Live A Life Full Of Purpose

Paul Kemp: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. I love where this show takes me - around the world. It introduces me to so many inspiring founders and entrepreneurs, digging into great app stories.

Today's episode, it's with the founder of DonorSee ; he's got a wonderful app, he's got an inspiring story about making a change in the world. Gret Glyer, the founder of DonorSee, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Gret Glyer: Thank you, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here!

Paul Kemp: Thanks for coming on. Let's find out about DonorSee then... "Donor" being "donation", I guess. Tell us about the app and what you're doing to change the world.

Gret Glyer: Alright, so basically the idea behind DonorSee is to provide donors a way where they can see where their money is going. This is only on a massive scale, where some people are calling it the Uber for charity. On a transactional level, this is what your experience will be like:

….let's say you go on the app and you find a little girl in Malawi who needs hearing aids. She's never heard anything before, and she needs an 180-dollar bone conduction hearing aid; this is something that we have on our app all the time. So you go onto the app, you donate $180 and a week later you'll get a video of that girl hearing for the first time.

That's the same type of experience that you would have with almost anything. Let's say you donate towards a house - then you would get to see that person's house being built. Or you donate towards a little kid who needs a school uniform - you get to not only see the school uniform, but them going to school, getting their books, all that stuff.

Paul Kemp: What I love about this -- in the U.K. there's been a lot of controversy around some of the bigger charities, the way they use quite strong tactics to get their donations. And often, there's these huge charities, a lot of money goes through them, and it's a black box. We kind of never see what happens directly with our money. What difference does it make when you actually get to see physically what a difference your money is making?

Gret Glyer: On a statistical level, I can't share exactly... [unintelligible 00:13:24.17] just because we're not allowed to share that, but I'll tell you, the number of people who make repeat donations on our app is astronomically high for our industry.

For example, when someone comes to the app, they make a donation, they get to see feedback - a week later, feedback comes on their phone, they swipe it, they see this video of this girl hearing for the first time, and then all of a sudden it's like this light bulb goes off and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I gotta keep doing this! This is way better than anything I've done before." Because you're right, usually when you give to charity you get a thank-you e-mail, or you get some donor relations person saying, "We promise that your gift went to the right place", but you never get to actually see where it's going. We've had a hugely positive response in the two months that we've been launched so far.

Paul Kemp: That's why I love this industry. The amount of money in the mainstream charities, let's say - they could have easily done this with technology. But it takes someone with passion like yourself, who I assume is not extremely well-funded, but you're coming in and you're just disrupting the whole giving mechanism through technology and through apps. What's driving you to do this, Gret? I wondered about you, what's giving you the impetus to do this?

Gret Glyer: Sure. So I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is right outside of Washington DC - very wealthy area. I went to a private school for both high-school and college, and I was just always privileged. I always had the best life. I graduated from college with no debt, my parents paid for it, and I got a good job right away, and I was off to the races. I was working at this customer-service-oriented company, and they were telling me, "We're gonna fast track you, you're doing very well." It wasn't very satisfying to me, and eventually, after a year of working at this company, doing very well, making plenty of money, I said, "You know what, I can't do this anymore."

I left, and I went to Malawi, Africa. So I went from one of the richest areas in the entire world to one of the poorest areas in the entire world. In fact, in 2014 Malawi literally was the poorest country on the planet. That was shocking. When you see the level of poverty that is going on in the world, it's impossible -- I tell this to people all the time... If you live in the U.K. in London, or if you live in the U.S., you have no idea what extreme poverty looks like. It's just like a completely different planet.

I think seeing that and experiencing it for the very first time really gave me a lot of meaning and purpose that I hadn't had in my life for so long. Being able to see how small amounts of money can completely change someone's life or even change someone's life gave me a lot of motivation to say, "Okay, what can I do about this?" Because there's a lot of charities out there, but they're not doing good work. There's some that are doing good work, but on the whole, they're not transparent, and people are giving them money and they don't care where the money's going, and they don't get to see where it's going, so what can I do to change that?
When I came up with the idea for DonorSee, and ever since then, I've had a passion to turn the app into something that’ll make a real impact. An app that not only provides funding to people in need living overseas, but also changes how people in the first world see how they are making an impact.

Paul Kemp: That's what I love about his show as well - it can inspire anyone to make a difference. I've actually been to a lot of places with extreme poverty; in India's pockets of poverty, in North Africa... I've been to a lot of places. It is quite life-changing, isn't it? And a lot of us are digital nomads. Are you going to some of these places and seeing people actually working there, Westerners who are deciding to use those locations to work and then try and use their time to help out the local people?

Gret Glyer: Yeah, there's these aid workers living all over the planet. I lived in Malawi for three years and I'm back in the U.S. at the moment, and one of the things that you realize when you get over there... It's kind of this funny thing - I, Gret Glyer went over to Malawi, and it was a big decision in my life. It was life changing, I didn't know a single person over there. And I got over there, and there were actually lots of other Americans and lots of other Europeans. It was interesting to talk to each and every one of them because they were all there, they all have their own story where they decided to go overseas, and they're all very interesting people. I'm sure you met plenty of them when you were traveling to these places like India and North Africa. So there are lots of these people abroad, and they're all there for different reasons - sometimes it Peace Corps work, aid relief, all kinds of stuff.

Paul Kemp: Yeah, and actually some of it feels quite dangerous as well, in some pockets of those places. This is a show about apps and we have a lot of app entrepreneurs listening to this, people working for corporate jobs that tend to want to do side projects, or maybe actually work on their app full-time... I'd love to know the process that you took to get this off the ground, because it's one thing having an idea... In 2014 you had this idea - great, but how did you actually physically get the app built, how did you fund it? Did you do it yourself? Talk us through that story of how you got DonorSee off the ground.

Gret Glyer: Gotcha. Like I said, I lived in Malawi for three years and I was living off of about $600/month, so I was by no means living a lavish lifestyle. I had a house, electricity, Wi-Fi, that kind of stuff, but I wasn't rich - $600/month. I came up with the idea for the app actually this past January, and I spent a couple months really working on it and talking to different people who I respected in the tech industry. I had never done anything technical before, I'd never written a line of code before, but I really believed in this idea; it came into my mind, "the Uber for charities", and then I realized, "Okay, what is this? How is it gonna look? What's important about it? What's gonna make it tick?" and by March I had a really good idea and a really good plan for how I wanted to have this thing sustain itself, and also how I wanted it to look... I worked with designers and all that stuff.

First what I did was I went to UpWork and I hired a guy from Ukraine to build a very rudimentary version of the app using some streams that I had designed. That cost $7,000. UpWork is a website where you can go online and hire freelancers all over the world.

It wasn't a great version of the app, it was extremely buggy and glitchy, and you couldn't even use a credit card to make a donation, you had to have a Paypal account... All sorts of stuff were wrong with it, but what I was able to do is get a handful of people to start playing around with it, and then I showed it to some investors. These venture capitalists in Raleigh, North Carolina - I showed it to them and I asked them for a certain amount of money in exchange for equity. They offered me some money in exchange for some equity but it wasn't a very good deal, so I went to one of my mentors and I told him, "Hey, what should I do? These guys are offering me money and I think it's enough to help me get off the ground, but they want a lot of equity. What's your recommendation at this point?" He said I should take it. He said, "Gret, you're 26 years old and you have an idea that hasn't made a single dollar yet. These guys are offering you a lot of money for someone in your position. I would just take it."

I spent the night thinking about it and the next morning I was gonna call them up and say, "Thank you for the offer, I accept", but before I had the chance to do that, that mentor called me and he said, "Hey Gret, I was thinking about last night and I wanna give you the funding that you need for the deal that you want." So what he did was he and a bunch of his friends who are multi-millionaires, they're business partners and they're entrepreneurs on their own - what they did was they each chipped in about ten or twenty thousand dollars in exchange for a certain amount of equity and we raised about $150,000 altogether. I was able to use that money to hire some programmers to help us get the thing off the ground. That's the version you see in the App Store today; it was professionally developed by some people in Raleigh and a few other places.

Paul Kemp: How inspiring is that? On the day you were about to take the investment, your mentor comes through...? The two things I've learned from that is the importance of getting in front of investors and having a good pitch, but also the importance of having an excellent mentor.

Gret Glyer: Oh, yeah.

Paul Kemp: How did you keep the costs under control? Because even though you had a wonderful seed, an injection of cash, I'm guessing with the idea that you had, the app can run away from you in terms of costs, with all the features that you wanted to include. How did you manage the cost side of it?

Gret Glyer: Yeah, I've told this to several people... I probably saved tens of thousands of dollars on that side thanks to a friend of mine and also a mentor - his name is Scott Barstow, and he's got a podcast and a blog that you can check out. His whole thing is basically how do you not light your money on fire when you're building a tech startup. It's designed for people who are non-technical to give them enough background so they don't do that stuff. He really helped a lot out in that, and he gave me a lot of personal advice. The basic idea there was I had the really important stuff built stateside - the server and all of the background stuff was built state-side, and then we went overseas to build the frontend stuff.

Also, honestly, my app DonorSee is designed to help people and it has one of those missions that lots of people wanna get behind, so there were a lot of people who decided they wanted to help us for less than market value just because they felt that it was something where they could contribute to a meaningful cause using some of their talents. So that was another thing that helped our situation specifically.

Paul Kemp: What I'm learning from you there is don't be scared to ask, as well. If you have a real cause with your app, then just ask the people that are building it to really help out as well. It sounds great, it really does!

So you got to launch the app then, and often it is quite hard to get... Discovery - one of the biggest challenges the appster tribe have here is with app discovery. Were there any big things that has happened to get your app noticed, get it out there? Because I noticed there's a lot of people putting money through, donating and stuff like that... Were there any big breakouts that you've had?

Gret Glyer: There is a number of things... Some of it was just a stroke of luck and some of it was making my own luck... A week after we launched there was this random friend of mine on Twitter who reached out to a guy named Tom Woods who has a really big podcast in the states, and he's like "Hey, Tom, you should check out this app" and Tom was like, "Yeah, sure. Let's interview him on Monday." So I interviewed a week after the app was launched, and immediately we got a thousand users right off the bat, just from that, and just had this huge spike in traffic a week after our launch. That was a pretty exciting thing, and that's lead to other podcasts and stuff like that that's happened.

Another thing that happened - you're probably familiar with hurricane Matthew which hit Haiti and really devastated a lot of the areas in that part of the world. When that happened, I immediately bought a ticket and took a flight down to Haiti, and I used my influence - I have a sizeable donor base of people who are interested in donating to whatever projects I'm working on, because they've been following me in Malawi for a long time... So I immediately bought a ticket, went down to Haiti and I said, "I'm going down to Haiti, I'm taking nothing but my phone with the DonorSee app and that's it."

I went down to Haiti for like three days and what we did is we raised enough money to provide several hundred emergency disaster relief kits to the victims of hurricane Matthew. There's all this controversy about, you know, "Is the Red Cross spending my money correctly? Is the Clinton Foundation spending my money correctly?" Well, with DonorSee you don't have to guess. Everyone who donated - there were hundreds of people who donated - got notifications on their phone of videos of us passing out the disaster relief kits in real time. That was a great testimony, and we actually got written up in U.S.A. Today because of that.
There was a whole bunch of good that came from that as well. So yeah, we've had a few big breaks so far, thankfully, in the only two months that we've been launched.

Paul Kemp: Gret, it's fantastic. I love the fact that you had a big breakout. One of the first times that people have said it's podcasts, which is wonderful...

Gret Glyer: [laughs] Yeah.

Paul Kemp: ...given that you're now on a podcast.

Gret Glyer: Oh yeah, I love podcasts. It's one of those amazing things where you get 30 minutes to just passionately talk about this thing that you've built and you're excited about and you have this vision for... It really does help get people excited.

Paul Kemp: Yeah, and also once you are on one, the ball starts rolling and you can show credibility and that opens up other doors.

Gret Glyer: Exactly.

Paul Kemp: Before we carry on now, there are definitely some other things I wanna talk to you about... One is how anyone who's interested in going to live in Africa, maybe you could give some tips for that. But before we carry on, let me just return to those two sponsors. I'm not sure if you've heard of these guys... Have you heard of Toptal before?

Gret Glyer: Oh yeah, I almost used them, if that guy Scott Barstow hadn't gotten involved.

Paul Kemp: There you go, there's an endorsement as well.

Break: [00:28:07.12] to [00:30:52.10]

Paul Kemp: Gret, what I was really fascinated with is that we do have founders who start their own companies, and they're living in London, San Francisco, New York; rents - sky high. I love the fact that you lived on $600 a month. Do you have any tips for anyone who may want to start their startup but perhaps could consider doing it maybe abroad, in a low-cost location?

Gret Glyer: Yeah, for me it was just coincidence. I happened to be overseas and then I had the idea for the app. If I had been in a different location, I would have probably found a different way to make it work. But I will say that the benefits of spending a year overseas are enormous. I tell people, if you spend a year overseas it's kind of the equivalent of a Ph.D. level education. You just get opened up to this brand new level of experience and culture that is impossible to really appreciate unless you spend a significant amount of time in some other location, where you're a sore thumb, you look different than everyone else and you talk differently than everyone else, and your cultures and customs don't work in this location. There's a lot of educational benefit to that.

I think there's certainly a lot of monetary benefit in terms of it being a low-cost place. That's something that people can look into as well. I would say if you want tips on going overseas, that's always the tricky thing - how do you get over there? I personally went to go teach at an international school in Malawi, and that was a really great setup for me because they paid for me to go over there; they gave me my monthly paycheck and I was able to get my feet on the ground out there. A lot of times people choose to use teaching as a way to get overseas, and English as a second language is a big way to do that.

I wasn't making a ton, but there are a lot of places where you can actually make pretty decent money being a teacher overseas. That's definitely something to look into.

Paul Kemp: Yeah, and I'm guessing they help you as well with the visa processing...

Gret Glyer: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where it depends on where you are. The particular establishment I was with, it was one of those things where you show up at the airport and they kind of like fast-track you through customs. They really have good relationships with everyone, and they've been there for 20 years... Lots of different stuff like that is also really helpful.

Paul Kemp: Wonderful. And the Wi-Fi speed in Malawi, was it decent?

Gret Glyer: It was horrible. [laughter] I was there for three years; when I first got there, I couldn't even watch a YouTube video. By the end of it, you could kind of watch one if you put on the lowest setting and not too many other people were using the internet. It was tough... That was a big reason for why I came back. I really felt passionate and I wanted DonorSee to be a big success; I felt like it's gonna help lots of people on both sides of the world, and I felt like I'm gonna have a better shot at doing this in America where I have good internet and I'm able to Skype with people and interact with people a lot faster than I can in Malawi.

Paul Kemp: Finally, before we say goodbye to you, I'd like to just ask you... For those people that have listened to you and are actually in that corporate job, doing something they perhaps realize that maybe they regret and they wish they'd made a different decision - do you have any suggestions on how you make this huge leap? Because you were on a certain path, and you made such a drastic decision that I'm guessing a lot of people around you were probably questioning what your thought process was at that time. Do you have any practical tips on advising anyone who's in that same part of their life but actually going down the path that they are starting to realize is the wrong path? How can they make the change?

Gret Glyer: I would encourage the listeners to really think about opportunity cost, because I think a lot of people are worried, like "I'm gonna be away from my friends for a year, I'm gonna have a blip in my resume for a year...", they're worried about what it's gonna cost them to spend that time overseas, leave their corporate job and all this other stuff. They're worried about a whole ton of stuff and it's probably harder for them to imagine, but I will go ahead and confirm for them - when you spend a year overseas, you become a lot more solid in who you are; you can't hang on to any part of your identity that isn't your true identity until you spend a significant amount of time where your only frame of reference is things that are totally foreign to you.

I also thing that you can kind of spin your resume however you want; if you spend a year overseas, a lot of employers are thrilled about that. That's a really great thing that you can talk about in interviews, and it's something that will set you apart for future employment. Then I also think - if I'm being honest, that all your friends are gonna be jealous that you're going overseas and you're spending a year overseas, and when you come back they're gonna wanna know where you were and they're gonna wanna hear about this experience, and they will be the ones who are gonna be questioning, "Oh man, I wish I had done something like that." That's always the case.

I guess I'll leave it at this one thing - you hear people all the time saying, "I wish I had traveled when I was younger." You hear that all the time. You never hear anyone say, "I regret traveling when I was younger", because no one does. It's a big, big benefit that can really transform your life, so I would just say go do it.

Paul Kemp: Let's try and direct people then to how best they can help and get involved. What can we do to connect with you and DonorSee? What's the best thing we could do right now?

Gret Glyer: Anyone can reach out to me on Twitter, I'm pretty active on there. That's @gretglyer. I'm happy to also just take e-mails from people. That would be gret@donorsee.com. You can follow me on DonorSee; if you sign up for DonorSee, you can follow me and anytime I post a new project, you'll get to see that. Feel free to reach out, I'm pretty available.

Paul Kemp: In terms of actually saying that, it's DonorSee, D-O-N-O-R-S-E-E. I'm guessing that it's a unique name; if you search that on the App Store, you should find the correct one. That's great. Use the app, or use the website to donate.

Wonderful, Gret. It's been, honestly, so inspiring... It's one of the reasons why I do this show - to meet people like you, and realize that not everyone is cut from the same cloth, that we all go and do some different things, and thank god we have people like yourself doing the stuff that you're doing, so thank you so much for being such an inspiration to the world, and coming on the show.

Gret Glyer: Paul, it was my pleasure, thank you so much for having me.

Paul Kemp: All the best! Bye for now.

How To Get Free Press For Your App Startup

An insightful interview with Dmitry Dragilev

https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-app-guy/id771670010?mt=2

Paul Kemp: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it’s Paul Kemp. As you know, I go around and I get all nationalities, everyone from around the world that can help us with our app journeys. Today I love my guest. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve met, wonderful at building up relationships with influencers and he’ definitely got something to talk to us about.

This founder is responsible for building up — get this — 40 million pageviews for his startup, which actually ended up being sold to Google. It’s a dream come true for many of the founders and the startup entrepreneurs that listen to this show.

He is the founder of JustReachOut, he’s got a product; I’ve been going through it, I love it, it’s just great content. Let me introduce Dmitry Dragilev. Dmitry, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Dmitry Dragilev: Thanks, good to be here!

Paul Kemp: Dmitry, you do a lot of stuff in the web space but it’s very applicable to apps because you have this product called JustReachOut, which I want to uncover with you going forward… But first, we must touch on Polar — your experience of building up this 40-million view site and selling it to Google. Would you be able to give us a run through of actually the story behind Polar?

Dmitry Dragilev: Well, actually it used to be an app when we started. It was primarily a mobile-first app, because the founder of Polar, Luke Wroblewski was the guy behind mobile-first development, the idea, and all the books, and he’s kind of a thought leader in the space (@lukew is his Twitter name). When he founded the company he said,

“Hey Dmitry, come work with me and this couple other people that I wanna recruit.”

It was primarily just a mobile app and it was a very simple app; it was just a beautiful way to create a poll on any given topic or question you have, and ask your friends to participate in your poll. It could be anything — Starbucks vs. Dunkin’ Donuts or Xbox vs PS4…

When we first launched to the app store, we really didn’t have a lot of time to try to find customers. We were funded by Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, so we had some money to play with, and we tried a lot of different things. We tried App Store optimization, we also tried a lot of different tactics such as partnerships, we also did ads, and all that did drive a good amount of users to our app to download and use it, but it was just not having impact of millions. We were burning through some of the cash and we were just not seeing huge hockey stick growth.

We tried a lot of things and a lot of them worked, but there wasn’t that sporadic, huge growth that was sustainable. We had to spend more money to get more users, and this app was free. We couldn’t keep spending more money on acquiring users and just hoping we’ll turn into the next Twitter. We needed to make this a business where we were not spending more money to get new customers.

What I was looking at at the time was breaking tech news, and one of my experiments — I like to call them PR experiments or SEO experiments — was just to find a way to gain a whole big influx of users with a cool little experiment or a trick, and see how sustainable that is, and if we can keep repeating it.

iOS 7 was coming out, so what we did is Luke being a design mind, with a design thinking, mobile-first, and really well-known in the design community, having a lot of connections, basically we compared 1-to-1 all the icons and all the functionality of iOS 7 with iOS 6. And at the time there was a little bit of uproar; people were not that excited about the new iOS 7. They were actually comparing that to the Windows phone operating system and saying that it might not look great and that there’s inspiration from Windows that came over to it… So we did a poll, Luke promoted it, and we got a thousand votes on each icon. It was icon-to-icon: iOS 6 versus iOS 7.

We ended up running that over our poll, and again, some votes on it. This was all on the iOS app. And what we did is we took that and pitched the results of it to press and media, to who was talking about this topic a lot — because the iOS 7 update was coming up — saying that people actually prefer iOS 7.

People loved it. They cited our name, they said

“This cool new app called Polar that allows you to poll did this study and this is what they found….”

…except there was nowhere to link to because it was an iOS app, so they just linked to our homepage, which was okay. People came to our homepage, some of them downloaded the app, some of the didn’t, but there was no immediate action or engagement on it. So we did a few other ones like that that were very newsworthy at the time: Xbox vs. PS4… Game consoles, games, all the different aspects of those, and compared them against each other.

Little by little, we just started going to Techmeme.com, TechCrunch… Just trying to figure out what are the hottest topics that are happening right now and what polls should we create.

We understood that journalists love these free studies, these free data that we’re giving them, and it was time to ask them to create these polls on their own, but also embed them in their own articles. That is where we pivoted away from the iOS app, which was kind of funny, because of Luke Wroblewski — his whole thing was mobile-first, and mobile-first became such a huge idea… It’s a worldwide phenomenon, everybody was talking about it; all he did is he flew around, giving talks about mobile-first development. So for us to pivot away from it and go to a web version was kind of a big deal, but we had to, because journalists would create these polls only on the web and add them to their sites through the web.

We built a whole web version, and that really kicked things into overdrive after we launched the web version. NPR, MLB, NBA, NHL, Gizmondo, all the sites out there, everybody started using it, and we would help them keep people on site longer by embedding these polls. Instead of just leaving a comment, a person might vote on ten polls, and then all sorts of ads would improve, ad performance would improve and so forth. That’s how we really grew.

The app was still kicking around, people were using it; it’s just the main growth kind of pivoted away from the app world into the desktop world a little bit, helping each other. The process was very similar to YouTube — you’d embed a poll, people would take it, they would click on the logo to come to our site, our site would show them this poll, it would all show them to sign up and create their own poll, and improve time on the site for themselves. It was like a circle… People would always go back and create more polls for their website.

Paul Kemp: Dmitry, I love this because… You know I’ve done 500 episode of this show, and you’ve just hit on two of the massive themes that come out of all of my chats with all these different successful founders. The first is the theme of solving a real problem, and it sounds to me like your journey was about solving a real problem especially for the journalists. The second one is pivot when you need to and follow the success, even if it’s against what you initially thought. You must have listened to all the other episodes to figure that out.

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah, I mean, I listened to quite a bit of your episodes. But I wanted to make sure people get some takeaways from this kind of stuff. It’s always hard to talk about success; everybody talks about success, and then people kind of get sad listening to it a lot of times, but…

Paul Kemp: Let’s talk about how we can help the appster tribe listening to this, because you have obviously had a huge amount of success. You were eventually bought up by Google, but what you learned throughout that whole process you are now giving back through JustReachOut. What is JustReachOut? Tell us about how you’re helping others pitch to the press.

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah, through that process I learned that all the people in my spot where I was were struggling exactly the same way. They wanted publicity and exposure for their apps and they couldn’t get it through traditional means. They had to either the big PR firm or hire this huge agency to represent them and pay them $5,000, $10,000. We only raised a million, a million and a half, so it wasn’t that much to keep a team going for a year, a year and a half and also afford a PR agency. We just couldn’t afford one. I found that a lot of people were in that same boat, they just needed to figure out how to talk to the press and get some exposure for their apps.

JustReachOut was born out of that need for the smaller entrepreneurs, app developers who are just on their own, one or two-person teams, to be able to e-mail a journalist and pitch them something relevant to what they liked to write about. We built sort of a matching algorithm that looks at journalists and their needs. Say, a journalist is writing about Bitcoin, and they’ve been writing about Bitcoin for the last five years and they’re probably the best expert in the Bitcoin field, and there’s somebody out there developing a Bitcoin app. Well, they probably should talk to each other at some point and they will have a lot of mutual interest. That mutual interest is a great conversation starter.

Our software just kind of makes that easy to find, finding that match. It will try and find the best journalist best on what they’ve written, or what they’re writing about right now. There are journalists out there that actually put out queries, believe it or not, saying

“I’m writing an article on Bitcoins and I need a quote from a Bitcoin expert. Or it could be an entrepreneur, an app developer. I need to interview them for this next issue.”

They’re just looking for somebody to talk to in their space. We aggregate that data and we also help you match with them, and then you can contact them through our platform. We make sure that your page gets to them, gets open, we correct any kind of e-mail addresses that are not correct, so we guarantee 100% deliverability.

It’s a SaaS product; I realize that people sometimes can’t afford 50–60 dollars a month. Literally, they’re looking at every dollar they spend every month, so it’s designed for the smaller guys to good at or become better at reaching out to press and journalists and be able to talk to them and gain some publicity.

Paul Kemp: I know how great it is when a journalist reaches out to you and asks for a comment or a quote (I just happened to be today); it’s so much easier. That’s the right way of doing it.

I’d love to know first — because I’m sure everyone’s I guess doing it wrong in some way — what is the wrong way of doing it? What is the wrong way of reaching out to influencers in the tech press?

Dmitry Dragilev: The wrong way — and I see this all the time — we have over 3,500 paying customers of the service right now, and I do the support for all of them, which is crazy, but I wanna talk to my customers… And the number one way that our app developers or small business are trying to pitch press is

“Hello John, I launched this new app. This new app does this, this and this, it helps families spend less time on their iPhones by rewarding them”

or

“It helps the teenagers not to text and drive. We just launched. Here’s the info about our team, here’s the link to our page, here’s the link to our app. Can you check it out? We’d love to hear from you”

..and that’s all they write.

That type of pitch is all about them and themselves and what they’re doing, and they’re presuming that that person will find it interesting. Now, usually journalists will receive anywhere from 80 to 100 e-mails every day, exactly the same format:

“Hey, this is what we’re doing. Can you write about us?”

and there’s no actual conversation starter there. I always say, a conversation starter is where you give something to them, you give value to them upfront, to start a relationship or a conversation. I always say

“If you saw them at a conference and you sat down with them or you started talking to them randomly, cold — they don’t know you, you don’t know them — what would you say?” and chances are you would not walk up to them and say “Hey” and start talking exactly about your app and what you’re doing. You’d probably refer to something they’ve written, something they’ve tweeted or something they’ve done, and start the conversation there and see if there’s any overlap between that and what you’re doing day-to-day with your app.

It’s a little bit of a bridge to

“Hey, this is what we’re doing. Can you write about us?”

and that’s where a lot of people tend to fall down.

“Well, I can’t figure out what that transition should be, because a typical app developer might not be an extrovert”

I’m an engineer by background, I know what that is like exactly. I came here as a Soviet immigrant in ’93 and I was not an extrovert in any way. I was that guy who sat coding on my computer. But I pushed myself to get a little better at just starting a conversation where there’s some common interest between you and the other person, and that person at least finds something you say is interesting.

It’s kind of mundane or too shallow I guess for a journalist to hear,

“Hey, we’re doing a new app. We have this new product. Can you look at it?”

Everybody says that to them, so how can you stand out? You have to offer some value, some insight, some data, some opinion, some comment on their article. Maybe you found a spelling mistake in the article, but something besides “Hey, here’s what we’re doing, here’s our brand new app.”

Paul Kemp: Dmitry, I have to confess… In my first ten episodes, I had a chat with the author of Pitch Perfect — this was when I was just staring the show out — and we were talking about exactly the same thing. That was four years ago. I feel that even though we know that it’s sensible advice, because you’re so excited about the app you just can’t help but start throwing e-mails around and saying,

“Hey world, I’ve built the app! Are you ready for it?”

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah, it’s so hard, and I still do it, too. I mean, I preach that stuff, I have a whole course on it, I coach over 200 startups every year, and I still once in a while go

“Hey, have you seen this?”

and I’m like

“Oh, I really shouldn’t be…”

So I started the practice of actually reading my e-mails out loud if I’m reaching out to somebody who I’m doing this on a first-time basis. And when you read it out loud, you kind of stop, because you usually wouldn’t say that to a person live, but somehow e-mail makes it fine to do. So yeah, I catch myself all the time with it, and I’m still struggling, but I’m getting better at building that first relationship, first value upfront, and then seeing how I can improve.

That’s why I started the course, for basically teaching people how to do it. I saw 3,500 people on there, and a lot of them are writing these huge e-mails all about their apps and what they do.

Paul Kemp: It’s crazy… It sort of reminds me of when I was at university; you start with the essays and you end up writing these really long essays and getting poor results, and then you realize if you start thinking of it as the marker and what they’re looking for, you start to write differently.

I guess if we put ourselves in the shoes of the journalists, they don’t wanna read this huge, long e-mail with pitches and PDFs. I’m guessing they just need a one-sentence pitch if you are pitching to them, or certainly something where you’re adding value.

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah. There’s an agency called Fractal, and they put out pretty interesting studies usually. They concentrate on content that goes viral, I guess; they create content that goes viral. It’s a marketing agency. They put out this study that was really interesting; they surveyed 500 journalists and they asked them what do they prefer to see in a pitch, and they compiled all the study into this slide deck which was shared on growthhackers.com, which is this platform to share interesting marketing articles and materials.

If you google ‘500 journalists survey’ you’ll probably find it, and I can send you a link to it. It’s funny, because they told you specifically:

“We want something that’s less than 200 words; subject line less than 65 characters. No PR releases, no attached stuff to it. We wanna receive it in the morning, something like 8 AM”

and something like 70–80% of them prefer e-mail pitches versus all other mediums.

That kind of gave people I guess the status quo when it comes to pitching press. From there, you can kind of improve on the actual conversation starter. But mostly e-mails… They should be kind of short, to the point and just to start a conversation with them, provoke them in some ways. I go through many different examples on it. Asking to interview them on your blog might be one way. Asking them to answer a Quora question, or a Reddit question or LinkedIn. Telling them,

“Hey, I tried to answer this question myself; I don’t think I did it justice, I’m not an expert. But you are — would you happen to share a few words of wisdom around this question?”

You’re not asking for PR, you’re not even asking them to cover yourself, you’re just engaging in a conversation with them about a topic that both of you share a common interest in. If you’re interested in something and they’re interested in something you both contribute to the same discussion, that’s one place you can push off of in the next section of the relationship, and just keep going that way.

Paul Kemp: Dmitry, clearly for everyone interested, just go to JustReachOut. There will be links on the show notes as well. You have a wonderful teaching style as well, having gone through now a majority of the courses; just a wonderful course.

I was thinking of changing gears slightly now… This is a show where we like to inspire those who are listening. They can be traveling in a car to a job they don’t like, stuck in traffic… And you are an entrepreneur, you’ve had a huge success with what you’ve done so far, you are living now almost I guess a life of freedom, free to do your own things; give us some idea of what it’s like to go through a day in your life, because I think it would inspire us.

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah, actually the first lecture in my course I talk a lot about trying to reach this point because I came here as a Soviet immigrant and half of my family believed it would be a better life here versus Russia, and when we arrived it was pretty tough, like it should be for any immigrant. I raised my sister on my own, my mom was working a lot, and the whole I was trying to think about this life that I have now. I didn’t wanna work for a large company or a big boss; I wanted to have a business where I control what I do day to day and I have the financial freedom to take vacations if I want… Sort of have control of my own destiny and I’m doing something that I’m truly excited about. I wanna wake up every day and be very excited about it day-to-day.

But it wasn’t like that so I was always on the search for what makes me click day-to-day and what makes me excited every day. I used to be a software engineer; I began working in software really early, in my teens, and then I got my formal education and I decided to become a full-time software engineer. I still wasn’t finding that excitement day-to-day. It was fun, it was interesting, but I was working at a large company at the time, so I quit my job, pre-MBA I think it was… Because I was reading magazines about Silicon Valley and all these news publications were talking about startups. This was 2005–2006.

So I drove cross-country in my Honda Civic to go to Silicon Valley. I arrived and I was trying to find a job, except I had no experience in marketing so nobody would hire me.

I lived in this cracky EconoLodge and I was trying to find a free gig

“I’ll work for free for anybody in the startup world. I just wanna figure out how to do startups.”

And nobody would hire me. They’d be like

“You’re a software engineer from BAE Systems; you worked on Department of Defense software development projects. You should just go back and do that.”

Little by little I proved myself to this one startup and they took me under their wing, and I learned a lot from their founder. We went through two years, we raised a lot of money, and we were acquired two years after that. So I learned a lot from that and then I kind of stuck around Silicon Valley for a while and bounced around different startups and met a lot of people, started my podcast series, met a lot more people by interviewing them, and then that’s where I thought

“Oh, when I interview them I can promote them, and I could help them fulfill whatever need they have.”

It was funny… Konstantine Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn agreed to be on my live interview in front of other people. Usually, he charges money to do this thing and did it for free just because he’s looking to hire people. And just because I knew that I could get him to come, and get the right people to come to this event and make it worthwhile for him. So I started thinking how I can help people and also align those interests with my own as well. That was the beginning of the PR space or the SEO space.

Now I love it, all of what I’m doing. It took a while to get to this point because I was always trying different startups, I did different roles… I was a product manager for a while, I was a marketing manager for a while… I needed to find something that was sustainable, that was the first thing — how can it be sustainable month over month and year after year as a business? And then how can I wake up every day and just can’t wait to open my inbox and see what’s going on, hop on calls? What can I be doing…? Because if you’re not excited every day about it…

There are always down times. 90% of the stuff I do is always failing…

Paul Kemp: Like now? [laughs]

Dmitry Dragilev: [laughs] I failed at all this stuff, I could be like, “Oh…!” 90% of stuff is like,

“Oh, this didn’t work out. This is not working.”

But it’s still exciting. I find it very exciting to think about traffic, exposure… I just love working with companies that are trying to get exposure; when they get it right, they get exposure, or they meet a big celebrity or something.

Paul Kemp: Dmitry, let me jump in here because you’ve mentioned a lot which literally resonates to many of the past episodes that people will pick up on. What I’ve learned from you, a very inspiring chat — it’s important to understand yourself, work at a startup, because you learn more at a startup in those few years than you could do in lots of years doing an MBA or proper education; add value first, when you’re reaching out, I learned that. Work hard, and just have exciting work that has a purpose. All those things seem to come out of your inspiring journey, and I really appreciate you sharing that with us.

Dmitry, I want to make sure that people do get a chance to follow up, so where best can they reach out to you?

Dmitry Dragilev: Yeah, criminallyprolific.com is my site, which is independent of JustReachOut. That’s where I write my articles, I got my little bio… There’s a contact field there, so you can contact me through criminallyprolific.com. I guess that’s the best way.

Listen to more interviews like this one

Paul Kemp: Great. There’s also JustReachOut, which is the course I’m going through. It’s obviously very easy to google; otherwise, just go to the show notes. It’s episode #503 with Dmitry.

Skype Co-Founder Says Our Biggest Existential Threat Is Artificial Intelligence

An interview with Jaan Talinn, original co-founder of Skype

Paul Kemp: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it’s Paul Kemp. This is a very, very special episode. It’s episode #500. We actually made it to #500, can you believe it?

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So, 500 episodes of The App Guy Podcast. Now, before I just start celebrating, I have a terrific episode lined up for you. It’s with the co-founder of Skype.

Skype is the reason why this show exists

Skype is the reasons why I can get so many guests on the show. It’s because it’s done all virtually.

Let me introduce Jaan Tallinn, one of the original co-founders of Skype.

We’re going to be talking about what he’s doing at the moment. It’s related to promoting the study of existential risk. Specifically relating to AI. Imagine! The possibility of the human race not existing in the future. It’s clearly a really important topic.

Jaan, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Jaan Tallinn: Thanks for having me.

Paul Kemp: Thanks for coming on this special episode #500. Let’s go straight into it then. How is the human race going to survive with artificial intelligence looming? What’s the big threat to us?

Jaan Tallinn: Well, first of all, AI is just one of the many potential existential risks. The big idea is that as we are creating more and more powerful technologies, the effective radius of influence that new technologies have keeps increasing, while the planet does not. You can imagine that clearly, you can do way more damage with nuclear weapons than you could do with rifles. Nuclear weapons are just almost a hundred-year-old technology. In some ways, we got lucky that it’s actually hard to construct nuclear weapons, whereas some of the new stuff that’s on the horizon might actually be fairly easy.

Paul Kemp: It’s interesting, we’re talking about the possibility of exterminating the human race with nuclear weapons at a time that actually seems quite dangerous (the threat of World War III between the U.S. and Russia). So, as it relates to A.I, surely this threat is at least a few hundred years in the future? Have you got any guess to how far into the future?

Jaan Tallinn: I think it’s important to be humble when projecting future timelines. If you look at the previous breakthrough technologies such as heavier than air flight… Heavier than air flight looked like 500 years off when it was actually 500 years off, but it still looked 500 years off when it was merely just a couple of decades off. Some people didn’t even know that heavier than air flight was possible after it was done on this planet.

I think in was the ’30s (last century) when Ernest Rutherford, the really prominent nuclear scientist said that anyone who is thinking or talking about harnessing nuclear energy is talking moonshine. Then, Leo Szilard invented the nuclear reactions the next day. When people say that some technology is in principle possible but hundreds of years off, they are what’s called über-confidently pessimist, in the sense that they don’t actually have sufficient evidence to make such a confident prediction.

Paul Kemp: This is where you’re testing my history now… I’m pretty sure that a lot of money went into trying to discover flight, and the Wright Brothers were incredibly under-funded. Nevertheless, they had a passionate group of people around them and they were the ones that got to fly before some of the rich universities and other inventors with lots of money and resources. I’m guessing it’s not just money that will get people to where we are inevitably going. True?

Jaan Tallinn: Exactly. Actually, that’s been more like a rule rather than an exception. I think that was a prominent exception to the rule that you really can’t buy scientific breakthroughs with money was the Manhattan project. There was a deliberate, well-funded effort to construct nuclear weapons. Other than that, usually the way breakthroughs happen is like the Wright Brothers stumbling on some new approach that actually opens up a new landscape of possibilities.

Paul Kemp: Where are we now with regards to artificial intelligence?Because I’m sure a lot of people are [reading] and thinking:

Well, I’ve got the Amazon Echo and it just doesn’t work very intelligently

You’ve also got Siri who fails over and over again. Where are we with A.I right now?

Jaan Tallinn: There are many ways to frame the current situation. One important background context is the AI has been coming and going in these fashion cycles called “AI summers” and “AI winters.” Somebody makes a breakthrough and a lot of people pile in, and the topic of AI becomes fashionable. Then at some point the researchers don’t live up to the promise, the investment dies down and then you have what’s called an “AI winter.”

Right now we are currently in the AI summer.

There is an increasing amount of investment being poured into artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of the reasons is that now people have figured out ways how to actually turn marginal improvements in AI into actual profits and revenue. If you actually improve Google’s AI algorithms, that will actually show up in Google’s profits and eventually share price; therefore, there is this existing economic pressure to improve AI algorithms.

The other way of framing AI, ia asking

What kind of approach has been the dominant one?

When AI started, the dominant approach was so-called “symbolic AI”, trying to code up rules of thinking in terms of symbols and symbol manipulations, logical operations.

Currently, as almost everyone is aware, the dominant approach is deep learning, which is, instead of having very clear-cut symbols, you have these almost human intuition-like systems that look at a lot of data and try to develop patterns or intuitions about the data.

Paul Kemp: Let’s talk then about the thing that perhaps is the biggest breakthrough that we could almost realize, but also then the biggest danger,

Consciousness

When machines get some form of consciousness- will we be to them like ants are to us? Do you think a lot about consciousness within the framework of artificial intelligence?

Jaan Tallinn: Well, interestingly, almost everything you said is false.

Paul Kemp: Okay, that’s why we’ve got you on the show to learn the truth. LOL

Jaan Tallinn: I think consciousness is a bit of a red herring.

If you think about it, when we ask whether a machine is conscious or not, what we are asking is what this machine is. However, I’m much more interested in what the machine does. It’s actually pretty plausible and it seems even likely that the machines that will dominate humanity will actually not be conscious, they are just very competent.

Are we creating machines that will break free of the programs that we gave them?

NO.

This isn’t how little machine programs work. There is no ghost in the computer that could read the instructions and then decide whether to execute them or discard them — no, the software is the machine, obviously, implementing the hardware.

The thing is that we are going to create really, really competent systems that have very precise work models and are able to foresee the consequences of their own actions very well, much better than humans, so even better than humanity in its entirety. So whenever they want something, they’ll obviously want something that we actually programmed them to want, and they are much more competent than the humans that created them. Basically, they will “get it.” They will be almost like a King Midas or a genie story, where we basically think we want something, yet actually, if we let the machine loose to do it, we quickly find out that actually we don’t want this after all. However, then it might be too late.

Paul Kemp: It’s interesting because this comes on the back of something I learned recently. It’s regarding the rise of the financial institution Black Rock. As you know, in our pre-chat I was saying that I was in finance. More specifically, in Asset Management. As it happens, Black Rock gained its prominence and financial success through its use of AI / machines to predict the potential risks and accurately assess the economic outlook. This was initially many years ago. Nevertheless, if we extrapolate this timeline, will we reach a point where was ask ourselves

Do we really need humanity to run institutions?

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Jaan Tallinn: Yes, I think the comparison with various institutions is pretty apt. It may be possible to have an organization do something without actually any humans working for that organization. The question is — do we actually want this thing to happen? It’s obvious that if there’s a very centralized organization, then the CEO has the ultimate control. But even then, the CEO’s hands might be tied. Corporations might exhibit these types of characteristics that I describe.

Paul Kemp: You know, I’m getting a lot of my information from films, which I’m sure a lot of people [reading] this are thinking about. I can’t help but think about the Matrix. In this film, there was a discussion about control.

what is control?

What I’m learning from you is that we may have a future where we [humans] lose control because we are a low-level existence compared to these very competent machines. Have you got any views on who will control who in the future?

Jaan Tallinn: Importantly, the technologies that we have developed so far and the institutions that we have created, they kind of assume that the controller is external to the system. That’s very starkly visible in the so-called “autonomous system” discussions.

For example, when we talk about autonomous weapons,

Where is the human? Is he in the loop, on the loop or out of the loop?

So far, whatever tools we have developed, we assume that a human is actually the one that uses the tool and controls the tool. However, once we start talking about autonomous systems, especially systems that are actually able to foresee the consequences of being turned off, the control mechanisms kind of assume that the system that’s being controlled is not aware of the control system itself.

So if there’s a button that we use to turn off the machine, yet the machine is aware of that button and can predict what are the consequences of it being turned off, and weigh its goal fulfillment, then it’s actually not really about anything human, like survival instinct or anything. It’s just a very natural consequence of goal-directed behavior. 
For example, if there’s a robot who’s goal is to fetch coffee, yet there’s a huge hole in the floor, of course it’s going to go around it. It’s not because it’s afraid of falling into that hole, but it knows that if it falls into that hole, then it will not be able to fetch that coffee.

It really frustrates me how people think that in order to go around that hole you have to have survival instinct.

NO, it’s just basic goal-directed behavior. You avoid obstacles when you want to get to the goal.

It’s a similar thing — if you have an off switch and your goal is to fetch coffee, if you see that being switched off you will not be able to fetch the coffee, you will avoid being switched off.

Paul Kemp: This is really fascinating. What I’m learning from you is that it’s all about the goal of these machines, these new artificial intelligence robots. They’re going to show very different characteristics to humans.

However, I’m guessing that there’s good and bad that will come from Artificial Intelligence? You talked about nuclear and the good versus bad which comes from it.

Is it just the same with artificial intelligence? Will there be good versus bad?

Jaan Tallinn: Yes, absolutely. One of the big reasons why I’m focusing on AI (and not the other risks such as new kinds of biological technologies) is that it has this huge upside. In fact,

if we get the AI right, then basically we’ll be able to address all the other existential risks

Whereas, if we just fix the nanotechnology or nuclear or synthetic biology risks, this will not help us directly with AI risk.

As far as I know, Elon Musk was interested in AI actually as a direct consequence of him realizing that

Wait a minute! Becoming a multi-planetary species will help us against all the existential risks — except the A.I risk

…because of course, if we are able to travel inter-planetary distances, so will A.I.

Paul Kemp: It’s fascinating. You’re in Elon’s group. I know he’s put a pact together to try to prevent the extinction of the human species. Are you involved in this?

Jaan Tallinn: When it comes to AI, as far as I know, there are two initiatives that Elon is supporting.

One is supporting AI safety research through what’s known as Future of Life Institute, which is an institute at MIT where I’m a co-founder. We’ve been ‘kind of’ handing out Elon’s money. He donated 10 million dollars in research grants to different AI researchers.

The other initiative that Elon Musk started earlier this year is OpenAI. There’s this group in San Francisco that is basically trying to do AI development, but they also have hired many excellent safety people. In fact, I do think that OpenAI’s safety team is right now the best in the world. They focus on developing AI outside of commercial context. Whether that’s a good idea or not, I have some reservations. Nevertheless, I certainly acknowledge that the group of people that they have over there is really excellent.

Paul Kemp: You’ve obviously seen the benefits of technology from building something that’s commercially-focused — Skype. I’m wondering, for the appster tribe who follows me and for the readers who have quit corporate jobs — how is it best to get involved in startups, tech, and AI?

Jaan Tallinn: I think regardless of whether you’re interested in AI research, (increasing the competence of machines) or AI safety research (improving the value alignment); I think a good place to start is to just get a better understanding about AI.

There are many excellent books out there, and open courses. I think Hacker News publishes some new course every week or couple of weeks, actually.

When you’re specifically interested in AI safety, there is a website called 80000hours.org, that has a career guide for so-called “effective altruists”, and it has a career guide for potential AI safety researchers. Also, they have published what they call AI Safety Syllabus — books to read and videos to watch and so forth.

Paul Kemp: Yes, because I’m also thinking of the future workforce that we may have in the future. In fact, who would have predicted 15 years ago that people would be going into careers such as Google AdWords, Pay Per Click experts and SEO. Getting involved in AI is probably a good bet on where the future workforce may be heading — right?

Jaan Tallinn: That’s true… Or, more generally, programming. It’s something that it’s harder and harder to avoid. Having some idea of how computers work and what software can do is a more and more important component of jobs, regardless of what domain you are in.

Paul Kemp: As we wrap this up, Jaan, I’m often thinking — the human race. We have to realize that technology is not the solution to everything. It could actually wipe us out instead of helping solve our problems in the world. What is going to be, in your opinion, the way that the human species is going to become extinct because of AI? How can we prevent it?

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Jaan Tallinn: Well, there are many ways how human species can go extinct. The most mundane thing is that every ten million years or so a large or, more important, a fast enough rock comes along to cause a wipeout of many species, potentially humans. It has happened before here, and if you just wait long enough, it will happen again. But it’s more likely, indeed, that there could be catastrophic scenarios from 21st-century technologies, or perhaps even 20th-century technologies such as nuclear weapons.

The reason I’m focused on AI, for one, it has all this positive upside. The way I describe it is that you can frame AI research as humanity’s search for the best possible future, with an important caveat — we are going to irrevocably commit to the first result that we find from that search. The other reason for thinking about AI is that Ai is sort of a meta-technology; it’s a technology that can develop its own technologies. Whatever concerns we have of a biotechnology, nanotechnology, terraforming and so on and so forth — if you don’t actually make AI being concerned about the same singular constraints that people would like to exercise on our technology development, well, once it starts developing its own technology, we’re just no longer going to have an environment that is able to sustain humanity.

Paul Kemp: It’s interesting, I think it definitely highlights how we need to think about his subject. Often, we feel like it’s very science fiction, it’s very put towards the future, but we don’t know when there could be this big breakthrough, so these safety things that are going on are obviously very important.

Thank you very much for coming on this very special episode, episode #500 of The App Guy Podcast. I’ll be putting full show notes on the website — it’s theappguy.co.

Jaan, thanks very much for speaking with us today and leaving us with the possibility of us all potentially becoming extinct.

Jaan Tallinn: Alright, thank you.

Follow me [Paul Kemp] on Twitter or join my Slack community. Subscribe to The App Guy Podcast for 500 episodes with other successful founders

Chino Lex : How One App Developer Went From Carpet Cleaner To Top 1% App Developer & Millions Of Users

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we speak to really interesting founders and ask them lots of questions about tips and tricks, and any kind of help that they can give us in our own journeys. It's really perfect for anyone who has side projects or anyone is founding their own companies, startups, and just to tap into this whole community.

Today I've got a really awesome, fun app, something that I have needed for quite some time. It gives me the ability to look at my friend's playlists for music. I'm a big music fan. I switched from Spotify to Apple Music recently, and I love finding new music, new songs. So let's introduce Chino Lex, he is the founder of tapTrax.co

Chino, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Chino: Hey, how's it going? Good to be here.

Paul: Great. Firstly, let's try to describe better than I've just done what you're doing with tapTrax.

Chino: Yes, tapTrax is a rapid music discovery app. Imagine Pandora on steroids: you type in a song and you get relevant, succinct song suggestions in six-second clips that you can like or pass. The liked songs become fully streamable in your playlists, which are public.

Paul: What I'm learning from you already, Chino, is that you've got a great tagline: "It's like Pandora on steroids." I think anyone else who's got their own product, they need to think of comparing it to something well-known like you've done - Pandora on steroids.

How did you get the idea?

Chino: I was actually in the car, in a radio experience with some friends, and do you know when you're in the car and you switch from station to station, you usually listen to the songs for like two to five seconds and decide you don't like and you switch stations? We all just wanted some new music, and then I plugged in my Pandora, and five skips later I was out of skips. I figured everything else we consume is bite-sized, like 140-character news updates, split-second date decisions with Tinder, five-second snaps - why not discover music this way?

Paul: It is an absolutely awesome idea. I'm almost like in that car with you, and the light bulbs come on. It must have been a great feeling to know that you've come across a pretty awesome. Now, 99% of people would have thought that was a great idea and then several years later it would have come out from someone else, and they would have done nothing about it. You did something about it; talks us through going from that idea to then making something that was actually a product.

Chino: Yes, what comes to mind is a quote - I'm probably butchering it, but "You don't rise to the level of your hopes, you fall to the level of your training." To contextualize it, I've published over 160 apps in my history, with over 5 million users. I've never started to run ads or marketing, so my kind of bread and butter is being able to grow apps and develop them.

So to the first point of the quote, I kind of fell to my history of making apps and being able to grow them, so I figured why not make this into reality? I know the steps, so I tried it out.

Paul: I'm actually writing that down, I love that: you don't rise to the level of your hopes, you reduce to the level of your training. That is just so awesome! Because I can imagine, if you hadn't had the experience of all the apps that you've built and all the downloads that you've had, then the initial reaction - I'm sure people listening to this have had this, the appster tribe - is you get really excited and you think, "Oh my god, the whole world is gonna want this right now", and you perhaps blitz a credit card, you pay a developer maybe, you launch the thing and you realize, "Oh dear, this is not working out the way I thought."

You've had a wonderful experience. Do you feel like that's a common mistake that a lot of people make, what I've just described?

Chino: Yes, I mean half of it is just mental and half of it is in practice. When you want to start something, there's like a level of novelty to your ideas that will get you really excited, and then you realize the reality of it, putting it into practice or letting it come into fruition is harder than you thought. You see some people quit, and the case most of the times is that people quit before they even start, or they think, "Oh, that's cool", and then they go about with their day.

Paul: Yes. Okay, so I just want to revisit something you've said, which is that you've built a lot of apps, and was it five million downloads?

Chino: Yes, more or less. [laughter]

Paul: That is a pretty impressive achievement. To be fair though, I've released apps, and some have reached a million, but I didn't make any money from the ones on Google, especially.

Chino: Yes, Google's tough.

Paul: So of the five million downloads, have you been able to crack the real secret, which is to source some income that would then give you a lifestyle as an app developer, as an app entrepreneur?

Chino: Yes, sure. First, for more context, in the last two years I've been to almost 30 cities, eight countries, so I've traveled quite a bit, and the lifestyle of an app entrepreneur I guess is either really good or terrible. There is two extreme ends of the app store - you've got your hits, and then you've got your long tail of apps. You've got your Facebooks, and then your thousand other social networking sites that didn't work out.

Paul: Yes. Okay, so you've traveled to around 30-odd cities. Where are we speaking to you right now?

Chino: I am currently in Montreal. I came back from Quebec a day and a half ago, and I'll be in New York City on Sunday, and then after that L.A.

Paul: That's just so awesome. You know, I was inspired quite a long time ago now, it was episode 97, my chat with Andreas Kambanis, and he was submitting his very successful at the time, Caveman Feast, from a bus in Columbia, and he was trying to get an internet connection.

Chino: That's so funny... [laughter]

Paul: Yes, so you must have some really similar stories where you're trying to do something, and there you are, traveling around. Has it been a good lifestyle for you?

Chino: Yes, I remember in school where you had a lot of work and you knew how to do it - for example some math homework - and you'd look outside, it's a sunny day, and you wanted to just focus on it, get it done, do it the right way so you get a good grade, and go outside. It's kind of the same thing - I have work to do, but I'm in a new city. So I wanna sit down in a coffee shop, focus on it, really nail it down, and then go and explore the city. It's kind of like that same recess kind of feeling where you know you can go play outside, but you've got some stuff to do. And that's okay, because you have to balance both, of course.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. So anyone listening, the appster tribe, we love to learn about the different lifestyles from the entrepreneurs... So how on earth did you get attracted to becoming an app entrepreneur yourself, and actually traveling around to all these different cities? How did that come about?

Chino: I whittled down from being just a general entrepreneur... My parents immigrated when I was kid. I'm a first-generation American, so the pressure to go to college was definitely there, but me myself - I've always been an entrepreneur in the sense that I've always mowed my neighbor's lawns, shovel the driveways, traded Pokémon cards when I was a kid. So that's always just been there, because my parents were a good middle-class, they never had a lot to give me, and whenever I asked for something they told me, "Go mow a lawn, or something."  

So I was an entrepreneur from the start, and then in terms of apps, that road was really interesting. I actually just read into this Yahoo! News article, the headline was, "18-year-old makes app empire from his laptop". So I click on the article... Now, he's actually my long-time friend, co-founder, also roommate.

Paul: Okay, let me just recap then... So you're reading something, and it's about an app entrepreneur who's only 18. You click on the article. Now he's a co-founder and long-time friend.

Chino: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: This is great, because this is all about my show - it's about networking, it's about reaching out, it's about helping, collaborating. So how did you actually get to know him that well?

Chino: Actually, it was really casual.

Paul: You mowed his lawn. [laughter]

Chino: No, no... So at the time I was in my hometown of Spokane, Washington and he was in Princeton, New Jersey. I clicked on the article, I read it and thought, "Well, if this kid can do it, I can freakin' do it." I've always had ideas back then, so I reached out to him, tweeted him and then got his email address and we started just talking back and forth on e-mail, and we added each other as friends on Facebook. He was just casually giving me tips here and there. We mostly connected over traveling, or food, or whatever. Then six to eight months later when I published my first app that actually made me money, I actually got up on my feet and started reinvesting that money back in the company and started publishing more apps. It went well, and then I could finally move out of my parent's house.

I was looking for a roommate, and I posted an ad on Craigslist, and there's just like this bunch of weirdoes. So I'm like, "Who's gonna move..." - because I wanted to move to Seattle, which is about four hours East of Spokane; it's like the bigger city, Seattle, Washington, of course... And I didn't know who else would be my roommate. I mean, all my friends were over in college, friends who had entry-level jobs couldn't get these places that I wanted to live in, so I just asked Spencer in a Facebook message, "Do you want to move to Seattle?" He said, "Sure."

Paul: That's just so awesome.

Chino: Well, it was great. But the funny things, I'm missing a lot of parts in the story... I kind of messed up, because before I was an app developer I wasn't just a student, I was a carpet cleaner. I actually got a job as a carpet cleaner, so cleaning up pee and poop from dirty carpets with machinery. That was my day job, and at night I'd work on apps.
It was kind of an interesting journey... It's just really random, and it all kind of worked out with a lot of curiosity and some Google searches.

Paul: I love this story, and it's why I do this podcast, to meet people like you. It's almost like there's a theme developing... My last episode, the guy sold his first company at the age of 15, and there's a real theme - there's something in you when you're young that you just know that this is the path to go down. You know, the establishments, the organizations, the corporations, they don't attract you; you just have this urge to be free and do your own thing. But you have to be, I guess, very self-motivated. Is that fair to say?

Chino: Yeah, I would say less motivated, more disciplined, because freedom without discipline is pretty much useless. But I'd say discipline is the main factor.

Paul: Yeah, because when you have this lifestyle, you can almost wake up and do anything you want to, in a way. I've chosen to have the discipline of getting a lot of episodes out of the podcast; you're episode 476, but I'm guessing everyone listening to this needs to think of discipline. Okay, let's get back to the story, because it's just so... So there you are, you're cleaning shit off the carpets and stuff like that, and then you move to Seattle. You've got Spencer, your friend who had a really massive win at the age of 18 with his app empire. Did you work then together to start building a lot of different apps?

Chino: No, I started my own company, he had his own company. We were just friends, it wasn't like a transactional thing, like "Hey, if you help me with this, I'll do this for you." It was just really two guys who... I think my first or second e-mail to him was like, "Hey, Spencer... I got into the University of Washington, which is the school I wanted to get into. It's number 13th in the world, right behind Princeton in terms of ranking." US News ranked all the colleges in the world, and it's at number 13, right after Princeton. It's a public school, best school in the state of Washington, definitely, I would say.

I'm missing parts to this story, I'm jumping all around because it's just all coming back to me now. So I actually went to college in high school, with this program called [unintelligible 00:17:43.27] It lets you take college classes in high school, at the community college level. So I had college credit, and then when I got into the University of Washington I actually went to orientation, and then dropped out the second day.

Paul: [laughs]

Chino: I can't make this shit up. So I went to orientation, and I was like, "I will not be happy here. I wanna continue working on my apps. I have college credit under my belt." My worst-case scenario is I'd spend another year or two at home, then I'd go back to college, right on track anyway.

So I kind of moved my chess pieces in a way that I didn't really have any risk. Of course, I was 18, I had some college credit under my belt, I had some money saved up, and then I wanted to do this apps thing... It was really all over the place.

Paul: Right, okay. So you then decided to focus solely on apps, and I'm guessing this is your biggest creative spell. Like me, did you just start creating apps that you thought would do well? Did you have a process in place?

Chino: Oh, I wanted to conquer the world. So my first app was a -- I didn't conquer the world. I mean, not conquer the world, conquer a world. The world of like sneakers, and stuff. In high school I was really into Jordans, so there were a lot of instances where I'd meet a seller for Jordans and they'd try to sell me fake shoes. So my first app ever - this is the only app. I'll have and keep forever, it was called NoMoFakes. It was a fake product  catalog for fake Gucci bags, fake Ray-Bans, fake Jordan shoes, and it'd help you indicate whether or not the item you'd buy is fake or not. I thought it changed the world, but it made like two dollars a day.

Paul: Yeah, actually a lot of my apps have the word 'fake' in there as well... But the first way you monetized the app was what - just a paid app? Or did you do it through advertising.

Chino: It was a paid app, and then I made it free to get more traffic, but it didn't get more traffic.

Paul: This is great, actually, just to take stock because I think a lot of people have the same problem. They're attracted to the app store through PR press, these reports that you've read, like "18-year-old makes an app empire". You make your first app, you put it on the app store, go through weeks and weeks of negotiation with Apple because it's been rejected for whatever reason. You get it on there, and then nothing happens. I reckon there's millions of people who are disappointed with their first app... But what kept you going?

Chino: Honestly, I think that's the part of the story we need to zoom in on most. My accolades - they're great, but it's not the important part. The important part was the journey. I had a moment where I was in the shower, crying; sitting down in the shower, crying. Pathetic. To contextualize, I'd quit school, I was on Facebook, I'm seeing all my friends making new friends... I didn't feel like I was progressing. My app didn't do anything. Actually, my first 20 to 40 apps got rejected. They were all failures, they did nothing. So I had this moment, like a quarter life crisis, or a pre-quarter life crisis, where I was miserable. But I figured, "Okay, if I could stick this out a little longer, maybe some of them will hit off", and eventually they did. Do you know that game Candy Crush?

Paul: Yes, of course.

Chino: Well, I didn't make that - I'd be like on a yacht right now - but I made the first guide to that in the app store, and that did really well. I figured that people had to pay to keep playing the game if they couldn't get past a level, so I figured why not make a cheat guide to just show you how to save money and beat the game. That got up to the top 200 in the store, and that let me kind of reinvest in other projects as well

Paul: Yeah, I mean Candy Crush actually I'm sure was successful primarily because of Facebook, they were advertising all over the place, and their viral in-built mechanisms were amazing. But you managed to write a guide, I'm guessing it was a paid app... I almost get the feeling that the first 40-odd apps were training for this one idea, for your Candy Crush guide, and that ultimately then gave you the success you needed to validate all those hard decisions you took, and rejections. It made it all worth it.

Chino: It did, it did. I remember exactly where I was... I'd go to my gym every day and work out, and I was playing basketball on the gym basketball court, and Spencer texted me saying "Hey, congratulations! Some of your apps, they got to the top charts." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" because I didn't even check these. I thought they'd be rejected like the first 40 of them... And I checked it on my phone, I went to the US Store and I saw my app on the charts. It was like the heavens were singing, the good music comes on in your head... It felt good. It felt like that moment in The Pursuit of Happiness, the end where Will Smith has his hands in the air and he's clapping, he was about to cry - that stuff. It was good.

Paul: Any movie producers listening to this, we're getting the story here: there you were, in the shower, on your hands and knees crying, and then it goes to the moment where you first hit the top charts. Okay, so you've built the Candy Crush guide, it's giving you a big boost... Carrying on the story, I'd like to know what happened after you had that big sort of win.

Chino: I knew it was just the start. I figured out how to post the apps and how to position yourself in the app stores to get traffic, and I made valuable products for those niches in the app store, for example - quizz guides, game guides, quizz apps... Different apps that I knew niches needed to be filled for. And then that training - going back to training - prepared me for TapTrax now, because obviously the music space is highly competitive, I'm not naive to that, and of course the app space is ever growing. So that training helped me put together a foundation to build the product on top of, as well as grow the actual traffic in parallel.

So that training was very important. It prepared me for what I'm gonna do now, as well as prepared me and gave me the tools to say I'm confident and competent enough to make something like this.

Paul: It's so inspirational... I'm pretty sure now that for anyone - me included - who's been plugging away and finding the app store just so hard to have any success... It took you 30-40 apps until you had this hit, so anyone else who's going through -- I mean, I've spoken to a lot of people who have only got to 20-30 apps, not even that, and have stopped, and quit, and said it doesn't work. So it just shows that you've gotta keep moving forward, keep doing it, plugging away, and eventually you'll get something.  

So Chino, let's talked about what you've learned to then market TapTrax. Are there any things you would say could help us with what you've learned in terms of how to get downloads and how to get up to the tops of the app store charts?

Chino: Yeah, I guess some things that you shouldn't do... I think what some people do is they -- for example, if I was making an Instagram competitor, they'll include Instagram in their keywords because they think that the traffic from Instagram searches will be relevant to their photo app. That's a bad idea, because Apple is smart and knows you're not Instagram, so they won't show you in no search results.

Something else you shouldn't do, don't include relevant brand names in your keywords or your app store descriptions or title, because it will actually hurt you in terms of searchability and discovery. That's one of them.

In terms of creatives - worry about your creatives last. I've seen lots of apps with ugly icons and ugly screenshots go up to the top charts, and that's pretty much just because they have good positioning on the app stores in terms of search results. That's similar to SEO, but it's a little different obviously, it's kind of a new feel, but it's art and science. There are tools out there, like SensorTower or - I think you mentioned them as one of your sponsors - Gummicube. But really it's moreso an art, because there are words and phrases that you can use in your metadata that are not necessarily competitive, but they are popular in terms of search volume.

Paul: That's great. What we're learn from this podcast series, Chino, is to have the problem first of all - completely try to focus on solving a problem, rather than emulating an app that's already successful and putting a different angle on it. So your problem, your overcoming is the difficulty in finding new songs, relying on Pandora and Apple Music curation. Were there some big technical hurdles that you had to overcome to get TapTrax on the app store?

Chino: I guess not that many, but to your first point, in terms of the problem we solve and how we're different, I would say we're rapid music discovery.

Classically, music has been discovered in three ways - Shazam, Pandora, and the big dog, the radio. All those solutions are what's called passive; you run into the song and you IT it with it Shazam, or you run into the song on your station on Pandora or the radio and you kind of put it in the playlist on Spotify. But with us, you're finding tens, possibly hundreds of songs in a short amount of time, as opposed to running into the songs one by one on the other medium.

For us, the problem we solve is - I'm just willing to bet there are people out there who are actively looking for music and who wouldn't want to just discover it by way of chance or serendipity.

Paul: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we've had some past guests who are very relevant to you. There's the founder of Clammr... I would love you to maybe have on your next project a way of podcast discovery, so getting little clips in podcasts maybe in some kind of playlist and then realizing the ones you actually want to listen to; that would be pretty cool.

There's so much to learn from you, Chino. I feel like we could go on for some time. Before we close and before we say goodbye to you, are there any things that you know that we should be asking you? You know the audience... What have we missed, to tap into your knowledge? Is there anything we should have gone across to get the most out of you?

Chino: Yeah, definitely - just look at the app store like the rest of the internet. People say, "Don't make apps, because it's too competitive." Well, there are - what, 2 million apps? How many websites are there? There might be a billion websites and then two million apps. Which landscape do you wanna compete in? The one that's growing - mobile - or the one that's having less and less users go to it everyday, like desktop, web.

Actually the app store is a good platform in terms of digital experiences and value, but in terms what I -- I actually consult for startups as well for growth, because there are funnel dynamics to this in terms of growth. There's the top line, which is ASO, game discovery on the app store, activation signups, all that good stuff, and retention and invites. But I help companies too with growth for apps, just because it's my jungle.

The funny thing is that people try to invest time and effort into external channels for growth. For example they say, "Oh yeah, we have influencers with a total reach of a million followers who are gonna shout us out on Vine. An influencer has a blog of 20,000 followers", or whatever it is. But the thing is - and there's data on this, you can check my facts - that 65% of the apps get discovered on the app store. It's not gonna be on a newspaper, a billboard, a Vine, a Snapchat or whatever, because there's just too much friction from that channel of promotion to download the app.

So really what you need to be focusing on is your ASO - that's very, very important - as well as getting your users to each step of that funnel. To get them to be an actual user of your app, so that you can solve a problem for them.

There's a lot of nuance to the area of app growth, but it's not as hard as everybody thinks it is.

Paul: Yeah, in fact from my own experience, I've managed to get apps onto the top, number one in the category; I was working with the guy I mentioned earlier to get a number two app, just getting piped to number one post. But what I've learned is that the app store does command most of the downloads, and yet actually I've spent a lot of this podcast on the other ways of getting downloads, and you're absolutely right - that's one of the most valuable things I've learned; 65% of apps roughly are discovered on the app store itself, and that's where you need to really focus the attention.

Thanks for mentioning my sponsor as well, Gummicube; I'm sure they'll be happy, Dave Bell there. Chino, this has been a terrific chat. It's really, honestly been so great going through your story. People will want I guess to maybe hit you up for consulting on startups - how best can people reach out and connect with you?

Chino: Yes, so I'm on all the socials: @itschinolex, or you can reach out to me on Chino Lex, or my website is chinolex.com. Pretty simple.

Paul: Chinolex.com, great. Of course, there will be show notes on episode 476 of The App Guy Podcast. Chino, what a great, great, great episode, I love it. All the best with tapTrax.co. I'm going to be using it. We wish you all the best and look forward to the next 40-odd apps that maybe come out from your company.

Chino: Thanks you.

Paul: Thanks a lot.

An Interview With A Doctor Who Quit - Goes On To Create A Rap Video For Kickstarter

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we get exciting CEOs and founders on the show and we learn from them. We have all types of founders that we can learn from, and we have a great founder today. It's the founder of the London App Brewery, Angela Yu. She's actually going to talk to us about going from - get this - a doctor to a programmer. So instead of saving lives, you're helping enrich lives through programming, and there's a lot of other stuff we can learn about as well. So Angela, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Angela: Hi, hi!

Paul: Let's go straight into it. So you went from obviously a lot of time training to be a doctor and all the qualifications, and then you jumped ship and became a programmer. Tell us about the back-story of that.

Angela: Yes, it's pretty crazy. So I trained as a doctor at UCL in London for six years, and then went on to work in the National Health Service for another two years. When I was young I was quite into programming, and while I was in medical school I started picking up iOS development, because I really wanted to make medical apps that could make our lives slightly easier. Then as I got more and more into it, I sort of felt "Hey, wait a minute. I enjoy this a lot more than my day job, so what am I doing here?" [laughter] And also, the NHS, for those of you who don't know, is complete wasteland for tech, basically. I mean, we're still faxing in this day and age. And not just faxing, but you fax somebody, and then you call them to make sure that they got the fax, and then you e-mail them a hard copy. And I'm thinking most of the jobs that I'm doing could probably be replaced with a few lines of code, and that was really frustrating. So yes, it's a big jump, but a very good one.

Paul: I often get asked how to know when to make that jump. There's many people who listen to this who have different occupations, different types of jobs, and they ask me, "Paul, when do you know...? Because it is a big risk." So how did you prepare? I think we can learn from you on that.

Angela: A friend of mine who's a founder as well once quoted somebody, I don't know if it was Elon Musk or somebody else - starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass, and it's very true. Making that jump was really, really scary. But once you do make that jump you realize, "Oh, I'm not actually freefalling." So for me I think getting traction in our company, starting to see an uptick, that was the point where I said, "Okay, I think this is a good enough result for me to decide to change career." I have a lot of friends who maybe did it too early or maybe too late, and maybe regretted that, but yes... Seeing traction.

Paul: This is great advice. So specifically what is it - a certain amount of earnings from your company whilst you're working on it part time? Or is it some other traction, such as trajectory?

Angela: So I started the London App Brewery with a co-founder who came from finance to Android app development, and basically we started out by teaching friends who wanted to learn how to code. We then saw that more and more friends wanted to learn from us, and we were having this little weekend boot camps, and then we thought, "Hey, let's launch this out into a website, see if anybody will actually sign up for it." And that uptick that I was mentioning was people paying for the course, people talking about our course after having been on it to their friends, without us ever asking them to. We were seeing Facebook, Twitter shares, and people raving about it without any push from us, and I think that was the real sign that there was some sort of a product market fit, and it was a good point to jump into it.

Paul: Yes, let's talk about the London App Brewery then. You are teaching coding...

Angela: Yes, we are. My co-founder and I, we're both self-taught programmers. We don't really have background in tech other than maybe messing about with stuff on the weekends. So we thought about trying to create a course for people who are from a non-technical background. Because very often you get very technical, very good programmers explaining things to people in a way that not everybody can understand. There's a lot of tutorials which say, "You follow step 1-2-3, which is super simple. Then step 3, you just simply set up your cloud database", and then people are like, "What?" [laughter] It was a bit of a jump there, right?

So we tried to make something that has really clear explanation, uses a lot of animations, and sort of explains things in ways that normal people can understand. That's basically in a nutshell what we're trying to do at the London App Brewery.

Paul: Right. Now, I know that you've been working on something that you're extremely excited about. You mentioned about the NHS and how prehistoric it is with tech, and we always on this show look at these opportunities. So you're doing something that helps save 800 million pounds a year, or something? Tell us about that.

Angela: Yes, so that was one of my larger apps that I've built, before starting the London App Brewery. It's [unintelligible 00:06:21.04] The problem at the moment is that we have a shortage of medical nursing staff in the NHS, and the NHS as a whole spends about 1.7 billion pounds on temporary medical staffing - so part time work -  per year. The crazy thing is about 20 to 30% of that goes towards private agencies as commission. What they do is incredibly low-tech. They are headhunters, so they call you up on Monday and say, "Hey, Dr. Angela, can you do a shift?" and I say, "No." They call you back on Tuesday, "Can you do a shift on another day?" I say, "No", and it goes again and again. Some days I have a call log of eight or nine calls from them. So I basically created an app with a designer and a backend developer which automates the entire process. It has notifications for jobs as they come up. You CV is sent straight to medical staffing in the hospitals, and you also have a track record of your performance on the job. So that's being pushed through the NHS... But obviously, the NHS being the NHS, it will take a while to spread from hospital to hospital.

Paul: Yes, I know. In fact, you've just inspired someone, I'm sure, who's working in their own industry. What I've learned from you is to simply keep your eyes open for problems that could be solved through tech.

Angela: Yes. I think this kind of "scratch your own itch" kind of app or product is the best, because you have real frustrations, and I was really upset about getting ten million calls from this medical staffing agency, and I'm sure everybody else has these kind of frustrations which they can address.

Paul: So why do you think that others... You are a doctor, you've learned and taught yourself to code - why is that important?

Angela: So in the future, I think not being able to communicate with technology or computers will become a hindrance. I think as we're moving towards this kind of tech-first society, not being able to talk to a computer is going to be a hindrance, if not a disability. So I think being able to have a degree of understanding of code is really essential. Even if you're not going to become a founder, even if you're not going to make a tech product, it's still important to understand how code words. But that's my opinion.

Paul: So what we're learning from you is that it is important to have that skill set even if you may not be the one who's developing the product. I would love to know... You were a doctor, it's incredibly long hours... How on earth did you find time to start your side projects, which ultimately lead you to this path?

Angela: [laughs] So the good thing about being a doctor is that you have a block of night shifts; sometimes it could be 14 days of night shifts in a row, where you work 12 hours per day. But after that block you get maybe 4 or 5 days to recuperate and get back into normal life, and during that time, being relatively young, it would only take me maybe 24 hours to bounce back into a good time cycle, so I would spend the four days coding, essentially. And also, being on night shifts, being in this sort of night mode, it's good for the coding as well, because it's quiet and dark. [laughter]

I had a lot of tricks that I would use... For example there's this app that I think some scientists made from Penn State University, which is called the Caffeine [unintelligible 00:10:28.25] where you can actually measure the half-life of coffee, and you figure out how much caffeine you've consumed, and it plots a decay curve of how much is coming out of your bloodstream. And once it hits a critical level, it prompts you, it gives you a notification to drink a bit more coffee, so that you always stay within the production zone.

Paul: I love that. We had an episode last year with the founder of Hidrate, and my wife and I, we just got our bottles now, after this year of waiting; that's for water. You've just discovered something similar for coffee.

Angela: Yes, exactly. And the other thing is, you know, after work... I think a lot of side projects happen after work. And while it's very tempting to just sit on the couch with ice-cream and watch Game Of Thrones, you're not gonna get much done, right? So I had this kind of mental trick that I would say to myself... As soon as I switch environment, so enter the door, that's my moment which I can capture to do good, or sit on the couch. So I kind of said to myself, "I'm only gonna code for 20 minutes. I'm just gonna code for 20 minutes, and then I'm gonna watch Game of Thrones, or whatever." But then once you get into it, that kind of momentum carries through, and it's actually quite hard to stop yourself from finishing a particular feature, or finishing something in the code. So using that momentum really helped me, and some days I coded up until like 2 AM. It's a good trick.

Paul: One of the successes I've had in the past is helping launch an app with my good friend Andreas, who's been on this show, and we launched Fit Men Cook. One of the apps to beat us - we got number two, and the number one app of that day happened to be Monument Valley. I can see that you've had some experience with the makers of Monument Valley. Tell us about that.

Angela: Yes, yes. So after launching App Brewery we sort of realized that becoming a good app developer is far more than being a good programmer. In this day and age you have to get good at app marketing, you have to get good at app design. We're not designers, we're not really growth hackers, so we try to bring in people who know about these kinds of topics. Through a VC friend of mine actually, I got in contact with [unintelligible 00:13:11.10], who's a UI/UX designer at Ustwo, the studio who made Monument Valley. We managed to get her to come and give our audience, our community a talk on how to design for mobile, which is her specialty. If any of your app makers are based in London, we've actually got a free talk coming up in two weeks at Twitter, where the Twitter team are going to teach our students about app analytics. So it's all about getting the experts to actually teach, rather than one person to teach it all.

Paul: Okay. Sadly, I think this is going to go live after that event, but certainly I'm sure you've got these types of things happening all the time. How can people track the events that you've got going on?

Angela: The best way is to go to Meetup.com/londonappbrewery, and that's where we list all of our free events and live events.

Paul: That's one of the most popular places to go, I've been told on this show, Meetup. So I'll make sure that there's links to the show notes. It's episode 474 of The App Guy Podcast. Let's talk also about Kickstarter, because also in the debrief that we had you mentioned Kickstarter.

Angela: So what we found is that while we can teach - I think we've taught over 4,000 students now in our central London classroom... But our time is limited and we're only based in London. We've had some great students, we've had employees from Google, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs... Loads of people come onto our course and really love it, but we're not able to offer this course beyond London, so the idea was why don't we try and convert our coding teaching principles to an online course, and make the best online programming course possible. That's why we're setting up this Kickstarter, to launch this online app development course.

Paul: Right, and I'm guessing that you've got details on your website to find out about that Kickstarter.

Angela: Yes, absolutely. It will be on LondonAppBrewery.com.

Paul: LondonAppBrewery.com, okay. And finally, I can see that you've mentioned an eBook as well, 12 simple rules... Tell us about the eBook.

Angela: Yes, so I just thought that for the App Guy Podcast listeners it'd be a great thing if there's... I think there's a lot of programmers who listen to your talk, but if there's anybody who wants to get into coding and wants to learn how to code, we wrote a 40-page eBook for your readers, which you can download for free. Basically it just goes onto the 12 rules for how you should approach learning to code. A lot of people have ideas about learning how to code, such as you've gotta find the perfect coding language for a beginner - which doesn't exist, by the way - or that coding is really hard, or the other way, some people get told rather that coding is easy and then you feel like you're dumb because you don't understand it... We sort of tried to address a lot of the fallacies about learning how to code, and some of the rules and tips for how you can go about it.

Paul: That's great. I'll make sure that we have links to that, Angela. That will be on theappguy.co, episode 474, or if you just search for your name, Angela. I was just wondering, this final thing... You've had incredible success - 4,000 students; I wondered if you look to all those - I don't know whether you keep in touch with many of those students, but have any got on to do anything special that you could think of from your course?

Angela: Yes, so we had a student who created the Double app, we had a student who created a very simple app that wakes him up one minute earlier every morning, so that he could form good habits, so that he would eventually wake up at 6 AM, or whatever his target was. [laughter] Yeah, so we had a lot of very interesting and quirky product ideas. We had another guy who created an app - I can't remember the name of it... I think it's called Never Eat/Dine Alone, and it's like Tinder but for people who don't want to eat in a restaurant alone, so you match up with somebody close by that you can go and have dinner with.

Paul: I love the time we're living it, don't you? Such creativity everywhere, it's so cool. Alright Angela, I know that you listen to this show and I really appreciate you coming on as well and sharing your wisdom. Hopefully we've inspired some doctors... Actually we don't want to inspire too many doctors, because we need them.

Angela: So few doctors left, yeah... [laughter]

Paul: Yeah, but it's just inspirational to know that someone who's pursued one career, it's not too late to change course. I did exactly the same thing, I left a career in finance and I thought it was stupid at the time, but there is this wonderful world of tech, and I love what I do. It's inspiring to know that you don't have to continue on the path that you kind of decided on as someone going to uni, and that you can change.

Angela: Yes, absolutely. Also, it's also about [unintelligible 00:19:29.05] A doctor is a very valuable asset, being able to do medicine, but also being able to program is a valuable asset in itself. But having the combination of different skills - yours is finance, plus coding or tech, that's more rare. I think this is what should encourage people working in different fields; just because you're jumping into a new opportunity, it doesn't mean that you're starting from scratch. You're bringing in your other skills as well.

Paul: Yes, and actually learning from the Tempo app what I realized is that sometimes we get too obsessed with the tech itself, but you've actually tapped into the problem, because you understand the problem of having scratched your own itch, kind of thing.

Angela: Yes, absolutely.

