What-Not-To-Build: Why a new Serbian first-aid app isn't the right move

TL;DR

I scoped a mobile app to teach Serbian users first aid through quizzes and reference content. Before writing a line of code, I researched the competitive landscape and found that the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies already runs almost exactly this product — free, offline, gamified, actively maintained, with 1M+ downloads — and localizes it into new languages by partnering with national Red Cross societies. Serbian isn’t yet one of the 27 supported languages, but that’s a gap IFRC can close far faster and cheaper than I could build a competing app. I recommended not building it, and explain why below, including what would change that call.

The history

The year was 2018 and I was chatting with a colleague during our coffee break. I told him how much I wished I knew first aid. We discussed how that is not told in schools and unless you deliberately apply to the Red Cross and attend a course for volunteers, you can’t really get educated. Best case scenario is you wait until you are 18 and eligible to enrol in a driving school where, as a part of curriculum, you’ll have some basic education. Theoretically it will be theoretical and practical, but practically — it is only theoretical. The test is done on paper, and pretty much everyone I talked to about this confirmed that they wouldn’t feel confident if faced with a real medical emergency and had to help. So that day when I returned home from work, I created a GitHub repo named “first aid app” and never touched it again.

Almost ten years later, this idea popped into my mind, and I decided to do a case study and answer my question — would it (still) be feasible to try to create a mobile app with first aid tips and learning quizzes in Serbian?

The idea

If I personally needed to mobilize a broken arm or perform rescue breathing tomorrow, I’d be relying on what I’ve seen in movies. The idea: a mobile app focused purely on teaching first aid: quizzes, spaced-repetition-style flashcards, emergency contact directories, and maps of nearby services. Explicitly not positioned as an emergency-response tool, to sidestep the liability and design complexity of real-time medical guidance.

Another important thing to mention is that we would want this app to be localized in Serbian and available in both Latin and Cyrillic script. That matters because an English-only app already excludes a huge chunk of the audience we’re trying to reach. There are examples of mobile apps that gained significant traction even though the model wasn’t revolutionary — Noćima, a Serbian dating app, is one: it grew largely on the appeal of simply being in the local language rather than any radically new feature set — which suggests the app being in Serbian could play a similarly significant role here.

We’re not interested in monetization in any form — ads feel tonally off for a first-aid app, and a paywall on safety education is a hard sell besides.

The market pain point

Is the market pain point as open as it looks? Partially, but it’s narrower than “no first aid education exists in Serbia.”

• Serbian driving schools do run a mandatory first-aid course and exam as a prerequisite for a license. So there is an existing, mandatory, country-wide touchpoint. The issue is that it’s just shallow and one-off, with no reinforcement afterward.
• Several driving schools (autoskolapravo.rs, autoskolastop.rs, and others) already publish free practice tests for that exact exam online. That’s a strong, specific, high-intent demand signal — but it’s also already being served, just not natively as a polished app.
• Red Cross Serbia’s actual first-aid courses (as opposed to the app) are volunteer/interest-based. That gap is real, but it’s a training-delivery gap, not really an app-shaped gap; an app doesn’t substitute for hands-on practice like CPR technique or bandaging, which is arguably the part people most need and most distrust learning from a screen.

The competitive landscape

We can safely assume that in the past 10 years (while my GitHub repo was collecting dust) someone published a first aid app. So the question here is not “does a first-aid app exist?” but rather, “is there a good, free, reliable, and actively maintained first-aid app available in Serbian?” Let’s take a look at the competition.

Before scoping features, I looked for existing solutions in three places: the Serbian market directly, a comparable regional market (Slovenia), and the global reference point for this exact product category.

App	Publisher	Downloads	Rating	Last updated	Serbian?	Model
Prva pomoć	Red Cross Belgrade	5,000+	4.9★ (129 reviews)	Nov 2021	Cyrillic only	Manual/reference, not learning-focused. Android only
Prva pomoč Kviz	Indie dev (Slovenia)	5,000+	3.1★ (10 reviews)	Oct 2024	No (Slovenian)	Quiz app for driving-exam prep
First Aid – IFRC	International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies	1,000,000+	4.2★ (9,370 reviews)	June 2026 (actively maintained)	No, 1 of 27 languages, but actively localized country-by-country	Free, offline, quizzes with shareable badges, safety tips, emergency-number integration, country-specific content built with local Red Cross societies

Well, it looks like the IFRC app is almost perfect. Functionally, it aligns with our idea. It’s already built and published, already available on both iOS and Android, already gamified with quizzes and badges, already offline-capable, already free, already regularly updated, and already localized for dozens of countries. This is where the “almost” part becomes important: there is dedicated content for Romania, Belgium, Egypt, Cyprus, and others in collaboration with those countries’ Red Cross societies; however, there is no Serbian language option yet.

