Digital Dope: Doly (Celebrating Black Entrepreneurs in Tech)

Ideas are free. The cost of developing those ideas, however, typically is not. I’ve had quite a few friends that have had amazing app ideas. I myself had a pretty awesome idea and even went through a local accelerator program where my idea was touted as an innovative and creative way to forge connections amongst people with like interests. It had all the sauce for success. I even had the opportunity to sit down with a financial expert who helped me work out a plan that projected $1 million dollars in revenue in year 5, with just a $50,000 investment. Unfortunately, that’s where my idea died…or at least sustained a life-threatening injury that kept it from ever growing wings.

The barrier to entry to create and sustain mobile apps is extremely high. Even if you can develop an app inexpensively, there’s the cost of continued maintenance, hosting, and app store commissions. Oh, and don’t forget marketing expenses. Without a marketing budget, your app will never get in front of the eyes it needs to grow a user base to pay the bills.

African American founder, Bruce Hamilton has invented a solution to help with that problem. Doly extends the capacity to create a mobile app to anyone who can afford to fork over $49.99 per month or $499.99 per year, which provides an infinitely better cost of admission to the world of app development.

Doly allows you to create your own app within minutes (maybe hours in reality) without any knowledge of coding. Dolly is an expansive platform that offers a responsive drag and drop builder, secure hosting, and a real-time analytics dashboard.

Bruce’s vision to alleviate the conditions that hinder entrepreneurs and aspiring tech founders by providing such a vast platform at a nominal cost is one that should be praised. In his interview with Rolling Out Magazine, he even remarks that his chief aim is not necessarily to make money, but rather to provide a useful tool for entrepreneurs and creatives to get their ideas out into the world.

Bruce’s idea stemmed from countless conversations that he had with would-be app founders, whose app store dreams were deflated once they found out that typical app development costs range from $50,000-$150,000. Bruce went on to create the app builder platform Doly, which has enabled and will continue to enable people who otherwise may not have the means and resources to build an app, to actually see their ideas actually come to fruition.

Doly is just one of the many products created under Bruce Hamilton’s Culturify company which endeavors to create numerous products, brands, and services which fuse music, culture, technology, and entertainment. We can clearly see that Bruce Hamilton isn’t one of those people that will be a one-hit wonder in the world of digital entrepreneurship. We look forward to seeing what Bruce will cook up next, but in the meantime, I’m heading straight to Doly to build my first app.