Paul: That's so valuable. Well Angela, thanks for coming on this show and all the best with your career path. I guess you could always go back to... [end of tape]

I’m In This To Make A Significant Impact

Paul Kemp, host of The App Guy Podcast talks with Brett Hagler, CEO and Co-Founder of New Story Charity

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the podcast that inspires loads and loads of entrepreneurs, app founders, startup founders, anyone who’s enthusiastic about the startup scene, the app scene, the mobile scene. We love to get guests on this show that inspire us and tell us about how they’re changing the world because it helps us all to change the world.

https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/the-app-guy/id771670010?mt=2

I’ve got a terrific guest because when I read about the mission, it’s a company called New Story — just go to New Story and you will see that they’re transforming slums into sustainable communities, doing a lot of stuff like that. We’re going to hear from the founder, he’s been on a load of podcasts and you’ve probably heard of him, it’s Brett Hagler. Brett, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Brett: Excited to be here, thanks for having me on.

Paul: Tell us about New Story because it sounds wonderful what you’re trying to do.

Brett: Yes, so in short, from a high level, we transform slum areas into new, sustainable communities. We do that starting out with crowdfunding houses for only $6,000 per home, so taking the family out of a slum, whether it’s a shack or a tent, and bringing them into a brand new home, for only about $6,000. To give you an example, you could go on your phone right now, go on our website and meet digital family profiles — we have it set up so that it actually looks like an app — in Haiti, families in Central America that have been living in life-threatening homelessness, see their story, see their picture. You give directly to them, and when they move into their new home, we take a move-in video of them getting their keys and their home certificate, and then we send it back to everybody that donated.

We don’t just build one-off houses, we build all of these homes in one area. What that allows us to do is actually create an entire community with school, with clean water and sanitation, with solar power, with agriculture training, with micro-loan opportunities because we have that foundation, and that’s why we say we transform slums into sustainable communities.

Paul: I love this already. We try to learn from this show, and what we’ve learned over the 468 episodes before you, Brett…

Brett: Wow, that’s a lot…

Paul: Yeah, and there’s a definite theme that comes out, which is trying to solve real-world problems. I’d love to know — I’m guessing it’s pretty obvious what we’re trying to solve, but from your words, what is it that you’re trying to solve with technology? What problem are you trying to eradicate?

Brett: Yes, so actually there’s two main problems that we’re trying to solve. The first is — — and I’ll just give an example of one family. So you’ve got a family of three kids; the kids are three years old, seven years old and eleven years old. They were born into a slum where they face life-threatening dangers every day, like child abduction, sex trafficking, weather dangers, theft, all types of violence, and they have no protection because they don’t have safety or shelter. So what we do is we use our platform that we’ve built and we put their story up, and they get funded online. We then move them into a brand new home.

So the first problem we’re solving is life-threatening homelessness, but then the second problem that I’m even almost more passionate about, is we’re solving this problem of an intelligent, talented kid being born, but has no opportunity. So literally imagine, as we’re talking, there’s the next Nelson Mandela, there is the next Einstein out there right now, at one of these slums, that has way more IQ than I do, way more talent than I do, but he or she does not have the opportunity to reach their potential and to reach their dreams. So what we want to do is we not only want to save their lives, we want to put them in an environment where they can go to school, where they don’t have to worry about getting sick every day; they’ll have clean water and sanitation. Where they’ll be able to have business training as they get older, so an entire opportunistic community. At the end of it the, net result is unlocking opportunity, and that’s what we get really excited about and that’s really the purpose of New Story.

Paul: Let’s talk about the donation side because I’d love to know… I feel like what you’re doing is you’re bringing a sense of realism to charitable causes because a lot of us are donating to big organizations, but we don’t see where the money goes. Is that another problem you’re trying to solve, which is trying to bring a bit of genuineness, realism into what you’re donating?

Brett: That’s actually how New Story got started because I went down and saw the problem that I just described, and at first — I never thought I’d start a charity, ever… I was always more technology-based and entrepreneurial. So when I saw this problem, I actually tried to go look at other organizations that I could champion and really rally around. Well, it turns out that all the ones that I’ve found, I kept feeling the same frustrations, which was a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability, a lack of innovation, and certainly a lack of technology. So I said,

“Why not apply the same spirit as a startup technology company to this problem on the ground that I saw?”

and this problem of what just seemed like traditional charity. So to answer your question, yes, absolutely.

https://www.newstorycharity.org/about

Our team is really fired up about creating a better giving experience, and using technology and transparency to do that.

Paul: Brett, a lot of the startup founders, the entrepreneurs that listen to this show really struggle with getting their idea off the ground. You’ve got this wonderful problem you’re solving, you’re already in the technology game, but I wondered how you actually got it started — was it with your own money, did you get some help along the way? Talk us through how you actually got it off the ground.

Brett: Yes, so a lot of times I think early-stage founders are people that are thinking about trying to get an idea off the ground. Unfortunately, I think people believe that good ideas just take off, and that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Founders make their ideas take off.

We subscribe to this idea that in the beginning, you actually have to do things that do not scale, which is very counterintuitive from what I think a lot of people think, as

“Oh, let’s just build this app, ship it, and all of a sudden it’s going to take off, it’s a good idea.”

A couple examples, then I’ll get to our example.

So when Airbnb first got started, it took them almost two years before they got any traction, and what they would have to do is they would literally fly across the United States of American, from San Francisco to New York — because most of their clients were in New York, the early stage hosts — and they would take professional pictures themselves, manually, of the apartments, to try to make the apartment look better so that it would convert higher on the site. And they were still only getting a couple dozen people a month doing that. But they had to do something that did not scale, to figure out

“Wow, okay, if we can take better photos, then it’s gonna convert higher on the site.”

And there’re all types of stories like that in Silicon Valley, where you’re starting out and you have to do things that don’t scale.

For us, the very beginning was

“Hey, let’s not try to fund a hundred thousand homes, let’s try to fund one home, and we’re just gonna start by first going to our network”

…you know, I Facebook messaged every single person I knew, and then we just literally manually pushed this boulder up the hill until it got to the top, and then things finally started going a little bit more organically.

So anyone feeling that, please know that you’re in a good spot because that’s what every entrepreneur has felt before, and now it comes down to

“Will you fight against it and will you push this boulder up the hill until you get it to a point where things start happening more organically and more inbound?”

Sometimes it takes a couple months to do that, sometimes it takes a couple years. There’re tons of stories of some of the best companies in the world right now, where it took them a couple years to get that started. So yes, it’s a long process. In the beginning literally do things that do not scale, to try to get your first whatever that goal is — whether it’s number of users, whether it’s your first… I don’t know, whatever your goal is, don’t be afraid to do things manually in the very beginning to get it going.

Paul: Terrific. Brett, I noticed that you are a non-profit, Y Combinator… We’ve had a lot of founders who’ve gone through incubators and accelerators. We’ve actually got some people queued up to try and get through, so I’d love to know your story on how you actually got YC to back your non-profit.

Brett: We were very fortunate to go through Y Combinator in the summer of 2015, and I think the way we got in — there were really two main reasons and a little bit of luck. The first was we had this idea, which was to build a crowdfunding platform and try to fund families on there as soon as possible. What we did is we didn’t wait around to build out a real, automatic, fully-coded technical site that could do all of the technical things that we wanted to do. What we did is we built a very, very minimum viable product that was basically a bunch of different landing mockup pages that looked like a real crowdfunding page, but it wasn’t. And when somebody donated, instead of it automatically updating the percentage and the meter — what people are used to — the founders would actually go in on the back and manually move the meter from this point to this point to this point, and change the percentages. Whenever someone donated, I would literally get on my phone and calculate what percentage that would be the goal. I’d mess up all the time, and people would call in or e-mail and be like,

“Hey, we donated, but not sure if it went through. What happened?” I’d be like, “Jimmy, don’t worry about it, it’s just credit-card processing, it takes a little bit of time.”

In the meanwhile, we would be scrambling to update it. But doing things like that, it allowed us to… I mean, we had our first couple homes funded in a very short amount of time, and that allowed us to not only prove that it was something people wanted online, but we could also build the end product, which was the homes, and then take the move-in video, which was kind of our end promise, and send it back to all the donors.

So to answer your question, the first part was that we shipped our idea as quickly as possible, using that mentality of doing things that don’t scale in the beginning, and that got us traction early on. So we didn’t wait around five or six months to build out this product, to do a ton of research, to make everything perfect before we launched it — we didn’t do any of that. We just launched it as quickly as we could, to see if it was something people wanted — turns out it was — and then we were able to go to Y Combinator and say

“Look, within five months of starting, this is what we’ve already done.” And that was very impressive to them because one of the things that I think was the most important is just “What are you getting done in a short amount of time? What’s your ability to execute on something in a short amount of time?”

and we were fortunate enough to do that.

Then the second piece was once we got the interview… How it kind of works, really quickly, is I think we had about 6500 startups all around the world apply to our batch. Out of those 6500, they took the top 300 and said

“Hey, we want to fly you to Mountain View, California for a 10-minute interview.”

Literally, they had people flying from Africa, from London, for a 10-minute interview in Mountain View. Ten minutes, that’s it. We got the call to do that, and when we got the call we knew that they were only going to take about a third of these startups. So what our team did was — and it’s kind of one of our values now — we prepared well over a hundred hours for ten minutes. So it was like going the extra mile to prepare to know everything that they were gonna ask, and that of course now spills into different things that we do now. It’s that mentality to be the most prepared, to be the most detail-oriented. So I’d say it’s those combinations.

Paul: I love that. That’s the first time we’ve heard a real step-by-step process of you going through. So when you successfully got through, how did it actually help your business? Talk us through what actually happened after you got in.

Brett: One of the best things that Y Combinator does with really any program — and it’s crazy how sometimes it takes a program to do this when you could really do it on your own, kind of… But basically you go through a three-month program, and what Y Combinator does, they say

“Envision yourself three months from now. Take one metric, one number that’s gonna be your big goal that you’re gonna hit at the end of this, and try to make it as close to impossible, but you could still do it somehow. Pick that goal, and you’re gonna spend the next three months only focusing on that goal.”

So for people that have apps, it could probably be ‘number of downloads’ or ‘number of users’. Then you would just spend three months where that’s the only metric that you measure, the only one.

So what we did was — they make you come to them and say

“Okay, what’s your goal gonna be?”

and our team put our heads together and we said

“Alright, let’s be crazy ambitious and let’s pick a number.”

We came up with a number of 50 homes. For us, that would be about $300,000 in three months, compared to where we had been, which was not even $100,000. They said,

“Okay, great. Fifty? You guys are gonna do one hundred. Double what you came to us thinking.”

That was already an audacious goal that we thought, and then they said,

“Good, okay. That means you’re gonna do a hundred.”

And I vividly remember thinking “I have no idea, literally no idea how we’re gonna do that.” It’s $600,000 in three months, and we’re like five months into this, we don’t even know what we’re doing.

But, getting to my point, what it made us do is it made us think, okay, if we had to hit this number, if we had to hit 100 homes — or for you listening right now, if you had to hit 100,000 downloads, if you HAD TO, no BS, if you HAD TO, what would you need to do, and what are the new channels that you would have to try to go after? What are maybe the new partnerships you would have to get because you know there’s no other way you could do it? So all that made us think of new ideas, and then we measured it off of a weekly growth rate. So we said

“If we grow at 10% every week, over time it’s gonna compound and it’s gonna reach our goal at the end of these three months.”

So anybody listening right now, if it’s ‘number of downloads’, try to say

“Okay, our goal is to grow by 10% every week.”

First week let’s just say you start with a hundred — great. The next week you’re going to be 110%. Next week, 10%, and keep going. Over time, if you just focus on that, you will be amazed as to how you’re growing.

Paul: Yes, and actually investors love that because anything that grows at a regular rate is like a hot property for an investor. That’s terrific, I really feel like that’s incredibly insightful. So there’s two more things we do before we say goodbye, Brett. I think people love to know why founders get in the game, and you’ve obviously had choices along your path, to end up where you are now. I’d love to know, was there anything that caused you to get into entrepreneurship startups, and would you recommend it to others? So why become a founder, and would you recommend the lifestyle?

Brett: That’s a great question. I don’t think that it’s for everybody. The reason I got into it, and the reason I think some of the better entrepreneurs that I meet get into it is there’s always a bigger purpose than just trying to make money. Because if you’re just trying to make money, there’s a lot of other ways to make money than building a company and building an organization, and building something that means so much more than the number of zeroes that you can try to get in your bank account. So for me — I at the end of the day would really want to look back and say,

“Me and my team — I have an amazing co-founding team — we built a truly great organization that is going to last, and is going to make an impact far beyond what we could ever imagine.”

It’s basically:

“I’m in this to make a significant impact and build an organization with a great culture, with great people”

and try our best to really make something great. As simple as that might sound, it’s having this level and this standard of excellence, and trying to make something as great as possible so that it could impact as many people as possible.

Paul: That is very, very inspirational. Finally, this is all around the world, and I guess you’ve gone to some of these locations that you help — I wondered where’s the place you feel right now is in most need? Which location around the world do you feel is in most need of your help?

Brett: That’s a good question… It’s tough. Honestly, we wouldn’t pick a location unless there was significant need there. It might be cliché to say, but all the locations that we’re in, there is significant need. We’re talking about life-threatening dangers. This isn’t just

“How can we take a family from a pretty bad situation to a better situation”,

it’s

“How can we take a family living out of a hell hole”,

the closest thing you can get to that on this earth. And how can we not only save their lives but then, as I’ve mentioned before, give them the opportunity to use their God-given talent and intelligence?

The areas we’re working in right now, Haiti — Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. If you just look at economic numbers, that would be the poorest area. But then we’re also in Central America, which is still very poor, and they have different types of problems there, and different types of needs. So I’m not giving you the best answer, but really in any of our locations, there is significant need.

Paul: But also I’m guessing as well — these places have slums, but also people are working remotely now all over the world, and I’ve got someone who just messaged me today, he’s traveling through India, these really rough parts of India…

Brett: Oh my gosh, yeah… I haven’t been there yet, honestly.

Paul: Okay, well add that to your list… The thing is though, there are so many great locations to be based from to help people on the ground, and I wondered, have you actually traveled to some of these locations and have you met other entrepreneurs working remotely?

Brett: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been to all of our locations, and the social entrepreneurship ecosystem is fantastic. You find really quickly who’s doing great work in these areas, so I get inspired all the time by people doing different things and trying to solve different problems with innovation. Honestly, one of the things that’s been on my mind a lot is using mobile — mobile phones and creating products and apps for that, whether it’s a for-profit company or a non-profit, that can deliver solutions and just whole new worlds for people that have never had access to the internet. Imagine that — imagine never having access to the internet, and then imagine getting it, and being able to learn from it, to research and to read. So to answer your question, yes, I get inspired all the time, and meeting those types of people is a really good place to go for inspiration.

Paul: That’s wonderful. There’s going to be full show notes now on episode 469. Just go to theappguy.co, search for Brett Hagler, you’ll see links there. Brett, how can people get in touch, and for anyone listening to this, what would be the best action they can take now?

Brett: I’ll give two options (if that’s okay). We have a really cool platform where anybody can start a digital fundraiser with us. For example, for your next birthday, you could give up your birthday and create a page on our site, and ask your friends and family for donations instead of gifts coming up. On average, you’re going to raise about $1,200, you’re going to bring in about 13 friends that you inspire, and you’re going to go through this process together with your friends and family, and it’s an awesome experience.

Just as an example, what we’ve had people do recently is give up their wedding registries and create a fundraising campaign on our platform where their friends and family are giving out a home, instead of extra chinaware or something. So those are two options where you could create any type of campaign, fundraiser that you want on our site. I will directly connect you to a family in need and you can see everything.

And then the other way, kind of a bigger level is if maybe your family or your company would want to sponsor a home because a home is only $6,000. That’s also another really great way to get involved.

Paul: Where should they go?

Brett: The best place to go is just our website, which is newstorycharity.org.

Paul: Wonderful. Brett, there’s one thing I just meant to ask — you’re really well connected in the social entrepreneurship… I’ve done a lot of these episodes, and it’s one of the first chats we’ve had about social entrepreneurship, I think. I wondered where you go to get plugged into the community, to the network and meet other social entrepreneurs?

Brett: It’s a good question. Ted is a good place — I get a lot of inspiration from Ted talks, and Ted as a community — there’s a ton of social entrepreneurship there. Endeavor is a really good place to meet social entrepreneurs… I think those are probably two of the best places to start.

Paul: Yes, great. Actually, you reminded me now — I can’t help this, but I was in Bali, and I remember one of the Ted talks was actually creating a village out of bamboo, and we went to the bamboo school, which I think was sponsored by Richard Branson and some others, and there was this whole village… It was amazing. So yes, absolutely, Ted, Ted talks and the community. Brett, I could chat for ages. It’s been so inspirational, thank you so much for coming on this show, and thanks for being so awesome in what you’re doing to change the world.

Brett: Yes, absolutely, and if anybody wants to reach out, if there’s any way I can help, I’m pretty active on Twitter, @BrettHagler.

Paul: Great. Brett, all the best, thanks for coming on.

Brett: Thank you so much!

Paul: Bye for now.

Brett: Bye.

12 Best Strategies To Promote Your Game App

Game apps are proliferating in the market at a burgeoning rate. It becomes really difficult to make out whether an app will be able to reach its targeted audience effectively or will it just get crushed beneath the hordes of other apps. 

If we search for a particular genre of apps on Play Store, we will be able to find thousands of apps on the same utility, game or a service. One thing that is worth noticing is that there are one or two apps which hold the top positions on the Play Store. These are the same apps which attract user’s attention and are able to make a mark in the market. Since, countless gaming apps featuring teen patti, rummy and other social games are being launched every day so it becomes very difficult to maintain a constant position among the top gaming apps on Play Store.

So are you wondering what could make your game app go from rags to riches ?

A well-defined marketing strategy is a requisite for the promotion of your game app. Everyone has one and so should you. It’s not just about following the rat race but creating a unique strategy of your own, better than your competitors, of course, to reach the zenith of success. 

Here’s a short infographic guiding you to the basic key points you should incorporate in your marketing strategy for your game app’s promotion:

An Interview With Nathan Hirsch, Owner / Founder of Freeeup

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show that inspires you by getting interviews with founders, with business owners to help you build your own business. Today I have got a great guest, because we're going to learn a lot about what he is doing with Freeeup.com, his name is Nathan Hirsch, he is the owner and the founder of Freeeup. Nathan, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Nathan: Thank you for having me.

Paul: Thanks for coming on. So let's talk about what you're doing; you're basically helping by providing remote workers who do a lot of stuff. Can you talk me through what Freeeup is doing?

Nathan: Definitely. So there are a lot of websites out there where you can hire remote workers, find different freelancers or temporary contractors, but a lot of my clients have had bad experiences hiring workers in the past, or they're hiring people for the first time, or they just don't have the time to go through and interview all these different applicants and make a good decision or a bad decision that sets them back. So what we developed was a hands-on approach to doing this. Our clients come to us and they don't want to spend time on the frontend, and they also want to have some kind of insurance on the backend. On the frontend, we do all the interviews ourselves. We get about a hundred applicants a week, we have a strict interview process, we have communication guidelines from my past experience dealing with clients to make sure that when we give a worker to the client they're good to go and that the client is going to have a good experience. In the backend, we also protect our clients because our workers don't quit very often - but it is real life, it could happen, so we have replacement workers ready to go, we cover all re-training costs if a worker ever leaves, and along that entire process from the time a worker is hired, trained, starts working, we're very hands-on; we're there to support the client to get involved if there's any miscommunication, so we have a very hands-on approach to help businesses hire workers and expand their company.

Paul: In a nutshell, I do think that everyone listening has probably heard of Elance or oDesk which is now Upwork, but you're better because if you don't want the headache of doing all the interviews yourself, getting a hundred applicants yourself to have to sift through, we basically can go to your site and then have trust that there's a thorough interview process. Is that right?

Nathan: Exactly. And you can go on these different sites if you have time, and post jobs and get all these applicants and go through them one by one, or if you don't have the time you can go to Freeeup and sign up as a client, be like "Nate, I need this worker with these skills, that can work these hours, that has this background." We're usually pretty quick, within 24 hours of getting you that worker from our team so you can hit the ground running right away.

Paul: So let's talk about who's hiring you, because we could have a lot of people listening who are potentially suitable as clients for hiring you. What types of companies tend to hire you?

Nathan: Sure, so our main focus originally was eCommerce just because that's my background. I run an Amazon store that does about 5-8 million dollars in sales a year, I've been doing that for six years, so that's my personal background and how we got started. But I do have a lot of clients that we've kind of expanded into different categories, from real estate to random marketing companies, to consulting companies, to even lawyers, and now we're kind of focusing on different targets: developers, different companies that do very unique things in small niches that aren't the mainstream eCommerce.

Paul: Right, okay. I'll tell you what, since you've touched on your background there, that is pretty phenomenal - 8 million dollars in sales per year... How did you get that started?

Nathan: Sure, so it's actually a funny story. When I was in college, about 20 years old, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I really wanted to start my own company; I don't really like working for other people, I had different internships in the past, so I actually started off by selling books. I would go to the dumpster... My grandfather would drive me to the dump and they had these books that people were recycling or throwing away, so I would pick them up, sell them online, make a little bit of money. I then got into selling textbooks. Instead of people selling back to the bookstore at my college, they would go to me and I would have my dorm room just full of textbooks that I would buy back and then resell on Amazon. It was all about timing - you would buy them at the end of the semester, hold on to them and resell them at the beginning of the next semester. That kind of got me involved in Amazon.com, where I started contacting different vendors, different manufacturers to sell their products, and it kind of blew up out of nowhere. Before I knew it, I was running a million-dollar business out of my dorm room, hiring my friends, making a lot of hiring decisions that were both good and bad, but also learning a lot. As the business grew, I had that need for remote workers. Whenever you're an entrepreneur, you just run out of hours in the day, so a friend of mine turned me on to oDesk and I was determined to build this remote army of workers, so I ended up doing a lot of hiring, hiring over 50 different remote workers to do everything from customer care, data entry, and through that you go through a lot of growing pains. Anyone who's hired international workers for the first time knows that there's a communication gap; you might not know exactly what you're looking for, but that kind of gave me the idea to help other people get through that process a lot simpler. Because we spent a lot of time interviewing, a lot of time making good decisions, bad hires or whatever it was, and really coming up with a foolproof process to vet workers and to make sure that people follow our communication guidelines, which is very similar to other clients' expectations, and a lot of people around the world don't have those same expectations, so we were able to lay it out clearly. So that's kind of how I got involved in becoming a hiring expert, and now I'm really focused on Freeeup.com, to help other businesses do the same thing.

Paul: So we have people listening who have made changes in their life, Nate, and I'm thinking that there's actually probably a few people listening in a dorm room. Any advice to those listening who are tempted by your lifestyle - is it worth it if they try to emulate what you've done and the path you have chosen?

Nathan: It's worth it if you like to work. It takes up a lot of hours. For me it's a passion, I enjoy doing it, but my advice would be to try a lot of different things. You never know what you're going to get into, what's going to stick, what you're going to think of in terms of a business idea. So try out a lot of different things; you have plenty of time when you're young, it's a time to take chances and take risks, and if you find something that you're passionate about, that you would rather do than a standard 9 to 5 job, then it's absolutely worth it. Just be prepared for a lot of ups and downs, and make sure that you're emotionally stable and ready for the challenge.

Paul: I love that, that was great. So let's then switch gears back to the Freeeup.com. I think there's a lot of people listening who are part of the appster tribe who have had the same pains that I've had, where you do have people let you down, you get a lot of bad staff through these companies, these platforms. What should we be looking out for as a great person to work with? What are the questions to ask when appointing someone remotely?

Nathan: Sure. So my biggest thing is I want to hire workaholics. I want people who love to work, who have a lot of free time to work, who are very passionate about my clients' businesses, who treat my clients' businesses as their own. Those are my targets. If I find someone who has an extra five hours a week because they have another job and a large family that they have to provide for and this is just a side gig, for me that's not good enough. I want someone who's committed to whatever job they take, is really passionate about it and is looking to be there long-term and to help it grow along with the business owner.

Paul: Right. You know, Nate, a lot of people I guess have the ability to so grow their own network, their own personal branding; you've done a lot of stuff with marketing and growing successful companies - what could we be doing through, say, social media and other outlets to grow our own personal brands, our own businesses through content marketing?

Nathan: Definitely. So whenever someone comes to me looking for marketing, I recommend three different things. I recommend hiring a content writer, because if you're like me and you have a hundred things to do every week, you just run out of time to write content, and content is very important. You want to get your ideas, your opinions on paper so other people can read it, whether it's blog posts, guest blog posts, different PR stuff, so hiring someone who's a very good writer, that can take your ideas and your notes and turn it into great content. Then hiring a social media person, someone with a lot of experience, running different Instagram, Facebook campaigns, advertising campaigns through them, and they kind of go hand in hand. Because the best kind of Facebook campaigns come with original content and not just articles copied from other places. And then the last thing is some type of lead generation person. This can almost be like your day-to-day VA, but they should have some kind of lead generation background. That's actually how I found you, by reaching out to different podcasts, different people in the industry, doing a lot of LinkedIn networking and trying to get your name out there, trying to get your content out there, and really just diversifying who you're contacting. Because I could spend all day sending different e-mails out and contacting different people, but I just don't have time for that, so having someone do it on your behalf can really give you a heads up.

Paul: Alright. Actually the way you do it the is that the staff would tap into your e-mail and send it as if it's communication from yourself.

Nathan: Exactly. And I'll make sure that I proofread any content or any e-mails that are representing me, but at the same time yes, that's how we do it.

Paul: This is great stuff, because I guarantee there's a lot of people listening to this who don't do this and try to do everything themselves, and that could be a recipe for disaster in a way, because what they're doing is they're not allowing the focus on their own time.

Nathan: Exactly. And off of that, what I always recommend doing is writing down a list of everything you do on a week-to-week basis and everything that you want to do on a week-to-week basis, and put it in priority from easiest to hardest, and then also circle the things that you either enjoy doing, or the things you're good at, or the things that you can do better than everyone else. And everything else on that list, you should try to find someone better than you, or try to find an assistant that can do it for you so that you can focus on expanding your company with the things that you're good at, with the things you specialize at, and you can have assistants that help you do the other things. You'll find a lot of times that if you background isn't social media for example, if you hire a social media expert you're going to get a lot more out of it than if you do it yourself.

Paul: Yes, I've unfortunately had the problem in the past of just having to google and youtube, and thinking you can do it yourself because the information is there, and then trying to research it, spending lots and lots of time doing it. So we're learning a huge amount from you, and I guess this is a show for app entrepreneurs, people in the mobile space; what I was going to ask is have you seen in your experience, in all the years that you've been doing this, has there been a shift towards mobile in the stuff that you're seeing?

Nathan: There's definitely been a shift, just in terms... Because I deal with a lot of eCommerce, so a lot of eCommerce people are buying online, buying through different apps, and I have clients that will sell through those apps, whether it's Amazon.com or other ones. So there definitely is a shift. Me personally, I don't deal with app development, it's just not my background, but I'm interested in working with future clients that do build apps as their source of business, and kind of helping them, be their support around this so that they can focus on what they're good at, which is building the apps, and my team can handle the other stuff.

Paul: Just out of curiosity, have you worked with many podcasters?

