Startup spend way too much time and too many resources on building native mobile apps for iOS and Android. In this post I want to convince you that you should be pouring resources building for web and mobile web instead, especially if you’re a startup with limited resources.

Building apps is sexy. But building websites will make your startup more likely to succeed.

Your parents think of startup as apps, so you can tell them about it. Maybe Apple will feature you in their next WWDC video. Then surely users will find the app and you’ll be on the road to riches.

Yet more than half of users download 0 apps per month:

51% of smartphone users download 0 apps per month. — Source: comScore

But most startups have already built apps, with tremendous sunk cost. In fact, the Apple App Store now has 2.1M apps on it, while on the Google Play Store you’re competing with 2.6M. This has led to an escalating battle of modal dialogs trying to get you to download the app. These are super annoying, and not what users came there to see.

“Please download our app”

If users came to a website, they likely went there to see the content they searched for, not to download their app. These type of product experiences feel like someone desperate to seal the deal on the first date.

If you’re a startup founder, you should be building for web instead of building apps. Maybe you’ve just raised angel funding, you have limited resources, and you’re trying to prioritize. You know that raising your Series A will require impressive traction.

Unless you’re building a ridesharing or scooter app which requires persistent background location (which the web doesn’t have), you should build for web.

At work, I get some amount of good-hearted ridicule for writing listicles such as these. But I couldn’t resist — here are 9 reasons why you should build a website, not an app:

1. One Platform, not Three

As the two platforms has become more complex, building both iPhone and Android apps most often requires hiring two separate engineering teams. Developing on the web means you’re only building on one platform.

2. Fast Release Cycles

It can take weeks to get your app through the Apple App Store, and you’re often subject to random nitpicks because you missed a detail in Apple’s guidelines. Back in the days of my first startup reMail, an important bugfix got delayed by days because Apple rejected the update due to me including a dollar amount in the product description. If you’re a mature company with resources for Q&A and documented release processes, that’s fine, but man it sucks as a startup to be twiddling your thumbs while a critical bug is destroying your metrics.

In contrast, web products can be deployed to the server with the push of a button.

3. People Underestimate what the Web can Do

People still mistakenly believe that the web doesn’t have crucial capabilities relative to mobile apps. But that’s often a misconception: