Should You Build An App Or A Website First?

A founder-friendly framework for deciding where your first rupee of development budget should go.

Almost every founder we meet wants an app. Most of them need a website first.

Ask one question: is the interaction one-off or repeated? If a customer will interact with you once or twice a year — a plumber, a wedding photographer, a consultant — a fast website wins. Nobody installs an app for an annual transaction.

If the interaction is weekly or daily, and especially if it benefits from notifications, offline access or the camera, an app earns its place.

There is a middle path we recommend often: a progressive web app. It installs to the home screen, sends notifications and costs a fraction of native development. Ship that, validate demand with real usage data, then invest in native once you know what people actually use.