Nathan: I'm trying to think... I have about 120 clients right now. I do have one, I have one guy, the Marketologist, who does different podcasts, and I do a lot with him with social media and stuff like that, but it's definitely something we're interested in doing. Anytime you're dealing with someone who's an expert either at marketing or consulting - and we deal with a lot of different consultants - there is definitely a need to have those virtual assistants in place.

Paul: Nathan, I was just kind of getting around to wondering, from your perspective, I think the way you have gone about sharing what you've built is amazing. The fact that you have grown this huge eCommerce platform and now you're actually solving a need that you had yourself - I'm guessing that you funded all this stuff from your own revenue, from your own business. Is that the best thing to do, do you think? Rather than take money from VCs?

Nathan: So I'm a big fan of staying out of debt and bootstrapping. Both of my businesses were bootstrapping; my original Amazon business, I started with 20 dollars, and this business the same thing - I didn't really put much money into it. So I'm a big fan of it, if you can do it. It's obviously not possible, depending on how much initial investment is needed to get off the ground, especially when you're dealing with app work, but I always recommend bootstrapping if you can, using your own funds if you can, because businesses are up and down. It really takes a little while before you see whether a business will be successful or not, whether it gains any traction. So before you make a huge investment that can put you in debt for the rest of your life, you want to get some kind of clarity whether that business is going to be successful, and what the opportunity and potential is. So for me, you always bootstrap until you can't bootstrap anymore, and the same thing goes for if you're going to get funding. If you're making a lot of money and you're growing at a rapid pace, and you can get by with bootstrapping without taking additional funding, without giving away your equity, to me that's always a way to go until you can't do it anymore, or until you get so big that the funding leads to something like going public or something bigger.

Paul: Right. Absolutely fascinating advice. So finally then, before we say goodbye to you Nathan, I'm curious, as you've grown your eCommerce business and you're growing this outlet now, I'm going to suggest that those of the appster tribe listening to your advice, what would be the biggest single thing that you could advise them at this stage as they're starting out? What would you suggest?

Nathan: My biggest advice is to value your time. You only have a certain amount of time in a week; you don't want to live your entire life just working a hundred hours a week, you have to allow time for friends, family, whatever it is that you enjoy doing outside of work. But know how much time you have a week to work and value that time. Make sure you're maximizing that time, make sure you're spending that time on things that expand and grow your company, rather than doing day-to-day or repetitive operations, and make sure you build a great team around you that can really allow you to do that. That's how the most successful entrepreneurs will grow, and grow quickly.

Paul: That is great advice. And of course, anyone who is interested in connecting with you can go to theappguy.co, it's episode 466 and there will be show notes with links to you. But in the meantime, how best can people reach out to you and connect?

Nathan: Sure, so they're welcome to go to our website at Freeeup.com, or you can e-mail me directly at nathan@freeeup.com

Paul: Wonderful, Nate, and also I'm guessing that it's not just clients who may be excited about this, but also that you have an interview process as well for remote staff. Is that the same thing that they should do - go through your interview process?

Nathan: Sure. You can apply online or you can e-mail hr@freeeup.com

Paul: Wonderful. Nathan, thanks for this conversation, it was great, and for coming on to The App Guy Podcast, and all the best with the wonderful journey that you seem to be on.

Nathan: Awesome. I really appreciate your time, thank you.

An Interview With David Kosmayer Founder of Bookmark

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show where we go and deconstruct the success of founders from around the world. This is episode 465, there's a ton of content for you to catch up on. I've got several archives in the podcasting apps, you can search those out. Just search my name, Paul Kemp, in your favorite podcasting app and you will be able to find The App Guy Podcast archives. I want to introduce my guest today, we actually worked together on a launch, and we're gonna go through and deconstruct that launch to help you if you're planning a launch for your own apps, so let me introduce David Kosmayer - he is the CEO and founder of Bookmark.com. You'd better go and check that out, bookmark.com is gonna be the next big thing. Dave, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

David: Hi Paul, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm really excited about the launch, still on a little bit of a high coming off yesterday's exciting Product Hunt debut, and I just want to say thank you very much for helping us with that. Your advice and knowledge has gone a long way.

Paul: It was a lot of fun, I have to say, and a lot of hard work, we were both up late. So first of all, let's paint a picture of what we're actually launching, and even though this is a show about apps, it's relevant because you're offering a website builder. Tell us a little bit about Bookmark.com to start with.

David: So Bookmark is a website publishing platform, and we're not just a website builder, we looked at ourselves as an entrepreneurial platform. We focus on the small business web users, one to nineteen type of employees, and we really focus on responsive. Responsive is very important for a lot of the websites, as many businesses don't have a responsive website and as we all know, mobile is becoming everything and if you're not responsive, you're nothing. So we build websites, we make them beautifully responsive and we take care of small businesses.

Paul: Right, okay. So we connected with each other, we had prepared a launch. You're just coming out of a beta, and just kind of getting the whole product started. I guess we can talk about the launch. We delayed it, didn't we? We were a little bit worried about the amount of traffic from mobile, but we decided to go for it, and we went and got hunted on a Wednesday. Talk us through the day from your perspective.

David: Yes, we were supposed to do it a day before, that was the original day, and I woke up in the morning excited, and I got a message from you telling me "We're thinking about delaying it until tomorrow", which was no problem. So Wednesday morning we woke up and I got my messages from you, you're six hours ahead of me - I'm on Eastern time - and we already had around 50 registrations coming into Bookmark; for the full day we had around 250 registrations. At the beginning of the day it was really exciting, it was just a flurry of a day.

Paul: We're still actually on the back of the launch, so [unintelligible 00:08:54]. [laughs] But I would say a hunter, Violeta Nedkova - just a quick shout out to her - she is a high influencer, and the most important thing for anyone listening is that she was able to get us onto the featured page, and there's no point in submitting your own product because the attention is on the homepage. We ended up on there and I guess you started to see the traffic flow in as well, and the comments were really positive, weren't they?

David: Yes. First I have to say thank you to Violeta, she was an expert and doing a great job of getting us on the homepage, and we needed to fight to stay in the top five; there was a lot of great companies on that day, and it was just an exciting day.

Paul: Yes, and I know that you did some announcements as well. I kind of briefed you about not asking for upvotes, which we do know that they have an algorithm at Product Hunt which actually takes into account negatively anyone asking for upvotes, so we were very cautious about that. But we were announcing it, and I know that I put an announcement on my site, to an e-mail list and to my Slack group, and you did stuff your side. I guess we got a fair bit of response from that.

David: Yes, every time I did a message to my Twitter followers or to a Slack group, I made sure that I did not send the link directly to the profile or asking for any votes. Every time I thought about it I had a pause, a voice in the back of my mind saying "Do not put it directly to your profile, because of the algorithm, and we don't want to be slapped for spamming. So we were very careful with that, but I did post in a few Slack groups just mentioning that we're on Product Hunt and putting a link to the Tech Page, where we were in the top three so it was easy to find us, and the same with our Facebook groups - Facebook page for Bookmark and Twitter page for Bookmark, and then later in the evening I sent out an e-mail to our people that have registered so far, telling them we're on Product Hunt.

Paul: I think for anyone listening to this, it is helpful to have some e-mail list beforehand. What was it like to get guidance, because I've been dealing with Product Hunt now for a few years, so it becomes second nature to me. But from your perspective, as someone new coming into it, how easy was it to get up to speed I guess, and how important was it to get advice on the actual process?

David: There are a lot of articles out there written about Product Hunt, but to have somebody to talk to, which you and I were discussing for weeks ahead of time, is much better than reading ten articles, because you don't know what you're actually going to read; that person could have written an article and he could have been hit for spam, and you don't know what their results were. So it's nice to talk to somebody that knows what they're doing. Learning everything from you has been absolutely great, and a lot of stuff I had no idea how it works; I didn't know that I couldn't even put comments at first, until you invited me to be able to do commenting; discussing how to respond to each comment - we had a lot of engagement. It was really good engagement and the comments were great. I was expecting a lot of the comments, so I was prepared ahead of time. I knew that people were going to say it's a very crowded market, "What makes you different?" I knew that that was going to be the first question, and low and behold it was the question. Then the same question was asked two or three more times throughout the comments, so I was prepared for that one and I think we did good responding. The people that asked the comments were happy with the responses.

Paul: David, I just want to announce to the audience, the appster tribe listening to this, that the thing I've learned from you is that you've got to be passionate about your own idea, your own vision. If the whole market can see necessarily the opportunity then it may not be as big, but it's the founder who has to see the vision and see the opportunity and expect there will be some doubters out there.

David: Well particularly in my market, which is website publishing, a lot of people have read about so many new platforms that are launching in the last couple of years, but what they don't know is the quality, they don't know how user-friendly it is, they don't know who the target market is. A lot of the website publishing market is targeting professionals or design firms, and that market I feel is very crowded. But the market where the novice, you and me building a website, mom and pop shops, doing it themselves - that market is a tricky market because you really need to make it easy, but you have to still have the customize ability, and ability to make professional-looking websites that people can run a business off of. So finding that balance I feel is key, and that's what we're trying to do with Bookmark.

Paul: Let's switch gears slightly. There are a lot of people who are listening and reading this who will be applying for accelerators and combinators. You have been successfully applying to a number of different incubators, and I wondered what would be your biggest advice having successfully got to the interview stage to two big ones. What would be your advice to anyone else out there who's thinking of doing the same?

David: Yes, I've researched accelerators and I saw an article that mentions Techstars and Y Combinator as the top two, so I only applied to the top two and I got an interview to both. So it's quite an accomplishment just to get an interview, since thousands of companies are applying. What they want to hear is that you have a solid team, that you are very passionate. A lot of the time they're focused more on the team and your passion that the actual product, because if you have the solid team and the passion you will be able to drive the product. Of course they want to know that your product is in a sector that is not overcrowded, that is a big enough opportunity, but you need to portray that you can do this, you have the confidence, your team is not going to fall apart, you're going to be there through the tough two or three years building this company and that you're not just going to fade off after 12 months when things hit tough times, if they do. So we created a really nice demo video showcasing building a website with Bookmark, and I created a Y Combinator website and I created a Techstars website within a one or two-minute video. It was really difficult to build it that short of a time, but their specification are you have to create it really quick. Both of those videos are inside my Product Hunt launch, and you can view them if you'd like, but I think that got me the interview.

Paul: That's great advice. So there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye, David. One is that, I mean you are an inspirational founder, I know there were some positive comments yesterday on Product Hunt about how dedicated you are. For anyone listening who's in a corporate job and wants to start their own business, work for themselves, what is the biggest tip you could do in making the transition?

David: Wow... I just became a mentor actually, I was contacted by Futurpreneur Canada and I started to mentor some Canadian companies, which was really nice. I like to help out people, especially in the startup community. Everybody is so tight-knit, we know how much of a struggle it is to create a startup. It's not easy, there's ups and downs. One minute you're super high and you think your product is gonna be the next Facebook, and the next minute you're like "This is never gonna sell" and you're super low; so lots of ups and downs, but it's an exciting journey and the payoffs are pretty great - being able to work for yourself, being able to create your own destiny. But some advice that I would say to somebody who wants to make the transition, I would say research your product that you're looking to do very, very well. Find out how people are buying it, who the competition is, why are they buying it. You really need to be good at growth-hacking. If you don't have a lot of money starting off, you need to know how to growth-hack, which is creating a buzz basically for free. I see a lot of people that are exceptional at this - they create a product, they've researched it, and then they get buzz by just using their network or using the reddits and the twitters and the different Facebook groups, and just creating a buzz around their product. Next thing you know, they have a thousand beta users and they haven't spent a dime. So research your product, know your market and then become an expert growth hacker, because if you don't have a huge amount of money, those are the things you need to do.

Paul: Great advice, David. Finally then, a lot of challenges that the community have are I guess with regards to funding. If you are starting on your own a new startup, any tips from what you've learned in how to actually get through the tough times of low revenue, perhaps almost zero income sometimes, whilst you're waiting for funding - I just wondered if you've got any tips for anyone out there who's also bootstrapping.

David: Well, right now my mentee, which I've just had an hour and a half meeting with, he has a grant for $45,000 and he's putting in $50,0000 of his own money, so he has around $100,000 in total, and he's discussing me what he's looking to do, and he talked about a PR agency, which I thought was very interesting, which is very expensive. And I right away told him, "Are you sure that you have the budget to do this PR agency?" That is like $35,000 he wants to spend over the next 6 months, which is interesting, but you have to manage your cash flow. It's doomsday thinking, but you have to assume your product's not gonna just take off right away. You have to budget for what if it doesn't take off for another three months? What if it doesn't take off for another six months? You've gotta keep in mind that your cash flow has to be spread out for a lot longer. To raise capital, that's the million-dollar question that everybody wants to know. It's not easy to raise capital. I'm going into a fundraising round actually starting in June, and we are creating a business plan, our pitch deck, three-year financial assumption showing what I will be looking to use the money on, doing a lot of pre-planning - it's almost taken one month to create all this, and we're going to be looking to raise funds in June, and we'll see how it goes. We're going to be pitching a lot of accredited investors, I don't think we're going to go right to the VCs, as we are seed stage still. We just have a tiny bit of revenue since we just launched a week and a half ago, so we're not ready for the VCs, but we're looking for angels and different platforms to raise capital on.

Paul: Well David, we have angel investors listening to this podcast and part of the community, so if there's any angel investors out there who like the idea of Bookmark, then they should contact you. Just on that then, how can people best reach out and connect with you, Dave? What's the best way of getting in touch?

David: They can e-mail me at Dave@bookmark.com. That's probably the best way to do it, I'm on my e-mail 24/7 and I respond really quick.

Paul: Great. Well Dave, as we wrap this up, it's been an absolute pleasure working alongside you, just being a very small part of what you're doing, and I'm a big fan of the work you're doing and I wish you all the success. Thanks for coming on this show!

David: Paul, I know that your website is created on Squarespace. [laughter] I remember when we first met we had that talk of converting you into a Bookmark person in the near future.

Paul: Yes, let's do it. I'm setting up websites all the time, so we can definitely get that onto a Bookmark. At the end of the day this is what you're competing against. SquareSpace have actually been massive advertising in the podcasting realm, they threw a lot of money and they're also advertising on the Super Bowl, so they are throwing a lot of money at their services. It's wonderful, that's why I do this podcast - you get to meet founders like you who compete against the big guys, and do well. That's what the digital revolution means, it's a level playing field.

David: Absolutely, it's a challenge.

Paul: Great, thanks for coming on Dave.

David: Thanks very much, Paul.

Paul: All the best.

An Interview With CORA founder Paul Martens Based In San Francisco

Paul K.: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show that helps app entrepreneurs, founders, people that love startups and anything relating to living a life of freedom and enjoying the digital revolution that we're actually going through. Social media is incredibly important, I did actually an episode a while ago and learned about the importance of posting to several social media sites. It does get a bit painful, so I wanted to get the founder of CORA on, who's got a nice solution to this problem. His name is Paul Martens, he is the founder, he's based in San Francisco in the Bay Area and he's here to talk about CORA. Paul, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Paul M.: Thanks for having me, Paul.

Paul K.: Thanks for coming on. I love San Francisco so before we talk about CORA, what's it like to work in the Bay Area? Give us a sense of the vibe there.

Paul M.: I think when I first landed here I was surprised... At least downtown, it has an odd sort of small town vibe. I don't quite understand that feeling, but when you're walking around it just feels that way. I've been in Manhattan, London, I've been in some big cities, but this city somehow has sort of an introverted, quiet demeanor. It is a small town vibe in the sense that you run into people here that are celebrities. Every so often I worked out with the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, I've run into Peter Thiel a whole bunch of times just randomly, so it's a small, weird, large city, I don't know.

Paul K.: Okay, tell us the reaction when you ran into Sergey Brin. Did you get that nervousness about yourself?

Paul M.: No, he's completely normal. There's nothing crazy, he didn't have any bodyguards - I would if I were in his shoes. It's so normal. He's very normal and apparently meeting these folks is very normal, I don't know.

Paul K.: I'm sure we'll all be searching on Google now for CORA to see if you've got any special preference of search rankings [unintelligible 00:06:18] I'm sure he doesn't do that. Okay, well let's talk about CORA. What is it you're doing, what problem are you solving and tell us how you're going about solving it.

Paul M.: Sure. The MVP is super simple, it's a social broadcast tool targeting consumers, so this is really broad. With just two clicks you can post to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, so it's very quick, a very fast experience and it just affords folks a lot of freedom in terms of "Hey, I can just shoot a picture, shoot text on the go and just rapidly post on a bunch of networks all at once." So the MVP is super simple, go to Cora.io to look at the prototype. Everyone gets it once I show them, sort of the walkthrough. But it's very now, a very simple social broadcast tool.

Paul K.: It's a crowded space Paul, how did you come up with the validation of the idea? Did you do anything testing-wise beforehand, before you jumped into the MVP?

Paul M.: Sure, I'm a UX guy, UX director by trade, so there's all sorts of validation that I'm used to doing professionally so yes, absolutely. You go around, you talk to experts, you go to Starbucks, you show folks the app and you get feedback. That's sort of the gorilla style, I haven't done too much formal, but you talk about - for me 25 folks, get feedback, and then just sort of iterate every so often. But yes, it's very easy to get validation on this product. The challenge here is because it is a crowded space for businesses, you're kind of selling consumers on "Hey listen, you can't afford the Hootsuites, the Buffers of the world. It's too complicated to learn if you're a really small business. Stick with this product because it will just save you an enormous amount of time and headache", unlike some of the competitors, who offer an incredible amount of value. I mean, I don't know where the world would be without the Hootsuites of the world. But yes, you just talk to folks. I'm somewhat outgoing, so I have no problem just stopping people on the street and asking for feedback.

Paul K.: Paul, we'd love to know how you went about starting to build your audience. Have you got any tips for us on the way to go about promoting your MVP?

Paul M.: I'll tell you what, I'll maybe talk to you about somebody who's doing a better job than me, and someone who I'm sort of learning from. There is a group of UX folks based in Malta, they have a product called HotJar, and they did something incredibly clever where they end up getting about 40,000 folks interested in their beta before they even launched. And they did a sort of very simple campaign on Facebook targeting UX folks and marketers, and they had this system set up where you would sign up, obviously, but then if you shared it with folks you would sort of rise up in the ranks of the listing. So there were 40,000 people, and you could easily sort of bump your way up [00:09:36] product when it launched. So they had this very clever way of getting attention before the product even launched. So if folks are interested, look into HotJar, see what they're doing, what they did with their launch... I don't know if they've written formally about it, but I've spoken with the founders and they've been very generous explaining what they did. In terms of just social media, attention, do that. I auditioned for Shark Tank a few months ago, I've got a few connections with the production team there, so that's going to be hopefully something that could come to fruition. I'm pre-seed, pre-launch, and I'm trying to be smart about it, but definitely the folks at HotJar did a great job. By the way, I'm not paid to say this, I just think they did a great job.

Paul K.: I think they've been mentioned on this show before. Please tell us about the Shark Tank, how that came about. We've had a few people on this show who have gone through it. How did you progress that?

Paul M.: It was so random. I started the company end of December formally, so mid-January I just saw an advertisement on a billboard and literally the next day was the audition date, so I quickly signed up. It's a very simple audition process. For San Francisco they met at a mall, I think in LA and in Las Vegas they also did it in a mall. You basically show up, you get a wristband, you talk to someone, pitch your product and I swear it takes no more than five minutes, maybe even less, to pitch a product. That's the only stage I'm at now. They're filming in July, so it's going to take a while I think for the whole callback situation to happen. If it's already happened, I missed out, too bad for me. But it's a very unassuming, very easy, just pitch to a producer and that's it.

Paul K.: So Paul, let's talk about social media, your experience on the different platforms. What do you feel is the best platform for getting app downloads and an engaged audience? Do you have any views on which social media platform we should be targeting?

Paul M.: That's a great question. Before my current gig as the founder of CORA I actually worked at a company called Marketo, which is a marketing automation platform. The data that we got as feedback from customers says Facebook tends to be the rigor standard in getting attention. So it's very prominent, obviously everyone has it. In terms of getting adoption, Facebook Ads seems to be pretty popular, pretty successful. They're very targeted, and if you work with a marketing automation platform, most have an integration so you can actually get great data. Marketo is maybe more enterprise, more medium-sized business, so I'm not aware of competitors that work or are engaged directly with Facebook's backend API, but from my research Facebook seems to be the dominant player.

Paul K.: Yes, also I wanted to grab some of the time we've got together on your experience as a UX designer, someone who's building some beautiful products. I mean, how much did you listen to feedback and how much did you really just do your own thing, if you are into designing beautiful things?

Paul M.: That's a fantastic question, and a very important question to ask as well, because as a designer you have to have a great instinct obviously, but you also want to verify that instinct, and there is a danger for younger designers to sort of operate in a silo and just say, "Okay, I want to do this, this and that", and not get much feedback. Honestly, devs are guilty of this, too. My personal opinion is have the best designer, the best aesthetic, or UI, or what have you, but then really be rigorous about feedback, adjusting, calls to action, what have you. It's a balance, I like to have the best UX research out there, married with the best UI designers who actually sort of operate in a silo and are completely operating on instinct. If you can get both together working harmoniously, I think you've got a great product. And there are companies that have done that in the past. I look at Bang & Olufsen, Apple, even Four Seasons, the way they design their rooms; it's really calculated,  but they get lots of feedback. So having worked with Apple, Facebook, Virgin, the big companies, they do their validation and I feel like even if you're in a small startup, do your research, do your validation. You won't be taken seriously by investors if you haven't done so.

Paul K.: So there's two more things we need to do Paul, before we say goodbye. One is that you did mention that you have worked with some awesome companies, and I do remember actually going to one of Richard Branson's parties and meeting him in person, and all the employees were there and it seemed like such a cool company to work for. What is the big difference to you running your own company, compared to working for some of those awesome companies you just mentioned?

Paul M.: Sure. You know, a personality-driven company is fun to engage with, and all three that I mentioned - Apple, Facebook, Virgin - they are that. I think the difference for me is I try to be really conscious of my strengths and weaknesses, I try to be really balanced about how I come across, so I'm not going to be terribly great at marketing in the sense of being obnoxious and creating these huge splashes. That's not me, but that might be Richard Branson and he's fantastic at it, and he shouldn't change. I aim at the Steve Jobs of the world, where I've got this incredibly focused vision and I'm maybe mercurial, but I've got this amazing ability to corral tens of thousands of people. [00:15:48] That's not me, but I know what my strengths and weaknesses are. I think Jeffrey Katzenberg is also a great CEO, and Zuckerberg is fantastic as a leader. I think if you're conscious about your strengths and weaknesses you can sort of take a bit of what every single successful CEO out there is, and sort of apply it to yourself. Years ago I wrote a book on basically personality drivers, focused on a few great CEOs, a few great designers. I sort of got into the psychodynamics of how they think and they feel and they operate in the world around them. And you do enough biographical research, you'll start to see there's a commonality between the most successful folks. I have no problem not being sort of this well-known individual because there's really highs and lows with that, and I'd rather be more focused on sort of moderating who I am as a personality, being great to work with. If you had to choose between one or the other, that to me is far more important than being the big, dynamic personality behind the brand.

Paul K.: I was also thinking for anyone who may be working at Apple, Facebook or Virgin for example, is it something you would recommend leaving to do your own thing? Is that a lifestyle choice that you would recommend to others?

Paul M.: I love having left my last job. Six figure income, really fantastic opportunity, but you've gotta know who you are and you've gotta know your skill sets. Not everyone's cut out to be an entrepreneur. In my opinion, you have to be an extrovert. I think Zuckerberg is sort of an exception. He surrounded himself with a really fantastic team, but you have to be sort of this extroverted personality, you've gotta be able to sell, or at least market yourself well. You've gotta be comfortable in front of people, and just know who you are. If you've got a great idea, why not? Go for it. I think a podcast or two ago someone was talking about living lean. I locked out in that right now, I was actually oddly enough able to live very lean in San Francisco. So know the environment that you're in, know your goals and know yourself; be very conscious of your skill sets. Be aware of what you're good at and what you're not good at, and then hire around you to compensate; hire for success.

Paul K.: I love this chat, because I also left a six-figure salary to basically join the digital revolution, and I did it the wrong way. I didn't have a gig sorted or an idea cemented before I left. Have you got any advice to anyone who is contemplating leaving a nice salary job to go and do their own thing, based on what you've learned?

Paul M.: Sure, I'll tell you a funny story. Back in November I actually pulled together a few Romanian developers, a Canadian project manager and a Ukrainian designer. So we're all converged to Costa Rica, we did a real test of the product, a rapid iteration, we tried to get this thing built in a week, the MVP. So after that happened and I realized this was possible, I was okay then at point leaving. I was sort of forced out actually, a week before Christmas I was let go. I was their most expensive designer and the company had sort of been struggling financially. So I didn't really have an option too much, I was sort of encouraged to start this up because I already had a product up and running. So yes, my opinion is really work through a prototype. I kind of assume everyone's got a prototype out there because that's my job, my 9 to 5 was designing prototypes, so have that and show it to folks. If you're getting good feedback, if you have a mentor or two, and they're sort of saying "Hey, this is great!" transition yourself out, but be gentle about it. You don't want to necessarily attack the situation, you don't want to necessarily throw caution completely to the wind; take a fair risk. My attitude is be gentle, even if you get fired a week before Christmas. Try to make it work for you, have some 6 to 12 months of money saved up so when you do sort of take that job you've got runway. Investors I know will respect that. If you have personal runway, they're going to like hearing that.

Paul K.: The final this is you mentioned about teams. I've had recently an approach from what seems like a great sponsor who puts together ready-made teams for projects, but how do you go about finding top-tier talent and attracting them to your vision? Have you got any tips for us on that?

Paul M.: That's a fantastic question. I've had a real challenge with that, it took me two years to find my designer. I'm a designer myself, so maybe I'm more picky than others, but it took me two years of looking to find somebody. I'd already been looking for a while and it took that long. Now dev - I still haven't found a core dev; I'm interviewing right now. There are some great teams out there, and I know some of your sponsors look fantastic, so I'm also looking at them, too. There are great developing teams ready for you, Creativedash is one that is number one right now for me. Find a core team... I'm unusual in that I don't have a co-founder right now, so it's only going to be a sole founder situation, but there are tons of opportunities out there, tons of companies out there that will provide that for you and I personally am not against that. I'm looking at a few, but at the same time I'm also looking to find a core future CTO for my company. Send your resumes my way if you're a dev. If you understand programmatic design, if you can do programmatic assets in iOS, we'll be good friends, so send your resume my way: paul@cora.io

Paul K.: Wonderful. Just on that, there will be show notes on episode 446 for anyone going to theappguy.co, and they could also search for your name, Paul Martens. And yes, you mentioned how to get yourself on e-mail, I guess it would be relevant to give your social media presence out, given that that's the essence of CORA.

Paul M.: Yes, sign up for at least for an early beta access on cora.io, but I'm totally cool with connecting on LinkedIn. Don't find me on Facebook, that's really relegated towards family. LinkedIn I think is a great way to connect with me professionally.

Paul K.: You know, I can't help it, I've got to squeeze one more in - how are you going about doing your own social media, because you mentioned Facebook for family? I have the same problem, I restrict it to... No one wants to see pictures of my kids, from the podcast audience. But how are you using CORA yourself to actually post your own things?

