At Mad Turtle Media, we develop Facebook Apps. Our Apps are games but many of the lessons we’ve learned can be applied to development of any type of app, from a mobile app for iPhone or Android to building a brand new social network.

We’ve developed two Facebook apps so far, have built our own social-crowdsourcing-network, and are currently working on another Facebook app. We’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way and are implementing those lessons on this current app.

It is important that whatever you do and however you structure your team you know your limitations very intimately. There is nothing worse than taking on too much and when it is too late you realize Task A is not going to be complete. So whatever it is you do, whether you are an artist, or a designer, or a coder make sure you don’t assign yourself work outside of that skill set.

Crowdsourcing works differently than traditional outsourcing. Let’s say you need a logo, so you post on gridbeat.com (that’s our crowdsourcing network, its specifically for game developers so it is very niche) or you go to crowdspring.com (not us but it has a larger userbase) and you post a job that everyone can see requesting a logo for Company A which needs to accomplish Objectives A, B, and C. People who are interested submit their work, and you choose from the submissions which one is best and pay that person. Everyone else can try again later, or if you saw someone you liked you can touch base to find out about outsourcing straight to them.

That is one major breakthrough for us. When you find someone who is good, reaching out to them and having their contact information is always good . This is a major advantage because instead of meeting with some freelancers or outsourcing firms and hoping the working relationship will work, you can see the work of potentially hundreds of people at once, select one, pay them, and now you have a relationship established and there is no period of wondering whether or not they are the right person.

The biggest difficulty in crowdsourcing is knowing how to break tasks down and managing the work as it is completed. Different people do things differently, one programmer may code using lots of for loops while another may never use one… I’m not sure how they would do that, but they might! So you need to have a plan of how everything will be brought together. This is where partners or a team come in.

Assuming you don’t know how to do everything (because if you did you would not be reading this but would be developing your app with no worries) find a partner who can figure out what you need to know. This could be a full time business partner, a friend who has the skill set you lack, or someone who you are outsourcing to. You don’t need to be able to code in C++ to understand how C++ functions, but if you don’t understand the functionality you’ll never be able to break it all down and manage the work flow.

When you have this knowledge and are breaking down tasks, then you can charge based on the task instead of by the hour. Since the tasks will be smaller than most tasks you can pay a smaller amount of money per task. This allows you to conserve money and only pay for absolutely what you need.

Determining what you need can be difficult, but developing an app is done with two goals. Launch and forget or launch and support. Considering this blog is about passive income you probably want to launch and forget. If, however, you are interested in getting your app out fast, and then assuming it gets the audience it should, you could put the funds from that app into developing the follow up app with the features that got left out of version one.

Crowdsourcing is a unique way of developing an app and can save you a lot of money but will require significant management and foresight. Know your product inside and out and have any knowledge holes filled with partners. There are crowdsourcing networks for everything from logos to music.

If you have any suggestions or questions I’d love to hear them!