  Zen Jar is, at its core, a text messaging service.  Except the single most important feature of a messaging system is actually removed.  You have no idea who you are talking to.  But more importantly it is about deep, soulful conversations.  It’s about being able to bare your soul without consequence.  The UI, graphics and sound effects are infinitely more important than the function.  If the UI consisted of a text view, a keyboard, and a send button, I would certainly have room to cram some interesting features into the app, but I would have completely lost the essence of it.  It is a jar and a piece of paper.  What makes the Zen Jar interesting is what you put into it, not what I, as the developer, put into it.

There are two points I am trying to make here.  If you want your app to appeal to women:

1. Start with an idea that will appeal to women.
2. Wrap it up in a simple, deep and meaningful package.  Abandon utility and cross out most of the features on your list. Focus on form over function.

Point 1 sounds the hardest, but it’s actually the easiest.  Talk to women about what kind of application they would like.  Stop coming up with ideas while having a beer with your buddies.  Zen Jar was hatched in my brain while talking to my mom.  My second most popular app, Are You Compatible? was my sister’s idea.  And while developing both of these, I came up with Are You Beautiful?, my third most popular app (search the app store and check those out as well).

Point 2 is the hard part.  Take your useful idea and figure out how to wrap it up in a package that emphasizes the experience.  And if your app is a community, and you do build a community that is overwhelmingly female, it is a matter of time before the guys catch wind of it and turn out in droves.  I’m still waiting for this to happen with Zen Jar, but it is almost certainly on the horizon.