Paul M.: That's a fantastic question and everyone's going to have to wait and see, because what we've got designed is going to completely blow people away. I've shown it to a few folks. It's going to be a very revolutionary way of understanding privacy, but also understanding sort of personal storage as well.

Paul K.: I love that, that is a good tease into going and joining the beta, so I definitely encourage everyone to go to cora.io. Paul, this has been a wonderful chat, it's so inspirational. Here you are, working for Virgin, Apple, Facebook and now doing your thing with a great team - wonderful. Thank you very much for joining us on The App Guy Podcast.

Paul M.: Thanks, it's been a lot of fun.

Authors Of Valley Speak : Deciphering The Jargon Of Silicon Valley

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we go around the world and we introduce you to founders, authors  entrepreneurs, investors because it helps you in your journey. So if you are interested in this mobile space of disruption, this is the podcast for you. I have two amazing co-authors that I'm going to introduce you to. We know these guys are relevant, because they have written a book called Valley Speak: Deciphering the Jargon of Silicon Valley. It's incredibly useful, and let me introduce Rochelle Kopp and Steve Ganz, who are the co-authors and we're going to be talking about their book. Guys, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Steve: Hi, Paul.

Rochelle: Hello.

Paul: Hi. So first of all, what inspired you to write the book? Maybe we can start with you, Rochelle.

Rochelle: Certainly. Well, interestingly it started out as a book that we wrote in Japanese. I had written a book in general about American business buzzwords and someone in the Japanese publishing industry said "Well, you should really do one related to Silicon Valley for all those Japanese people who are coming to the U.S." Then when we were working on it - I invited Steve to help me with it - we discovered that there wasn't anything in English about all the jargon used in Silicon Valley, and we thought "Well, we're researching it and we're finding great stuff. Let's share it with everyone in English, too."

Paul: I love that. How did you guys connect and do it together, as co-authors?

Steve: Well Paul, we're married so I was the natural person for Rochelle to turn to, looking for more support in some of the technical areas. I also have worked as part of several startups, I know about some of the financial aspects as well, so we were able to pool our expertise and bring it together.

Rochelle: So besides being very complementary as a couple, we're also very complimentary as co-authors.

Paul: Yes, I guess with the two different names, you see, that threw me. My wife is the same in fact, she has a different surname to me in her work profession, so it's quite common. Okay, this is great, you're a married couple and you've found that there's an issue, you've written a book in Japanese about Silicon Valley jargon. What's that done to your own careers, having a book out there?

Rochelle: Well, the Japanese book  has been really great for more exposure in the Japanese market, and I've done books in Japanese already, so I'm kind of known as an author there about issues of language and culture, but having the Silicon Valley specific one really helps put us on the map for our expertise on that, and we work with a lot of Japanese companies that are here in Silicon Valley.

Paul: Yes, it's fascinating because we've had recently an episode where we were talking about a book writing service, and anyone can go back and listen to that, and we know now the importance for our own careers, for our own credibility, it's almost important to have a book. Would you say, Steve, that for anyone listening if they can get a book on a subject that they're passionate about, that it does actually mean a lot?

Steve: Yes absolutely, and this is actually one of the topics that we discuss in our book, because it really is part of the Silicon Valley way of going about things, the thought leadership. So whatever expertise you might have, it's always a good thing to present that, to use that to establish yourself and then whatever else you can do to build an offer around that, it's really just a very natural way of connecting with people and furthering whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Paul: So here is the challenge that many people listening to this are attracted to the Silicon Valley lifestyle; there's a lot of press about the money that's being made and I would ask you both, given that you have been doing your own startups and you've got this book, is it worth it being a startup founder, living in Silicon Valley? Would you recommend that to anyone listening?

Steve: Well, it is not for everybody, that's for sure, but on the other hand I think most people really do have things that they've kind of thought about, "Oh, wouldn't it be great if things were this way, or if I could accomplish something, whatever it happens to be?" and there's really nothing like a situation that enables you to follow those impulses and live them out. So it's actually a huge amount of work to do your own startup, it's a huge amount of work to participate in an existing startup, but there's really nothing like the leverage it gives you in terms of having an impact with the company and being able to direct the development of your product.

Rochelle: The thing about Silicon Valley is that it's such an incredible density of people who are doing startups, people who have experience supporting, advising and funding startups, all within a very concentrated space, so it has a lot of efficiencies. And a lot of VCs, when they are investing in promising startups, one of the conditions is that they move the startup to Silicon Valley to be part of the ecosystem. There's a lot of benefits, but with that being said, on the other hand you could say that Silicon Valley is also becoming kind of a state of mind, and there's so many great startup hubs that are popping up really all over the world where people are taking a lot of the ideas and practices and applying them in different places, so I don't think you necessarily have to be here anymore. I guess you could say it's a topic that a lot of people debate.

Paul: Yes, well that's debated because a lot of developers listening to this are going for jobs for example at Slack, and they're requiring people to be at the offices; yet we also have these other digital nomads, in a way - and I'm included in this, I actually work from a hub in Bali - so what are the other hubs do you think in your mind, where they are trying to emulate the success in Silicon Valley.

Steve: Well, within the US you have lots of startup communities really in pretty much any major city, but certainly Boston, Chicago and New York. Around universities you'll tend to have startup communities kind of following the way things developed in Silicon Valley around Stanford University. So I believe Austin has a strong startup community as well, and then going internationally, likewise, certainly London is very strong.

Paul: I was going to ask Rochelle about Japan as well. Is that an interesting space at the moment for startups in tech?

Rochelle: Yes, I was just going to mention that, that there are a lot of startups in Japan. In fact, there are a lot more there than there used to be, so there's a nice blossoming that's going on there, and particularly for startups in the app world. Because Japan is so advanced in the penetration of smartphones and how integrated they are into people’s lives, it's a really great place for people who are doing apps. Also Korea and Singapore are getting a lot of attention from people who are making things. Also what comes to mind to me is Chile, they've got a great program where they actually subsidize entrepreneurs to come there, and another one that comes to mind, I've done some work with the U.S. Department of State's TechWomen program, and I've met some really great entrepreneurs from Africa, and particularly standing out is Nairobi - a really interesting hub of people, including some app developers.

Paul: Yes, I've heard that they've invested quite a lot in their internet speed and fiber optics, and that has completely changed the way they think about their industries. That's really inspiring, I'm sure everyone listening can get quite inspired that it's not just Silicon Valley, but let's move our attention back to Silicon Valley. In writing the book, what would you say were the biggest challenges in terms of getting what you needed for the book? Rochelle, let's start with you on this one.

Rochelle: Boy, I think just the vast number of concepts and new technologies and financial techniques that are in use here. We actually are keeping a list of all the key concepts we mention in the book and it's up to 610. We have it up on a website called Wordnik. It's a lot to get your arms around.

Steve: Yes, I would say that a big part of the challenge is actually keeping in a form in which so much material is digestible. We have a reasonably constraining format of two pages per chapter, which covers a particular topic area, and the jargon that's fundamental to that area. It's not necessarily a perfect fit all the time to try to get whatever the size of that space is into those two pages, but it is really a great exercise and great discipline to have to think in terms of how concisely we can present the material to cover a lot of space in a short number of words, but make it readable and entertaining and actually get across not just the terminology, but what the terminology means to people, what they're passionate about, what they argue about, different positions people take on the issues, and really convey that concisely.

Paul: So there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye, guys. One is that I would love to know, as you were researching the book, tell us any stories that may come to mind about fascinating people you met in the process. There's so many greats, but maybe if you could pick someone who comes to mind that really helped with the material.

Rochelle: Well, one person who was really helpful and gave us a lot of great comments was a Guy Kawasaki.

Paul: Right, did you actually sit down and spend some time with Guy?

Rochelle: No, unfortunately we didn't, but we'd love to do that, of course. He was really generous with looking at the manuscript, giving us suggestions, it was wonderful.

Steve: Another person I will mention is investor Carol Sands, who I had met through the Startup Leadership Program which I have been participating in with my current startup, Teamifier, and she was very helpful in reviewing some of the material and giving her thoughts on how it could be improved, and contributed a quote for the book as well.

Paul: Well, if you have a direct line to Guy Kawasaki maybe you can invite him onto this show, we have yet to get him. Okay, well finally, there is a theme and a trend developing on this show, because I do a lot of these and what is coming out is the whole area of artificial intelligence and bots, and I wondered if you had any views on how that's developing - is it a fad or do you feel like there's some longevity in the development of artificial intelligence and bots? Do you have a view on that?

Steve: Yes, well artificial intelligence is hardly a fad; it's fundamentally been what computer science has been developing towards over decades, and we are really making much more progress now. I think there have been various periods over time where that's been seen as hype, where maybe too grandiose promises have been made, and I would say that we are continuing in that mode of making grandiose promises, but in fact the promises becoming more grandiose may be a sign that we're actually making much more progress and doing much more amazing things with artificial intelligence. As far as bots, that is just one way of interfacing artificial intelligence with people; I think it's a natural one, but it most certainly won't be the only one.

Paul: You know why, because this show has been going now for several years, and it's called The App Guy and suddenly, to my shock and horror I've listened to someone saying that that could be now the death of apps. Because we've had apps replacing the internet in a way - the original computers, the browsers - and now bots could be replacing apps, because Facebook are talking about having a bot store, and you do everything within the one platform, rather than going off to different apps, hence my kind of worry about the name of this show.

Steve: I wouldn't worry so much. Names may well change, but the same sorts of technological solutions keep reinventing themselves. It's the sense in which apps are really just a resurgence of the downloaded software model, which we've taken a brief break from with some of the cloud-based technologies.

Paul: Just to flesh that out a tiny bit more, Steve... So you think what we're going through with apps is a resurgence of what we've been through in a past period with downloading software?

Steve: Yes, there are various ways of dividing control in a system between the user's technology and the server's technology, and there's a pendulum that goes back and forth and will continue to do so.

Paul: I love that, that's just so much clarity there. Well, Rochelle and Steve, it's been a genuine pleasure and I would recommend that people do go and find your book and buy it and read it. I will have links of my website to you. For everyone who is listening, you can go to theappguy.co, search for episode 458 with Rochelle Kopp and Steve Ganz, and you'll see links to them and the book. But in the meantime, how can people connect with you? What's the best way of reaching out?

Rochelle: Okay, well we've got a site, it's siliconvalleyspeak.com, and there's a contact form on there. That's probably the quickest way.

Paul: Wonderful, and will it be yourself that we're engaging with, or will it be a bot in the background?

Steve: Well, you won't know the difference.

Paul: Exactly. We'll be doing the Turing test on you, I think.

Steve: By the way, we do have some quizzes on the website that people can interact with and get an initial chance to play around with some of Silicon Valley's jargon.

Paul: I love that, that's great. Well, thank you so much for bringing such a wildly useful book to market and sharing your knowledge with us on this show.

An Interview With Breanden Beneschott : Co-founder of Toptal

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show where we meet founders, entrepreneurs, startup people, anyone in the startup world because we are app entrepreneurs ourselves and if you listen to this as an entrepreneur you will gain a lot of benefit. I have a terrific, terrific guest lined up for us today because we're going to learn a lot about this next problem out there, which is getting a hold of good designers, good developers. My guest is Breanden Beneschott and he is the co-founder of a company called Toptal, we're going to learn a lot about that. Breanden, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Breanden: Thank you for having me.

Paul: Thanks for coming on. Firstly, I guess I'd love to know what Toptal is. I know that you have a very good, unique proposition which is that you search for the top 3% of talent, but give us an idea of what Toptal is.

Breanden: Sure, so we still consider ourselves a startup, we're a little over five years old and we are a pretty exclusive network of engineers and more recently designers all over the world. We work with a lot of clients all over the world, so what it means for startups and Fortune500 companies and SMBs and everything in between is when they have needs for top-level software engineers or designers, UX experts etc. they come to us and hire top talent to work on their projects as if they were hiring a core team member sitting in San Francisco or wherever he happens to be, in their in-house office.

Paul: So what lead you to start Toptal then? How did you get this off the ground five years ago?

Breanden: Sure, so we were in my dorm room at Princeton; Toptal pretty much started from my dorm room at Princeton. So I was doing this degree in chemical engineering, it was very expensive and I was responsible for paying for it myself, so the way that I did that was by freelancing as a software engineer on the side. It involved all sorts of things and I worked with all sorts of different companies and startups etc. and got pretty good at this, and inevitably various startups ended up in a position where I had to hire other engineers because we needed to scale our team, our product or whatever, and that was really hard.

The traditional methods of hiring engineers were just totally broken in terms of you post a job on like an open forum, or Craigslist, a job board or any of these freelance marketplaces and you get thousands of applicants and thousands of very bad applicants. Even the simplest things, it just became very difficult to find anybody good through all of this noise, and people pinging you from all over the world who are just totally under qualified. So finding someone very good through all of that noise was just way too difficult, and it takes months of time for us in every case, and a lot of times you hire the wrong person because unfortunately the best software engineers are usually the least aggressive self-marketers, so finding them was just a total broken model. Sometimes you can go try to hire your friends, or through your network etc. but everybody is already taken, because everybody is either working at like a Facebook or a Google and they have multiple good offers at any point in time, and especially as a startup it's very difficult to compete with those guys on a compensation level. I knew that this was very frustrating and I was able to leverage kind of this supply shortage of engineers as a freelancer myself and do quite well as a young kid, but on the hiring side - it was totally broken.

And then Taso was coming from a similar point of view - he was an engineer working at some prominent companies in Silicon Valley and feeling the exact same thing: hiring was extremely difficult. I was actually trying to hire somebody, or fill a position on a startup that I was working at while going to school, and ran into Taso who was my neighbor in Palo Alto, and I asked him, like I was asking everybody, I said "Hey, do you know anybody awesome who is available?" knowing that it was a long shot, and Taso was the first person who said yes. I said, "Really?" because I knew Taso respected him a lot and he is very smart. I said, "Okay, fantastic. I can't wait to talk to him!" He said, "He's in Argentina and he's going to be working remotely etc. etc." and a lot of red flags went up for me, like "Wait, I can't work with somebody in Argentina, across the world. I need to be sitting next to people in the office", and I had had lots of bad experiences outsourcing things overseas, and pretty much everybody had. I had come to the conclusion that this is impossible, not just difficult. He said, "Trust me." I talked to Ignacio the next day and started worked with him an hour later, and did a 180 on the whole remote thing, it was amazing. He was unbelievably smart, unbelievably proactive, super funny and just got it instantly. I realized in the first few hours of working with him that this really was possible.

You could work with somebody anywhere in the world, they just needed to be of a very specific caliber and cut from a very specific cloth. Ignacio and I are killing it, we're doing all this stuff together and I'm learning tons from him and just really building this great relationship. Taso inevitably came and visited me at Princeton and I was just blown away. I'm like "If we can do this at scale, find more people like Ignacio and build an exclusive network..." and he had already been thinking about this, so he was the driver in this initial conversation. He said, "We can do this, we could change the world in terms of if we make an exclusive network full of the smartest people that fit these characteristics that will enable them to thrive with US startups and US companies, then it will be unstoppable. This could be a multi-billion dollar company", and we started looking at how all these other companies were trying to do this, but sort of really falling short etc. and that's how it got started, in my dorm room. Taso had a lot of connections in Silicon Valley, I had a good number of classmates and stuff. As engineers, people were coming to us every day, asking us if we were available to work at their companies, so instead of saying no in the early days, we said, "No, but you should try this thing we're working on." So all of our clients came to us in the early days, they were the early adopters. We killed it with them and they invited their friends, and then the sort of virality took off in the early days, and that's really how it started. We had quite a bit of revenue very quickly and knew we were on to something.

Paul: I love that, it's so inspiring. You've actually picked up on a very major theme of this entire show. We've had 449 episodes now, and that is the biggest theme - coming across a problem and solving it. So the next problem I'm often asked is actually how to scale, because you've got something that you see as successful and you know you're on to something, but what were the biggest challenges as you did actually grow and scale the company?

Breanden: Sure, so the company started a little over five years ago at zero, basically, in terms of revenue. It was just Taso and me, and now we have hundreds of core team members, we'll fly past a hundred million in revenue this year, so it's a very fast growth rate. The biggest challenges throughout that process I think were probably knowledge transfer and training programs. Toptal had this amazing benefit in that we... Most people say that their biggest problem is recruiting. Ours is not recruiting, because any time I need to hire somebody we have all of Toptal right here, so people rise through the ranks here, giving a sort of very cool meritocracy that we've built, so that was never the issue. The issue was okay, you're super smart and super driven - how can I catch you up on the last ten years of context and everything that we've learned, so that you can thrive here? And trying to figure that out and do it at scale, so hundreds of times over and over again, and not dropping balls or having gaps, or realizing that you covered something with somebody but not somebody else, that's been the most difficult part. Because everybody here is exceptionally capable; the problem is when they didn't know something that somebody else did, or that I took for granted etc., so honestly I think that's definitely my answer. For us, the solution has been investing a lot in training programs, just making sure people have everything that they need in order to thrive as quickly as possible, and if I were to do that again I would do it a lot sooner.

Paul: Yes, what I'm learning from you is you're not a company that's a hundred years old and you've got this corporate culture to fall back on; you're a new company, and that must be hard to sustain a culture over that time. I wondered then how you actually managed to build such a huge network of talent. I mean, you said how difficult it was in the early days to find talent, but here you are discovering all this talent. How did you build that network?

Breanden: Sure, so really kind of a network effect. Once Taso and I sat down and said, "This is what we think the screening process should be. This is what an elite engineer looks like, now let's come up with a screening process to make sure somebody is that good or better." Then we started filling that screening funnel, so reaching out to people, who then reached out to other people, and that seeded a lot of it. We had very small numbers, I think the acceptance rate now is around 1%. So after a lot of hard work, we're building up this network of a few really good people. Then where it really started to take off was those few really good people were able to bring in their friends who were really good people. I think about this example all the time - if I go ping the best engineer that I know and ask them for an intro to the best engineer that they know, and then ask them for an intro to the best engineer that they know, you can quickly get to extremely good engineers. So we did that over and over and over, and now there's thousands of Toptal engineers and the network effects are amazing, and it grows itself.

Paul: I love that. I'm going to have to pick up on that 1% - that's really hard to get into then. Is that 1% of everyone that visits you, or 1% of everyone that applies?

Breanden: Everyone who applies and starts the screening process, which is pretty lengthy and it's everything from looking at integrity, communication style, and skill, to drive, to some personality characteristics, to experience, problem-solving abilities; problem-solving abilities is really where the majority of the emphasis is, but there's a lot of soft skills we look at as well.

Paul: Let's talk about the screening process and how you came up with it. I know that there's a lot of people listening who perhaps would be very interested in going through that. We've had a lot of listeners apply to accelerators, incubators, but I just wondered how you came up with the screening process and perhaps you can give us an insight into anyone who wants to apply.

Breanden: Sure. Well, we came up with it because Taso and I had interviewed at a lot of companies and we kind of took the best parts of different experiences that we had had being interviewed. So there's the coding challenge side of it that's more like algorithmic, then you have the whiteboard coding sessions, which is more real problem-solving, and then you have some of the soft skill stuff etc. We looked at how Google does it, we looked at how Facebook does it and we relied on a lot of first-hand experience, subtracted out what we thought the lowest common denominators needed to be and then added the components that we thought were the requirements of "Okay, how do you not just find somebody extremely smart, driven and talented, but somebody who's really going to thrive with a US company typically?" So they need to speak perfect English, there can be no hiccups or bottlenecks/issues there. Then we're looking for their internet connectivity, and are they showing up on interviews on time, and all of the things that you - or maybe even as a little kid you're told, like "Never be late for an interview, never chew gum." We came up with our own list of all these things that were really looking at all the engineers we had been working with and saying "What's the lowest common denominator here?"

Paul: Okay, that is great. So I guess people have gone through the screening process, so how did you manage to build a company? I mean, I'm really interested in this remote working. There's a lot of people listening to this all over the world, the podcast reaches every country, and I wondered how you actually built a company where everyone works remotely.

Breanden: Sure, so this is a byproduct of the Princeton days, where Taso was living in Palo Alto and I'm living in my dorm room, and I'm finishing the degree. It was super time-consuming and difficult to do the degree component, so I didn't have time to go meet with clients in New York City or anywhere else. I didn't have time to meet with engineers; some of them happened to be in Princeton, but we were talking to people in Argentina, for example. And Taso didn't have, he would have gone nuts if he stayed in my dorm room too long, so he's back in Palo Alto and talking to clients and doing the same thing there. So purely out of necessity, because I had class and stuff, we had to be remote at first. And then by the time we graduated six months later, we're asking ourselves very seriously... Like okay, we kind of assumed that we were going to go to Silicon Valley where we both consider our roots to be and do a big round of funding and follow the Valley way - that's kind of how we thought of it - but we paused and said: "Why?" We need all this money to do what - to grow really fast? We're already growing really fast. To do what - pay ourselves? I mean, we're single and unattached 20-somethings, we don't need that. Did we need to get an office and fill it with people? I mean, we already have people working with us and they're doing it from all over the world in their homes; why do we need a $10,000/month office just to start? And so we skipped it and we said, "Well, we are young, unattached 20-somethings, so let's go to some place super fun and super economically smart."

So we went to central Europe in Budapest, where it was extremely cheap and we had massive penthouses downtown, overlooking opera houses and stuff, for less than $1,000/month combined, whereas that would have been the worst single-room apartment in New York. The dollar went so far there, and they also had the opposite problem in terms of they have tons of really smart people and software engineers who just don't have enough opportunities, so from a lot of different directions that's why we chose to go that route, and then along the way it just made sense. When a new person joins the team, because they're scaling sales or your engineering team internally etc. they're plugging in and jumping into Skype and all the things that we're already using, and occasionally you need to sort of rethink things, because you might have a chat with 45 people on it, and that's too many. But for the most part, I think we hired more than 90 people in the last 70 days was a number that I heard, just on the core team, and very little has changed at the company in terms of how we interact - it's mostly through Skype.

We use a few other tools like Slack and stuff a little bit now, and it's really just over-communicating with people all the time and very few scheduled meetings. Everybody is very smart and has a lot of freedom, and you're empowered to take what you need, and ping people if you need to solve something. Don't email them and say "Hey, do you have time on Tuesday at 5?" and they're like "No." "How about 6?" and then it comes and goes and you only have one meeting and one communication point in like a week with that person. With Toptal, you just find them on Skype and ping them and say, "Hey, got a sec?" It's like walking over to their office physically and knocking and saying "Hey man, do you have a sec?" So the cycles just become very fast. It's a little chaotic, but it's exhilarating and I think everybody feels this incredible energy when they plug into Toptal, where there's so many things happening all over the place, and everybody is so driven and so smart, and these people are communicating all over the place. Ten hours go by and you may have forgotten to leave your chair or go get something to eat.

Paul: Yes, I mean it's interesting - you mentioned Slack as well, and they've got this big fund, 80-million dollar [I think] and they are looking for developers, but even they can't tackle the remote... I think everything done in Slack is in an office, so it's really impressive what you've done there at Toptal.

Breanden: Yes, the Slack example is interesting. I think they could if they wanted to. Slack, if I remember correctly, I read a couple of articles, they're taking a bit different approach where they are kind of strictly more 9 to 5 and take a lot of time off, and they are really emphasizing kind of a work/life balance, and for some people I think that's fantastic, but the type of people who come to Toptal, I think they'd go nuts in that type of environment, including me. I need constant exhilaration and stimulation, and I get it through working at Toptal.

Paul: There are two more things we need to do then, before we say goodbye. One is that you mentioned when you were starting out, a lot of people listening to this are starting out and one of the toughest challenges they often face is getting funding. Now, you did say you had a lot of revenue and it was a success at the start, but did you fund externally? Did you go to angel investors or VC to get the extra funding? Tell us how you kind of got the funding off the ground.

Breanden: We raised a little bit of money from a few strategic investors, like Andreessen Horowitz, Adam D'Angelo and Ryan Rockefeller etc. I think it totaled about 1.5 million. For where we are, that is very little. The way that I think of it, we skipped multiple funding rounds, by acting like a bootstrapped company. So the answer to your question is I would avoid raising money. I would think about how you can generate a little bit of revenue in the early days and run kind of via bootstrap... I think Amazon does a good job doing this. So generate some money and then reinvest it today so that you grow more tomorrow. Every little growth spurt you do, you have a new opportunity to reinvest, so that you grow even more. And don't save a bunch of money... I mean, if you have reasons, you think you need a rainy day fund or something maybe that makes sense, but I like how Peter Thiel thinks of it in terms of if you are saving money in startup mode, that means you've run out of ideas in terms of how to grow faster, and that's probably not the case. So it makes more sense to invest that as fast as possible and as intelligently as possible.

If you've decided that you really do need to raise, I think the best thing you can do is network and put together a very good deck. That is something that we did in the early days. We put a lot of energy into it, and ultra-professional - a very clear deck, very short, but it really had some of the things that I think people care about, which is what are your unfair competitive advantages, your unit economics and you clearly paint a picture that enables investors to connect the dots in terms of... They can look at this deck and then quickly imagine, like "Okay, I'm going to 10x or 100x my investment with these guys."

Paul: You know, that is so inspirational because we've had so many founders on this show who have said how hard it is fundraising, how they sometimes have to spend a year focused on the fundraising round, and just to hear you talk about actually doing it without that much funding is so inspirational. There's one other thing we need to do then, which is a lot of people get inspired by this show from our guests, and we've had a lot of examples where people have quit corporate jobs to go and do their own thing, start their own company. I'd love to know what a typical day is like for you, Breanden. I guess there's no typical day, but give us a sense of what it's like to be the co-founder of Toptal.

Breanden: Sure. Yes, typical is a little difficult. Tuesday is never like Monday, at Toptal and especially for me. My life now is changing a lot, I have a five-week-old daughter, so I'm still sort of getting the hang of things and trying to build in some routines, whereas before my life was very free. But for most people at Toptal, including me, for the majority of my time at Toptal it's been a lot of travel. When you're remote you can go anywhere you want, so I would follow the sun and spend summers in Europe and winters in South America, play lots of polo, work from beaches, and live a life I think a lot of people dream about. Now it's gotten a little bit slower, I'm not traveling so often, obviously, so when I wake up I love to drink bulletproof coffee. I drink a bunch of that, I make breakfast every day with a lot of protein and stuff. Then I will check e-mail, check a bunch of analytics dashboards at Toptal in terms of economics, trends and overall health, and maybe I have some questions. I get really deep into a lot of the data science stuff, so that might take a little bit of time, but then the rest of the day is on Skype and doing a lot of one-on-ones with people at the company, trying to problem-solve and eliminate whatever barriers they have and help them work through problems or train their team, hire new people etc. So I do that and a lot of interviews. We hire so many people as we're scaling so quickly that I get deeply involved with a lot of the interview processes here.

Paul: That's inspirational, wow.