Our hypothesis that an app can go from irrelevant to popular in a market purely by adding the local language is the exact dynamic that could sink this idea rather than justify it. IFRC or the Serbian Red Cross, its natural local partner, could add Serbian at any point, for a fraction of what building a competing app from scratch would cost us, thereby instantly erasing our app’s differentiation. And we don’t want to build against a competitor who can outspend, out-maintain, and out-distribute us and who can close our one real gap with a translation sprint.

The two apps that are Serbian-market-relevant (Red Cross Belgrade’s app, and by analogy the Slovenian quiz app) are both small and not as popular as the IFRC one — evidence that there’s a real content/localization gap, but not evidence that the gap is big enough to sustain a standalone product, since even the closest attempts haven’t grown much.

Feasibility

Technically, this is genuinely easy relative to most app ideas. The harder costs are actually non-technical. Let’s look at them in detail.

Content

Content is static and can be built with a simple stack (even a PWA or a template-based Flutter/React Native app), no backend complexity, no real-time data beyond maybe a maps API for hospital/AED locations.

Distribution

Distribution via Play Store/App Store is a solved problem.

Accuracy and liability

Even framed as “education, not emergency guidance,” we would still be teaching people how to (for example) mobilize a broken arm or perform rescue breathing. Getting this wrong has real consequences and reputational risk, and disclaiming liability in app-store text doesn’t eliminate the need for actual medical review. This means we need a qualified reviewer (ideally a partnership with Red Cross Serbia or a medical professional), not just translated Wikipedia content.

Maintenance

First-aid guidance changes (e.g., CPR ratio updates over the years). A static app that goes stale can quickly stop being trustworthy.

Localization

Cyrillic vs. Latin script matters a lot here. This could be a real, fixable gap if we pursue it, but it is a content and QA cost (not a purely technical one).

Scalability

Market size

Serbia alone is a small market (~6.6M people) for a free app with no obvious monetization path.

Regional expansion (Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia) is linguistically plausible given the shared Serbo-Croatian roots. This could meaningfully increase addressable market, but each of those countries likely has (or could easily get) the same IFRC localization option, so the platform-risk problem scales right along with the market.

Monetization

(purely analytical; as stated above, our idea is not to monetize the app, ever)

Realistic monetization, if any, looks more B2B/institutional than consumer. Some examples could include licensing content to driving schools, corporate workplace-safety training, or a paid partnership with Red Cross Serbia.

Decision scorecard

Let’s evaluate the idea against the criteria we’d want any product bet to clear, rather than relying on gut feel.

Criterion	Signal	Read
Unmet user need	Partial	Real gap in ongoing/retained first-aid education; but one-off mandatory driving-school course already exists
Competitive whitespace	Weak	IFRC app already delivers this exact concept free, at scale, and can localize into Serbian faster than a new entrant can build
Technical feasibility	Strong	Static content, simple stack, low build risk
Non-technical cost	Weak	Requires real medical review, ongoing content maintenance, and Latin/Cyrillic QA — not a one-time build
Monetization path	Weak	No credible consumer revenue model for safety education; institutional/B2B licensing is the only plausible path
Market size / scalability	Weak–Moderate	Serbia alone is small (~6.6M); regional (ex-Yu) expansion is linguistically feasible but inherits the same platform risk

Bottom line

While the problem identified is real, as a standalone consumer app built from scratch, this idea is… not worth pursuing.

The best version of this idea already exists at global scale, is free, is actively maintained, and can neutralize our only real advantage (localization) faster and cheaper than we can build a competing product.

The narrower, genuinely underserved niche (driving-exam-prep quizzing) is real but small.

What would change this decision

If Red Cross Serbia wanted a build partner for localized content (rather than doing it in-house or via IFRC’s existing pipeline), or if user interviews surfaced a specific, underserved need the IFRC app structurally can’t meet — e.g. deep integration with the driving-school exam curriculum — the calculus would shift from “competing with a funded incumbent” to “filling a specific hole a generalist app leaves open.” That’s the kind of signal I’d want before revisiting this.