Breanden: And the rest of that time, everybody at Toptal kind of lives on Skype, so even if somebody seems available at all times, it's not like they're chained to their desk and working, or anything. Even if I'm standing in line at like the grocery store, or I'm getting ready at the gym, or something like that, I'll probably have Skype on and be responsive, and to me it's not a burden at all. It's just helping people get to the information that they need etc. and that's kind of common across the company, so it's just kind of a non-stop thing. Now that I have a daughter, I deliberately get away from my phone or electronics and I spend a lot of time with her, so things are changing.

Paul: They are... I mean, if anyone has been listening to this show for some time, that is so inspirational - the fact that you can have this lifestyle of moving around the world, following the beaches, but then also you can change when you need to, when your circumstances change, and that's why I feel a lot of people do choose the life of entrepreneurship or working for companies that are a little bit more flexible on that side.

Breanden: Yes, I think if you're starting a company and you're choosing not to do it remotely, you're making the worst decision possible. I mean, unless you need to build a lab or something, and you need to physically be there, because you're doing hardware type stuff, it's the worst decision you can make, because you won't be able to leverage global talent for you; you're going to be stuck with employees who have to quit because their wife got into medical school across the country, and all these problems you don't need. You need to be able to go to LinkedIn and hire anybody, and you can only do that if you're set up remotely.

Paul: Great. Breanden, this has been so inspirational for me and the appster tribe listening to this, thank you so much for coming on. Just to remind people that you can go to episode 450, it's theappguy.co, search for the episode with Breanden. In the meantime Breanden, how can people best reach out to you? How can they connect?

Breanden: They can send me an e-mail, that's breanden@toptal.com

Paul: Breanden, I have to say thank you to your awesome colleague Nelson Wang who introduced us and got this set up. He's been just so amazing and terrific, and I think he's a listener to this show, so I couldn't leave without saying thank you to Nelson. It's been great, thanks for coming on and all the best with Toptal.

Breanden: Awesome, thank you very much.

The future of your messaging apps

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show that helps you in your journey as an app entrepreneur, so if you are working in a corporate job or you're a startup founder/entrepreneur, it's a world of apps and what I do to help you is I try to find the most successful app entrepreneurs out there, and we go through their journey of what they're doing with their apps, how they're promoting them, how they're fundraising - all this stuff, it's great.

Now, I want to just cast your mind back to an episode that I had with BuzzFeed - if anyone hasn't listened to that, go listen to it, you can search on theappguy.co - messaging is all the rage, and they talked a lot about how viral messaging is going, how important it is, so why not get someone who's doing some really awesome stuff with messaging? His name is Mathieu Rigolot, he is the co-founder and CEO of Hiboo.co and he's going to talk to us about his messaging app. Mathieu, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Mathieu: Hi Paul, thank you. It's a pleasure to be there, and hi to everyone!

Paul: So tell us then what is different with Hiboo, compared to all the other messaging apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger... How are you differentiating yourself?

Mathieu: Of course, so Hiboo is a messaging app that allows you to see what your friends type in real time, so you can see every keystroke that they send through, you don't need to tap Send any more. It has a much more fluid flow, it's a new way of communicating. For example, when you're stuck on Facebook Messenger or Viber, sometimes your friend is typing for five minutes and you can't see anything and it's so frustrating sometimes; you see these three dots rolling, your friend is typing, your friend is typing, but you can't see what he is actually typing. Hiboo solved that problem and allows you to see everything without the need to tap Send any more.

Paul: Mathieu, this is absolutely fascinating. This is a definite need, solving a problem. What is your biggest challenge with the app and getting it out there and downloaded?

Mathieu: Yes, it's a major problem for basically every messaging app - how do you acquire your users, basically. We started the journey more than a year ago now, and of course we built the product, tested it with our community and everything, and we finally built something that we thought was great, and now was the time to go public, right? So we did prepare a launch for probably four months at least, and we did launch the app on the AppStore on the 30th of January. We didn't want to spend much on marketing, so what we did is we focused on PR outreach. We've built a list of a lot of relevant journalists, targeted for apps, for social networks all around the world and among more than 30 countries all around the globe. It took a month to do that, actually, it was really tiring, but at the end when the time came we did reach all these journalists, sent hundreds of e-mails and we were covered by a lot of magazines, mainly in Latin America, in Spain and Portugal. We ended up being featured on the Portugal AppStore and we did reach 10k downloads in three days, over the weekend actually, and 20k within a week. So for us, it went pretty well I guess; only PR, that was our main strategy.

Paul: I'm pretty sure that everyone listening would be very interested in that e-mail list that you created.

Mathieu: Yes, but you know, we tried not to be spam-ish because usually journalists don't like that, so we tried to put up several templates together and find the most relevant ones to each journalist. So we've been careful about that, we didn't mass spam to anyone; we tried to be customized, even though when you send hundreds of e-mails that's a bit difficult, but we've tried to be as thorough and customized as possible.

Paul: The main thing I'm learning from you, which I think is an immediate takeaway - and I've never almost heard of this - is testing the responses of e-mail to journalists, and picking the best template that gets the highest conversion.

Mathieu: Yes, definitely. Well, we had the luxury to have some friends who are mainly in PR, so we could test beforehand, before sending hundreds of messages, to test it. But it's definitely something that has to be tested, because it can influence quite highly your response rate. Probably the headline is the main point to test, it's probably the most important thing, because journalists usually are being sent hundreds of e-mails each day, so they don't have the time to screen everyone. So I'd say the headline is really important.

Paul: And it sounds like you did all that yourself, rather than employing a PR agency.

Mathieu: Yes, we basically did it ourselves. Do-it-yourself PR, that's it. We had a small experience about that when we did launch our beta version at Web Summit, it's an interesting story actually. We did the same kind of thing, we screened through all the attendees at Web Summit, on their website, because it was public. We scraped them and sorted them, like which journalist wrote about tech, about apps in particular, about social networks, so we did the same process and contacted them beforehand, before attending the event. We had a couple responses, but we were a bit late in our timing. We started ten days before the event, and journalists were already super booked and super busy. We really tried to customize the pitch really highly and focus on the main writers, so in our case we focused on Martin Bryant, who is the Editor-at-Large at The Next Web.

Paul: Yes, for anyone listening, he's been on this show, we have a past episode with Martin, so they can search for that. It was a great episode in how to reach out to him.

Mathieu: Yes, exactly, so it's even more relevant then. So actually we did a bit of research about him, and we found that he had a band called The Star Fighter and we listened to a few of his tunes and we decided to customize our pitch and include really subtly titles of his tunes in our pitch e-mail.

Paul: That is genius, seriously! We're learning so much here: the benefit of absolute targeting your pitch.

Mathieu: Exactly. I can provide you the pitch e-mail perhaps; actually, Martin wrote an article about that, so perhaps it's not necessary. So we did send it, and Martin replied saying "Oh yeah, full marks for the pitcher, it was really nice. My schedule is really full, but I'll try to hop by your booth." That was it. So we were exhibiting at Web Summit... Actually, we took advantage of free spots, because at Web Summit your were only allowed to exhibit one day, so we took advantage of some free spots for the other days, and we were able to exhibit there freely for the full event. But that's another story...

Paul: I'm loving this journey, I'm really loving going through the journey. We feel like we're going through it with you. One thing I would like to know, and I'm sure everyone of the appster tribe would also love to know is you mentioned that community - you've been working on the app for over a year, and you then have a community that you've been able to launch to. How did you build that community up? Tell us about that.

Mathieu: Well, we didn't build that out of the blue, right? We've reached our friends, asked them "Is that something you would like?" and they were like "Yeah, that sounds amazing. But aren't you worried of that and that and that?" Then the discussion was starting and we were refining our ideas. We tested it among different kinds of people: teenagers, students, working people and we had a good idea of what to do, what not to do, and what to provide for our users. So we built the first version of the app with that in mind, and when the time came to launch our beta version, we already had over a hundred of private testers, a circle of friends, friends of friends etc. The first thing we've noticed when we launched our beta version was the amount of people saying "Wow, that's so cool!" They were really enthusiastic about the product and it was really something we were proud about.

Paul: How did you communicate with them? Did you use an e-mail list to keep them updated with the apps' progress?

Mathieu: Exactly, we did that. We built an e-mail list, we've built a website with a subscribe e-mail, the basic stuff. We also implemented a really great tool called Instabug - you can implement it really easily into your app. You have SDK provided, and it allows your users to swipe left and provide feedback directly in the app. So you don't need to call the founder or write an e-mail, you can directly screenshot a bug, draw a circle around it to really pinpoint the problem, write some lines and that's it, it's sent to our server. We were able to communicate with them and see what the problem is.

Paul: One of the other challenges that I have within my community that I run on Slack is often how to build the app. Are you doing this yourself, or are you outsourcing the development or the app?

Mathieu: We do it ourselves. Basically, we do everything ourselves for now.

Paul: It does sound like that, yes.

Mathieu: Yes, but you know how it is, startup style - everybody is doing everything. We had the chance to have a really highly technical team, so that's not a real problem for us. Even though we all hold master degrees in IT, it's challenging. Only a few people probably did that before, so you still have to learn a lot on your journey. Even though you're a technical person, you learn so much through the journey of building this product, and you also have to account for the classical problems - scaling, how you organize your backend architecture and everything. All these we had to learn on the fly, basically; even though we are technical people, we still had to learn a lot.

Paul: So if you were to go back and start your journey again, I know that there are services out there where you can actually appoint highly qualified technical teams. Would you do the same again? Would you keep it in-house or would you be open to the idea of outsourcing the development? Did you do the right thing?

Mathieu: Well, I think for us it made sense because we were both able to do it. But in the case of a business, or a marketer, a designer or a founder, I think it makes sense as well to consider outsourcing. The problem is to find the right people, that's the main thing. If you're not into the industry, it might be difficult to find the right people, the right price, have this quality/price balance, that can be difficult for people who are not very acquainted with the technical world, programming languages etc. I think for us it made sense; we felt able to do it because of our background knowledge, so I think we wouldn't change much in that particular area.

Paul: That's interesting to know. There's a company I know that is building their whole business on the back of that particular problem. In terms of your journey with the app, we've talked about the community, we've talked about the PR outreach, we've talked about a lot of things, but we haven't talked about how you funded the whole journey. Is this off your own back, bootstrapping or is this from angel investors or VC money?

Mathieu: For now we're still bootstrapped, although we are soon to be finishing our first seed round with private investors. Hopefully it will go well, but yes, we are still bootstrapped; it all comes from our own funds, because we've been freelancing for a couple of years before, so we had some financial stability. We're still bootstrapped at the moment.

Paul: So Mathieu, there are a lot of people listening who are in exactly the same position as you were maybe a year ago, and they would love to get their projects off the ground. Do you have any guidance for them on the process that you went through to be successful in keeping the project flowing whilst there was no income and you're funding it yourself? Any tips for the audience on how to go through that period?

Mathieu: Well, I think it's difficult for everyone, it makes sense. Sometimes you're doubting of what you're doing,  you ask yourself a lot of questions when you're a founder, but I think the most important thing is to never give up, basically. If you really believe in what you're doing, keep working hard, keep hustling - hustling is really important, actually. Keep doing what you think is best for your company, for your product. Keep doing and it will happen, eventually.

Paul: And any tips on how you pitch the investors? I'm assuming the investors that have funded your initial seed round have received a presentation from you, a pitch.

Mathieu: Yes. Well, I don't think I'm an expert on that, first, so don't take my advice to the letter.

Paul: Right, but you can tell us the do's and don'ts of what you have learned going through the process.

Mathieu: Basically we've reached investors at various stages of the project, and what I can tell is the three main points are... Because you would be evaluating your company in the end, right? So the three main things to account for is team, idea and traction, I'd say. Those are the main three points that have to be evaluated. In order to raise money, you have to have the three points. If you can't justify some traction in this environment... It's tricky, especially in London, to raise money because VC's are a bit [unintelligible 00:18:00] everywhere, so you really have to have a strong team, a strong product and strong traction. In that sense, we did achieve good traction and good momentum. We reached 20k downloads in a week, which was quite solid and we had a very strong technical team behind, and the idea was really innovative, I think. So that's probably why we are interesting for private investors. But I'd say don't try to be too marketish in the pitch; it might depend, but in my experience investors don't really like it. They prefer honesty, and for you to be open about everything you do, even if it's unconventional; they like people that can think out of the box. That would be my two cents.

Paul: So there's two more things, Mathieu, before we say goodbye. One is I just wanted to carry on this line with the investors, and I wondered during the questioning that you got from them, what do you thing is their biggest single reason for investing in you? Is it some kind of statistic like downloads, or is it the engagement, or is it the idea itself? Give us an idea of what's the biggest attraction to investing in Hiboo.

Mathieu: So it's mainly a combination of all the points you've mentioned. They see the market, the huge potential is there because no messaging apps are [unintelligible 00:19:56] that rings a bell to investors; the market is huge, so they see that. They see the potential is there, they see the end game. Also, they see a crowded; there's a need for innovation somewhere, and they won't accept to invest in any messaging app, because it just has the potential to have nine figures valuations. It now has to be something others can't provide, or something that is difficult to do. That's the main attraction of Hiboo - it's really something innovative. It's difficult to actually describe it with words because it's addictive and you really have to try it in order to experience that feeling. It's really a new way of communication, so in that sense we're really innovative and I think that's the main attraction for us. Also, you have to consider the technological potential behind. It's a really unique technology and it's something that can be patented, and that's also a strong point for us.

Paul: So I've learned three things from that, which is what the appster tribe can think about when they're assessing their app ideas. One is the potential in the market, the market itself, how big that is, and number two, even though it may be a crowded market, there is a need for innovation within that market, and number three is the tech itself, making sure that what your solution is is offering some unique tech that perhaps is not out there.

Mathieu: Yes, and it [unintelligible 00:21:51] you have this example with Parse, which was a service provided by Facebook - it was recently announced that it will be discontinued. So you had a lot of apps relying on Parse, and all of these apps now have to migrate their tech because of that, because Parse will be shut down in a year. So that also has to be accounted for.

Paul: Oh, I see, a change in the market. Got it. So the final thing then is that we have a lot of people listening to this who are interested in becoming a founder, a CEO of their own company, their own destiny - my question to you is is it worth it? Is the lifestyle that you live and the ups and downs that you go through in your journey - is it something you would recommend to others?

Mathieu: Definitely. For the experience and for everything that you learn in this journey, that's fantastic. On the contrary, as you said, you have ups and downs, and you ask yourself a lot of questions, and you never count your hours basically. If you are comfortable doing your five to seven job, and if you want to be a founder just because it's trendy nowadays, "Oh yeah, I want to improve my lifestyle", well, don't do that, because you'll be even more worried about everything. But you learn so much during this journey that it can only be beneficial. Even if you work hard - and, of course, you have to work hard, because you have to create value out of nothing, basically, so of course you have to work hard, but yes, I would definitely recommend that for anyone who is determined to learn more and work a lot, and believe in his ideas. Definitely.

Paul: Mathieu, this has been an amazing chat and for everyone listening, there will be full show notes on theappguy.co, just search for episode 443 with Mathieu Rigolot and you'll get links there, but in the meantime, how can people reach out, connect with you? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Mathieu: Well, you can reach to me via e-mail. If you're going to hiboo.co you'll be able to see it, or just reach me at matthieu@hiboo.co I'd be glad to answer any questions.

Paul: Yes, you've inspired me and I'm sure you'll inspire people listening to this. Thanks so much for coming on The App Guy Podcast, and all the best for the future of your messaging app.

Mathieu: Thank you very much, Paul. It has been a pleasure.

Startups Raise Funding Through An App

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we get app founders, CEOs, anyone in the mobile business and we really deconstruct their success, their journey so that it helps us with our own app entrepreneurial journeys, and we have many listeners who are listening to this right now who are making a living off the app store. So what I'd like to do is get these great guests on, and I have a terrific guest on today, because he is the founder and CEO of Off3r.com; now don't get confused, it's OFF3R - a nice little play on words there. His name is Lex Deak, and OFF3R - let me just summarize - aggregates deals from leading crowdfunding platforms and uses a swipe-style UI to make it easy to discover deals. So Lex Deak, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Lex: Hey Paul, thanks for having me.

Paul: Thanks for coming on. So tell us about OFF3R, what are you actually doing with the app?

Lex: So we live in this world of increasing noise, and if you're an investor or an entrepreneur that wants to stay abreast of investment opportunities and companies that are getting funded, seeking funding, where do you go? There's all sorts of places, there are crowdfunding platforms and angel networks, but it's fragmented, it's distributed. So we built OFF3R to pull together all of those companies and those investment opportunities into a very simple, familiar, sort of Tinder-style interface on your mobile. You're alerted whenever there is a new fundraising opportunity, you can track the deals, you can set notifications and alerts if they reach X% of their funding target... It's just a very simple, very useful tool for staying abreast of early stage investment activity.

Paul: I love this already because a lot of the episodes are focused on the need for curation, and this is almost like curating investment deals. So I'm really interested to know if there's been any deals that you feel money has been raised because of the app?

Lex: Yes, we know that through talking with our base, which now numbers about four and a half thousand active investors. Unfortunately, and this is something that many of your listeners will appreciate, there is work to be done on the transactional piece, and just kind of maintaining transparency of that investment process when somebody goes to a platform to actually invest. So we're working on that technology now, but to date it's just evidenced from our base that, courtesy of discovery on OFF3R, they have gone through and they've backed some great companies, and it's made their life easier. It's the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile for you as a founder of something like this.

Paul: It does sound great. I mean, funding is definitely one of the big challenges. So how do we get noticed by you? Are you doing any manual curation from all these other platforms, or is it more automated?

Lex: What we're trying to do is not really take a view on the deals themselves. My other business, which is QVentures, is a high-level Super Angel network and in that business we get very meaningfully involved. With OFF3R, the bar to reach is to be a platform that has the relevant permissions, is authorized in the UK by the FCA and follows best practice. If we can be confident of all of that, then we can by extension be fairly confident that the deals are of a certain quality, that due diligence has been done, so we don't have to take a view. But what we will do in an upcoming release is give some insight into what the community is finding really interesting: trending deals, fastest-moving deals, that kind of a thing, so a sort of community-generated curation, rather than us being the ones to do that.

Paul: So we love chats about fintech because there's a lot of money to be made with fintech-style apps, but I'm wondering, the regulation must be quite hard then. Are you actually regulated by the FSA?

Lex: Yes, the FCA. Currently, we're just working through our application. It is an area where you have to be careful, we're all making financial promotions, we're making invitations to invest, although we take advantage of signposting, so we're not recreating any deal data, we're simply reporting what is already out there in the public domain. We're in a slightly grey area, but the landscape is ever-shifting, and we're in consultation with the FCA around where we fit into that, and we want to be a part of... You know, in the UK we're very lucky, the FCA is perhaps the most progressive body in the world for trying to create structures for enterprise and for funding. We're figuring it out as we go, it's a new space which is kind of exciting and challenging and scary and horrible and amazing at the same time.

Paul: We love grey areas, that's where the opportunity is. You'll have to remind me, what's the FCA stand for again? I always thought it was the Financial Services Authority, but it must have changed.

Lex: It was that, yes. It's now the Financial Conduct Authority.

Paul: Alright, okay.

Lex: Yes, it's similar powers really, but just a bit of a spruce up, and a few other areas that they cover.

Paul: Okay, so these 4,500 active investors - that is amazing leverage that you have to attract money to deals. How did you go about getting these users, these investors interested in OFF3R?

Lex: Well, to date we've only done some very low-level marketing. We've leveraged social channels, namely Twitter, and we've worked with platforms to help spread the word. It's in their interest to promote us, as well as us promote them. We've done somewhat fairly low-level, reciprocal marketing for the time being. We've just closed a funding round, so that gives us some firepower to do some other cool stuff as well. We've been lucky enough, I think, that the investor/entrepreneur/startup communities are fairly tightly knit, so you benefit from word of mouth, and ultimately we've done well from that so far.

Paul: Lex, it would be pretty cool if you could tell me that you've funded your own startup with OFF3R.com

Lex: Yes, I'd love to say that. We did consider that, but we ended up through the QVentures network, which is the Super Angel network, closing it with just a small number of high-net-worth there. We've got Tom Singh, who's the founder of New Look as our lead investor, and a number of other senior Citi finance professionals and super angels. We kept it small, but I think for a subsequent round which we're thinking about perhaps in the autumn, we'd love to use the platform. I mean, what a great story, right?

Paul: Yes, actually voting your own platform to get your own funding, that would be pretty cool. You sound like you've been in the game for quite some time and that you've got a number of different things, I'd like to switch gears slightly and ask you about your journey, and whether you feel like the startup world and going through funding and all this sort of stuff - whether it's worth it, to anyone who's listening who may be attracted to the kind of lifestyle that you may have.

Lex: Well, that's a great question. Is it worth it? I guess that's only something that you can say retrospectively. I think over the years, you know, I started my entrepreneurial journey in my late teens, early twenties and at that age you have this beautiful naivety, you don't realize how hard or difficult things will be, you don't have the same appreciation for money as you do when you get older and you may have mortgages to pay and a family to support, car payments to make and all those wonderful realities of life. I've noticed my own perspective shift quite significantly over the past decade in particular. I've been interested in many different things, and my journey has taken me through setting up the first eBay drop-off shop in the UK, and growing that and exiting to GE Capital in my early twenties, to then flying to Marrakech for a weekend to take stock of what happened, and end up buying an old [unintelligible 00:09:22] and converting it into a boutique hotel and living in Marrakech for a year... Then getting a Facebook friend request - this was 10-11 years ago I guess - from my mother, and thinking that this was not the place for family online activity to take place, so I end up building a platform for families, which was a place to share photos and to-do lists and calendars. Then going through the Dragons' Den process, getting my TV exposure as marketing and finding out that some people are perhaps not as straight as they might like to make out, and the value of candor in fundraising... I had some good experiences in raising a fund, and I had a terrible experience in raising a fund, and then involved in the energy industry, in energy performance certificates, and then working with a number of high-level entrepreneurs organizations, namely The Supper Club, and feeding through into setting up an investment club for a really top tier group of entrepreneur-investors to then setting up QVentures in partnership with Quintessentially, which is the world's largest network of high net-worths with offices in about 60 countries, to then eventually getting into OFF3R. Sorry, it's a slightly verbose answer to your question, Paul, but it's not been a straight line, and at each interval you become immersed and absorb yourself in a new industry, and you learn as much as you can, and I think we live in a slightly different age now, especially in technology. You can set something up, you can trial it relatively quickly, relatively cheaply, and I would suggest doing that as often as possible, and just remaining adaptable and flexible. I think you need a certain personality type in order to weather some of the storms, you need some resilience, you need a good sense of humor, I think you need perspective. The best entrepreneurs that I come across tend to tread the line between humility and super-confidence very well. They will listen, but you also have the feeling that they will knock down doors to get what they want. It isn't a journey for everyone, and I guess the other side, the slightly less positive side of the coin is that it's become a very attractive or 'aspirational career' choice for more people now, and I think that I'm seeing some people just simply aren't equipped for the highs and the lows and the twists and the turns and the instability of it, and there's a feeling that if one buys a nice MacBook and has artisan coffee and starts pinging some e-mails around then you're suddenly a startup founder, and I think that there's a risk there in expectations perhaps not being realistic. It is hard to turn something from a concept into a product, it is even harder to turn that product into something that's a business and makes money. Then there's the stage after that, which is making yourself redundant or growing so that the business is a self-contained entity and can either be sold or grown substantially is even harder, and it will take - it should take - five, six, seven years to get there. But anyway, that's my two cents, that's how I'm feeling this morning, Paul; it might be different later in the day, you never know.

Paul: I'm gonna take that as a yes.

Lex: Yes, I think that was a yes. I forget what the question was, but that's a yes. [laughter]

Paul: I love this, this is why I set up this show, it's really inspirational. I think it's one of the best answers. This show is to try and get to the genuineness. There's so much hype out there, isn't there, about people watching Dragons' Den... Tell us, as someone who's been on there - obviously, for all our US listeners, it's the Shark Tank, and we've had quite a few Shark Tank people on here as well - is it worth the hype of getting on there? Does it really open up lots of opportunities?

Lex: Yes, it was great for that, as a marketing exercise I think it's had the highest impact of anything that I've done. I ended up with six or seven minutes of primetime BBC2 exposure, what would one cost that up, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, I'm sure. It generated 20,000 odd new signups overnight, it opened conversations with PhotoBox, Snappy Snaps, Firebox and known, sizeable retailers and interesting partners. So yes, I would suggest it; from a marketing perspective, it was incredibly worthwhile. I don't think the format and the mindset of the Dragons are well-suited to technology ventures, they typically have a different means of valuing business, that always seems to be the sticking point. So I think if you can come out of the experience without undermining yourself, and just stay true to your beliefs and the value that you've set and what needs to be done to make the business successful I think it's incredibly useful.

Paul: I love that as well. I guess I wanted to also pick up on... You talked about your  journey and it's not a straight line, and a lot of people that come to me seem to have trouble focusing; I know I've suffered from this in the past. How do you stop pursuing the kind of shiny thing syndrome, where you get a Facebook message from your mom and then you set up your own platform?

Lex: Yes, exactly... I don't know, if you find the answer to that, Paul, do let me know. I think it's one of the hardest things with an entrepreneur because by definition you should be an opportunist as an entrepreneur, and there's different types of entrepreneurs, but that's my particular leaning. I think that the opportunity cost of not pursuing what you deem to be a very interesting opportunity is gonna haunt you, and even if you're not working on it, your subconscious is worrying away and that is expending energy. It's a difficult one. I'm kind of embracing it, rather than trying to hide it or to change it. I was talking with Modwenna, who set up Angel News, and has recently set up The Pluralists Club, which has been created to recognize that many of us now wear different hats and have different interests, and I think that traditional wisdom dictates that you must focus and have a laser-sharp focus in your area in order to be very successful and I can't discount that, of course, but in technology particularly there are so many tools that allow you to organize your time better, to segment and to prioritize, that I think it is possible to do more, to work whilst mobile, to have different interests. I would suggest if you are doing multiple things, they should be under the same sort of umbrella. I have a few different ventures which are all in fintech, and there are synergies between them, so I see it as one bigger businessor one bigger play. If I had a cake shop on the side and a travel business, as well as OFF3R, I think I may find myself slightly stretched. But the other thing is that also if you're involved in more things at the CEO/founder level, I think it allow you, if you've got great people - and this is an absolute must - working with you, for you in those businesses, it allows you to maintain a slightly objective perspective on the business, and you can deal with the stuff that really matters, and that's really important, rather than getting drawn into the minutiae because you just simply do not have time. I think that's working for me, whether it will work in the long term or whether I'll end up going mental and selling [unintelligible 00:17:56] on the beach somewhere in Bali. But that's the theory for now.

Paul: Maybe you've just given yourself the seed of an idea with the cake shop.

Lex: Yes, dammit, cakes! There's so much room for improvement with cakes. [laughter]

Paul: There is, it's a hugely disruptive market. And actually, you've mentioned Firebox as well, I have to say that we had the CEO on this show as well, so if anyone wants to listen, it's episode 395 with Kristian Bromley.

There's two more things we need to do then Lex before we say goodbye. One is that I'm really interested in OFF3R because the data behind it must be immensely valuable, getting to see lots of different trends, what investors are perhaps swiping on, and I wondered if you could share any of those trends that you're seeing there, any particular investor interest in certain areas regarding mobile?

Lex: Yes, there's a huge amount of underlying data. So far, our investors have undertaken about three-quarters of a million interactions on the app - that's a like, or a pass, or a social share, or a video view - and that does give us a great deal of sentiment data and sector data. The clear kind of standout observations would be that deals that are at least 65% funded seem to just naturally draw more attention; as a metric, as a starting point, everyone knows you should start a crowdfunding campaign with a certain amount, but it seems to be 65% plus is the level where things really start to... It's the tipping point. Sector-wise, we've seen FMCG, retail and otherwise consumer propositions do particularly well through crowdfunding platforms. I think that that stands to reason because of the mobilization of a fan base. You know, the classic example of breweries I guess is the one that will be cited for years to come. At one point last year, 18% of deals on CrowdCube had to do with food and drink, with a large leaning towards the brewery side of things, so I think that's really interesting. You're seeing a huge appetite for SEIS deals for crowdfunders, where there are reliefs for them there on capital gains and other income tax liabilities. The deals that are up to 150-250 typically are getting closed more quickly. Again, that stands to reason because it's a smaller amount of money, but the million-pound-plus deals that are B2B perhapsor medtech are not as successful on crowdfunding platform currently, and that may well change in due course. We're seeing a lot more younger people getting into this space. I think a traditional angel would be 45+, them having done well and having some spare liquidity. Now we're seeing most engagement from the 30-40 range, so the tech-savvy, younger, mobile, more engaged or more tech-engaged investor, which is really interesting. There's all sorts of cool stuff, Paul, and, actually, if any of the listeners would want to have a look at some of that data and make meaning of it, I would invite anyone to do so, very happy to share that.

Paul: That's wonderful, yes. You mentioned breweries, and I do remember a chat with the guy who created Orderella, which is the ordering app, and they raised a ton of money. So definitely, the brewery space is... I guess that's a British thing, isn't it Lex? Beer and spirits always seem to do quite well.

Lex: Yes, although there may be a link towards alcoholism and investing, which would be an interesting one - high risk investing and the consumption of alcohol.

Paul: Here you go then, here's a partnership: we had a guy on from Shark Tank, in fact, doing the alcohol test on your iPhone; you have to breathe into that to be able to swipe, to show interest.

Lex: That sounds like the future, I love that.

Paul: Okay, well the final thing then is I wondered, as a very busy entrepreneur, you said that you have lots of tools now to help with our productivity, and really maximize our time. I wondered if you could maybe give us one or two of your most useful resources you use online, whether it's an app or a piece of software that helps with your productivity.

Lex: Sure. Well, firstly everything that I would use would need to be synced across all devices, so essentially device-agnostic; I'm sure that's the same for most of your listeners. Slack is a recent and absolutely stellar success, it works very well, it's cut down internal communications via e-mail for us in both businesses significantly. Note-taking tools, I use GNotes and I use Google Keep, which works really well for capturing any ideas; it's that little detail that you capture that can make all the difference sometimes when you wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, capturing that, making use of that and sharing that with the team - really important. Dashboards that we have for businesses - we spend a lot of time upfront, figuring out what metrics we need to see, and creating dashboards which again are built on a mobile-responsive website, so out and about it's as easy to view that. I use TickTick as a to-do list tool, and we use Trello Boards as a team for more project management-based work, and then beyond that we use Google Hangouts generally for video conference calling if we're out and about, as a team, on both businesses. Google is I guess the suite that we use for our everyday stuff, for our e-mail and calendars, contacts, and also Google Docs, although I do find Google Docs and Microsoft Office users tend to sit in two camps, and the two play, but they don't play that well together. So I've recently just conceded and we're also using Office from Microsoft as well; that's pretty standard.

Paul: Well, if anyone from Google is listening, they've changed the way you create a hangout from YouTube, which is driving me insane because I do a weekly hangout with a Slack group. For everyone listening, I actually do have a Slack community that I've just started building, you're very welcome Lex to come in and say hello to everyone. It can be found at a link at theappguy.co where it's got Slack. So all your details will be on the show notes, it's episode 440, an easy number to remember. So just go to theappguy.co and you can connect with Lex. In the meantime Lex, how can  people reach out and connect with you? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Lex: Head to LinkedIn, I'm a fairly open networker on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @lexdeak. You're welcome to e-mail me also if you want to, lex@off3r.com, and we have a Slack channel and a community that we've created for crowdfunding and alternative finance as well, which you can find in the footer of the OFF3R homepage. So yes, multiple ways... Luckily I have a fairly unique name, so wherever you can find me I'm generally pretty responsive and happy to talk.

Paul: Yes, Slack is amazing. A few years ago Evernote was the most mentioned app, and now it's Slack; it shows you how these things change.

Lex: He's nailed it.

Paul: Yes. Lex, this has been absolutely a terrific chat, I think one of my best. I appreciate your time and all the best with OFF3R.

Lex: Thank you, Paul. I appreciate yours, and lovely talking to you.

Clammr : Instagram For Audio

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show that goes around and helps app entrepreneurs, app developers, anyone working on a side project regarding apps, this whole world of apps. We help you by finding the best people to speak to in the industry and then deconstructing their success, what we can learn from them so we can actually take that into our own businesses and our own lives. Today, to help with this endeavor is a great guest because he's in the whole field of audio, his name is Parviz Parvizi and he is the co-founder Clammr, which is a social discovery app and a platform for audio. So Parviz, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Parviz: Paul, it's so nice to be with you.

Paul: It's great that you're here. Please tell us about Clammr and what it is that it can do for us.

Parviz: Sure, so we made Clammr to make great audio easier to share and also discover. One of the things that we found to be a challenge for our own selves (my co-founders and me)  is that there's all this great audio out there, but it's often hard to really dig into. If you think about audio, it's kind of the wrong unit size for discovery, especially in spoken word - podcasts are 15-20 minutes, hour plus. So if you know about something, that's great, but if you don't know about a podcast or you're not familiar with it, it's a big commitment to dig into it. We actually thought if you shrink the unit size down, if you actually have a platform where you can have these bite-sized moments and introductions and highlights from podcasts, that actually makes it easier to discover new podcasts and new audio. So that's really why we've built Clammr, for the purpose of making great audio more accessible and also bridging it to social media, which I can get into.

Paul: Parviz, it is great, you're tackling this big, massive challenge. But I wanted to know why did you do this? What inspired you to actually tackle this problem?

Parviz: Yes, it goes to something personal with one of my co-founders - David - and me. We actually met in law school many years ago and we were in the small group. At law school, you take the same classes, with the same 12-15 people in your first semester. The reason I bring up law school is because we both bonded over the fact that we were slow readers.  Combining law school and being a slow reader is a pretty big challenge. So we always bonded over that and we're both big self-learners.Audio for us has been this really great hack for self-development, at the same time as being on the slower side of being readers. Over the years we've always shared audio with each other, sending links to each other with a timestamp and saying "Hey, fast-forward to this part, check this out!" or even putting audiobooks on Dropbox and referencing particular parts. It really came out of that definitely kind of out there, weirdo behavior on our part, where we were engaging in this behavior of sharing audio with each other, where David said one day, "Hey, why can't we just tweet these moments at each other? Why can't we do the equivalent of tweeting something to each other and then sharing that little nugget? And then if you want to hear more or if you want to hear the whole thing, you can do that." That scratched a itch for us and it was tied to something that we were doing and we thought that actually something like that would make other people's lives better. We picked our heads up and said, "You look around and every major format has a bite-sized social flavor: text has Twitter, images have Instagram, video has Vine, audio doesn't really have anything like that and audio isn't really present on social media in a significant way other than for music." We thought, you know, if you could actually have almost a butler who curates all these great moments from audio, that you could kind of get this power feed and then decide what you want to listen to, that could be a really cool experience. So little by little, we started off just spitballing it and then creating these clips for each other and putting them on Dropbox just to test out what the experience would be like and then it really took on a life of its own.

Paul: This is fascinating. You know, we love to get behind the idea and many of us have these ideas but few of us actually go ahead and create something, so how did you get it off the ground once you knew what you wanted to do? Did you have to quit some kind of job to get this done? Tell us about how it actually became a reality for you.

Parviz: Yes, it became a bit of an obsession.. When you reflect on it, human species has been around for 200,000 years and we've been coding our knowledge in text and written form for less than 3% of that time. And there have been a lot of good reasons for doing that, in terms of storage, transferability etc, but we're just getting to a point where that more natural mode, speaking and listening, doesn't suffer from its traditional disadvantages with things like storage and transmission. So, it's a little bit of a back-to-the-future move. But in terms of how we actually got from that initial germ of an idea to rolling out a company - it really came step by step. Initially, we just wanted to test the basic concept and so, as I started to reference earlier, we simply made a series of these short clips for each other and curated great moments that we were listening to in our daily lives and said "Okay, why don't we over the next week grab our favorite moments in a clunky way and put them together in playlists and show them with each other?" We did that as our very first step. Then we started sharing it with some friends and other folks, just to get initial feedback. We still didn't just go all in; we then set up just a really simple website version. Neither of us had programming backgrounds and I think that's definitely - for launching a product in the year 2016 - something that's definitely a disadvantage, in that it's a basic skill at this point that people have and it's very helpful for iterating. So, for a really basic website, we just spent a little bit of money, got someone to help us out and get something up just so we could play with it without having to, say, go launch QuickTime and Dropbox, or whatever. So we started showing that around to friends, testing it out, and then we really decided to jump in full time on it and pull together a team. So Ken and Oren, who are our two other co-founders, who have programming backgrounds, they joined the effort and then we really went at it in terms of developing an app and a website. In a lot of ways, our app is a bit of a sandbox for us. I don't know if you've run into others who've had this on The App Guy, but we love our app, we love people using it, in a lot of ways, though we see it as a proving ground, because we think of Clammr as really a social layer for audio and a platform. We're less trying to strictly aggregate audiences with Clammr and instead trying to really bridge audio into other social media. So one of the really big ways people use Clammr is they share moments to Facebook, to Twitter and the Clammrs play natively in those places; it's not just a link, but it actually shows up as an autoplay embed.

We've also created a series of Clammr buttons that we've embedded inside of other people's audio players. I think last month we reached 16 million people who are being exposed to that button and it's embedded inside of Libsyn's player, inside of PowerPress and some of the leading audio players. When someone's listening to audio, they can hear a moment and just press that Clammr It button to share it out. So that's been another aspect of how we've thought about the app. We certainly early days focused on the app and having a decent experience. In a lot of ways it's provided lessons to us in terms of really building out a platform where we want a network of soundbites to be around and available in people's lives, in the places where they actually consume content and make their audio decisions.

Paul: I'm learning a load from you, Parviz. The first thing is not trying to recreate the wheel without social media platforms and I learned that also from an episode with BuzzFeed, the VP of marketing; they made the decision to just be everywhere, no matter what the platform is. Almost be platform-agnostic and that's what we have to be, I guess, with our apps.

Parviz: Yes, I think so. I mean, it's time-dependent, right? If you're in the year 2015, 2016 and you're trying to build a consumer experience, certainly you can take inspiration from Facebook and others, but I think simply saying "I'm gonna create a social network" is a little bit tone-deaf to the reality we live in and also not taking advantage of the reality we live in. People have already created social graphs for you, so why recreate another one? Why not take advantage of that? I think BuzzFeed is a perfect example, they've done a brilliant job leveraging social graphs.

Paul: I wanted to ask you then, since you've been running, was there any particular time where you had a specific breakout, where you just knew that this was working, because of the spike in downloads, or something you did, some kind of growth hack? Was there any moment you could talk through?

Parviz: I think there were a couple moments. One is we - maybe a little earlier than we should have - but we just went to a trade show not long into some of our development - this was last year, New Media Expo, which is part of the National Association of Broadcasters. New Media Expo was kind of the biggest podcaster conference in the US. It's now defunct, so I'm glad we got in that last year, but it’s a great gathering of podcasters. We said "Let's go a bit native with the audio community and really just expose what we're doing and get feedback. That was one great breakout moment because we just got a lot of great feedback from the community and really got to know the community well. And we came in really just with our ears open, that was really primarily the reason we were there. And one big breakout there was just to learn that this problem of discovery was a really big deal. We actually even ended up doing a survey of podcasters afterward, publishing an article about it and that really helped in terms of building a core community. We had some podcasters even start a private Facebook group for Clammr power users, that we participate in. We got this kind of core group who started giving us feedback and that helped really solidify our thinking to say "Look, this really needs to be something that's a social layer and a discovery layer and not a destination-type move."

Because we'd certainly had in our minds, in an ideal world, from where David and I had started from, if I could wave a magic wand I'd have an app, just turn it on and it has all the content in it for me already. But again, if you're in 2015, 2016, that's hard to make happen when people are already spending a lot of their time and energy as content creators on existing social platforms. So that really was one moment, getting that feedback from the community and really helping shape our direction. The other moment came this past December, January, when a set of our partners started embedding this Clammr button into their players and we saw a lot of increased creation and exposure from that. So folks like Blubrry with PowerPress player, Libsyn, Simple Podcast Press, Awesound, some of these other great folks.

Paul: That's wonderful. What I've learned from that as well is that it's great to have good partners by you and really add value to them because that gives you the exposure that you need.

Parviz: For sure and I think we got lucky in that the podcast community is such an open, friendly, collaborative one. When we first created the plugin it had bugs and things like that and we really appreciated that folks kind of stayed with us, gave feedback. It was obviously beneficial for them to have this capability available to their users, but like anything else, developer time is scarce and the fact that they were willing to take a look at our early draft and give us feedback was incredibly helpful.

Paul: Parviz, one of the things I'm really interested at the moment is - because I'm building my own community around a Slack group, I wondered from your perspective, do you have any guidance on building a community, people that are testing your app, that are giving feedback, that are participating... You already mentioned the Facebook group, but do you have any tips for us to help build our communities?

Parviz: Well, one thing I'd actually note. It's not a tip from having done this well; it's more looking back in retrospect and giving feedback to ourselves. I'd say starting as early as possible would be incredibly helpful for building a community and here's a part of what I mean by that: I think when we started really engaging with the community is when we had an early beta version of Clammr and we had something that we could show people. And that's great, but I think we could have helped ourselves even more by simply participating as active members of the community and not being shy earlier, like six months earlier, and just establishing ourselves as thoughtful people on the topic of audio, on the topic of podcasting. Because then you can really kind of be more peer-like with people, where you're in the same boat with them, rather than "I have something, I want you to try it out." While I think the podcasting community is one that's just been incredibly open and collaborative, there's always an aspect of, you know, when you have yet another app, people are busy and there are a lot of apps and they think "Oh, you just want me to download your app", right? There's a little bit of a fence that goes up, at least with some people. So I think just participating in the community without even having anything is a great way to just build a bunch of friendships in a peer network, before doing anything else. So even things like publishing articles, running a newsletter - those can be incredibly helpful. After we went live, we published an article in TechCrunch over the summer and then another one over the winter. Those were great, those were actually great relationship-building tools. People would write to us and they would share their thoughts with us and we'd have these back-and-forths and we'd actually build a set of very good relationships. There's no reason why we couldn't have done that before having an app out there. So that would be my biggest tip: engage early, not just when you have something that you want people to try out.

Paul: So there's two more things, Parviz, that we need to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that we love to learn about the lifestyles of app entrepreneurs. We've had people who have actually left corporate jobs and who listen to this show and have joined the kind of lifestyle of app-preneurs. You had in front of you a law school, which I'm assuming that you had the chance of going into law and having a very corporate type of career; you've chosen the life of a co-founder, of your own company. Tell us - was it worth it and would you recommend this lifestyle to others?

Parviz: Yes. It's a good question, I haven't reflected on what I do as a lifestyle, so I'd have to think more about it; it's actually provoking some thought that I probably can't just immediately react to, I have to marinate on that one. Actually, both Dave and I, when we graduated, we both went and got these kinds of blue chip, corporate-type jobs. We had started a business in law school together, a winter hat company actually and it was a lot of fun. We knew we liked working together, we knew we wanted to jump and do something together. I was lucky enough my former employer actually paid for law school, but we both we wanted to save up a little etc. Talk about the extreme of corporate jobs: he was an M&A banker at Morgan Stanley and I was a McKinsey consultant, so you can't get any more corporate than that. But we both kept a line open with each other and we were always kicking things arounda We even invested in a couple of things together. When we really jumped ship it was really less of a lifestyle decision and more of something we felt we had to do; I can't think of it in a different way. It felt pretty continuous; in my case, I'd been serving media companies and wireless carriers and telecom manufacturers, all around the topics of digital consumer behavior, digital strategy, so it felt like a natural next step to actually go do something, rather than the mode of being an advisor - which is a great job, it has many benefits, but it felt like just another toolkit and another opportunity to grow.

Paul: But how did you actually cope? Because I actually jumped ship from a similar kind of thing, it was an institutional asset management company and I found it quite challenging adjusting, especially the difference in salary, worrying about the income. Do you have any tips on how to transition from basically a monthly salary where you don't have to worry about money at all, in a way, to then running your own business and worrying about payroll and paying yourself and all that sort of stuff?

Parviz: Yes, so part of this also comes to how you might think about the process of exiting. If some of those things are necessary, having the higher salary etc. then you sort of shift how you do it. In our case, we got a little bit lucky, I'd say, if nothing else. We actually started off creating a set of just content-focused websites, like a ranking website, that was pretty fun; it was kind of crowd-sourced rankings and we generated revenue out of those. That was actually one of our initial sparks - we got really into that and we were doing that for a while together. So we pretty much off the bat had steady incomes. oth of us also just happened to be in - this is something I've heard others say too, I didn't think about it expressly - but I have a very low-cost lifestyle, a low burn lifestyle. David now has a couple of kids, but his is also low burn relatively speaking, you know, with having two kids. So we didn't really have habits that were expensive in our lives, so that also was helpful. But I think we got lucky in that the first thing we jumped off and did was something that was a cash flow generator. It wasn't something that would necessarily generate a lot of equity value, it was really just cash flow, ad-based businesses, but that was helpful and also gave us some confidence to really then take a swing of the bat as we started getting obsessed with the Clammr idea. We said, "You know what? Yes, it's a bit of a risk", but to focus on something that's really not… - Clammr was not - gonna generate immediate revenue, but it gave us some confidence that even if it's a fail, we (at least) feel like we have some skills that we could fall back on things that are a bit more cash flow generating if we need to.

Paul: I love that, you've just picked up on a theme of this show, which is no matter what the risks are, the learning that you get from running your own company, your own startup sort of outweighs the risk of failure.

Parviz: Yes. And that's why when you asked that lifestyle question I really thought of it as a continuation of my education, as opposed to a lifestyle. We have this little rule, David calls it 'the Parviz test', because I guess I said it to him once, which was when you're choosing to do something, you might ask yourself the question "Even if this thing doesn't work out the way I want it to, if I think of the worst-case scenario, would I still do it? Would I still be happy that I did it?" And I think starting something like this definitely falls into that bucket, because it's a life experience, you learn from it regardless.

Paul: Well, Parviz, this is why I do this show, to meet people like you, that give me a reality check as well, because I left my six-figure corporate salary and I wish I had followed your advice at the time. What I've learned is one, having some income that you're generating, even it's from a side project and I guess the second one is to have a low-cost lifestyle, which is quite beneficial. The last thing then, Parviz, what should we be doing to enjoy Clammr? How can we use it the best, to get the maximum out of it?

Parviz: Sure, so let's split it into two sides: creators and people who are more purely audio consumers. I think on the creator front, really think of it as a tool. Clammr is a way to amplify your social presence and to make your audio usable and discoverable in the places where people are actually finding content, which is on social media, on places like websites. We actually have a user guide that we've documented, because why not, and in there we have a section that says "Okay, I'm now using Clammr, how do I actually grow my audience?" We just did a study actually and the podcasters who are using Clammr, they reported a three-times higher engagement on their social media posts that use the Clammr format, versus normal ones. So I'd say take a look at the user guide and the tips there for people who are audio creators. It really comes down to posting on social media; everything in Clammr is an open object, so you can embed Clammrs on your websit eand that's a way to expose things like past episodes to people who visit the website. We're actually just rolling out a premium product. e partnered with Entrepreneur.com to create a Recommended Podcasts section next to their articles, that has podcasts featured in there, where people can actually play the preview without leaving the site. So that's an opportunity for folks using the same content they would with Clammr to basically promote it on a premium site as a way to get some additional audience exposure. I think one of the real challenges in podcasting today is unless you're somebody who has an existing relationship with the radio world, there are no systematic ways to promote your podcast. So we're just getting that off the ground, we've had a bunch of people sign up. Microsoft signed up, in terms of blue chip, big companies and then a whole host of independent podcasters have, as well. So that's on the creators' side. On the listeners' side, getting the most out of Clammr - give the app a try and give the website a try; it's mobile-responsive for Android. I think the biggest thing you can do is to really customize it for yourself. We have a set of playlists, but go find the people who you're linked to on Twitter and Facebook - we have a mode where you can find everybody who you're following on Twitter and Facebook - follow those people, follow the specific sources you want to create a customized feed of audio for yourself, rather than the sort of generic feed that some of the playlists have.

Paul: Okay, well obviously I'm a creator and we've just created an episode, so it might be a little bit specific, but let me understand - this episode we've created, should I be clipping out some of the best extracts from our chat and then using Clammr to then post that onto social media?

Parviz: Exactly, exactly. You can grab the highlights. Your podcast doesn't necessarily lend itself to this, but I'll throw it out anyway: we also have integrated GIF search on Giphy, so you can mash up the audio with GIFs or just still images, as well. I think that works for a lot of podcasts; it may not work for this one in particular, but maybe I said something goofy that I didn't realize, that ties to a GIF, right? Tere's a button that says create and you can basically highlight and extract up to 24 seconds and then add a message and send it out. In that user guide there are some tips - this is maybe way too specific for your audience, but one of the things that we definitely recommend is using tagging. I see a lot of early users who will just tweet out a moment from their podcast, but they don't mention anyone; they just tweet it out. One of the things that's happened with Twitter that's become pretty clear in recent years is Twitter is really not a reach platform, Twitter is an influencer platform. If you're just tweeting stuff out, unless you happen to be someone who has a large audience and they actually hang on your every word, it's kind of like going into a black hole. So the way to really make use of Twitter is to mention people who you actually want to reach, who you want to influence, who you want to get on their radar screens. So being a little bit savvy about how you share them out, not just sharing them, but using the @ mention and ditto for Facebook, given that they're applying algorithms and it's not simply open exposure. Using the @ mentions and tagging appropriately to get the attention of people can help a lot.

Paul: Well, that is excellent, I'm really keen on giving it a try. I love what you've done as well, it's been so inspirational. So full show notes will be on theappguy.co's episode 439, if anyone wants to go and check out the notes. But in the meantime, Parviz, how can we reach out to you, how can we connect with you?

Parviz: Sure, so I'm the primary Wizard of Oz behind our Twitter account, so you can always reach us there, reach me there; I'm on Twitter, I have a personal account, it's just @pparvizi. Our Twitter account is @clammrapp. On Clammr itself there's a simple messaging function and I'm @parviz on that, so feel free to message me within Clammr and you can always e-mail me on parviz@clammr.com. You can e-mail our whole team at support@clammr.com. I really always love to hear from folks.

Paul: Parviz, thanks very much for joining me on the show tonight and all the best for the future.

Parviz: Thanks Paul, it's been a pleasure!

Netflix Style App For Kids Aged 9 - 11 Years Old

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, Paul Kemp. I do this show because I'm inspired to have a lifestyle as an app entrepreneur; I live off the income from the app store and from all the things I do digitally. I can work anywhere, and I also get to be at home a lot so I can spend more time with my wife. But not as much as my guests today. They are husband and wife, and the co-founders of an app called Azoomee. We're going to learn all about what they're doing, so let me introduce Estelle and Douglas Lloyd, the husband and wife team behind Azoomee. Guys, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Estelle: Hello.

Douglas: Hi, thank you.

Paul: First of all, I'd like to know about you both. You're husband and wife, what's it like working together as a duo?

Estelle: It's great. So there are several ways we can look at it... We talk about work a lot, and the great thing is that we love what we do, so most of the times it doesn't feel like work. But most seriously the reason why it works really well is because we each bring very different and specific skills to this venture, and we don't tend to work on the same thing or the same aspect of the business, so it's very well divided. But this doesn't mean that we're not involved, for example if I'm working on something on content, and I want to have Douglas' opinion on it, we'll have a chat. That's really how we work, we seek each other's feedback, but we are ultimately working separately, each of us on specific aspects of the business.

Douglas: This isn't actually the first venture that we've co-founded, we had another venture which was very successful and was sold very profitably in the media sphere. So in fact we've been working together building businesses for over a decade. So there's a track record there, and we're still smiling, and laughing, and we have three young children.

Paul: This is so inspirational for anyone listening who has a partner as it shows that you are soulmates who can spend work and home time together. Let's put this in the context of what you're doing now, so perhaps we could talk about Azoomee.

Estelle: Sure, so to explain it in a simple way Azoomee is the place for parents to give to their children, to be entertained and learn in a safe environment online. One way that I like to describe it is if you recall your childhood and building a fort or a den with the blankets and pillows… this was your own space where you could go to play.

Douglas: Paul, I don't know how much time you've had a chance to look at the app, but when you login it's like a massive toy box, and what we wanted to do is to create something really exciting that children could engage with. They love being able to discover the different parts of the app, and parents know when they give them Azoomee there’s nothing for them to fear, that all the content there has been curated and is age-appropriate. So it's something that both parents and children embrace as I think that when it comes to technology it's often more a source of conflict than a source of harmony between parents and children. We're trying to resolve that.

Paul: This is great because it really ties into how this podcast started. It was my second ever interview and I interviewed someone behind Toca Boca, and they said...

Estelle: We're big fans...

Douglas: Yes, they're great.

Paul: Okay, well they were told at the time that it was crazy to build an app for kids. Who on earth is going to give their kids access to a several hundred pounds device, and how right they were to dedicate themselves. Are you finding that that age of being scared about your kids being on your iPads and your iPhones is over, and there's a lot more people relaxed about the amount of device time children are having?

Estelle: So before we get into the specifics of this, the Azoomee app is for kids aged 5-11. So it's for primary school children, and it's an age when there is interest about the internet. Some kids are using the internet for their homework, so there is definitely already a presence online. There isn't yet necessarily an interest in social media, although there's definitely chats about social media and awareness, so we think it's a very critical age group that needs to have access to all of the wonders that the internet offers, but without necessarily the threat of finding a really inappropriate piece of content by mistake.

Douglas: Paul, to address your question, first of all let's look at homework - it's become more digital, and therefore parents no longer have a choice about whether their children are online or not, or actually in front of the screen. I mean, if you take state schools in the UK, a huge percentage of maths homework is now done online, through a variety of different brands, and then you've obviously got the growth in ICT, actually it's a core part of the curriculum. So tablet and laptop usage has naturally grown as the curriculum has changed, and homework and the way it’s used has changed, and there's coding in all of that. So that's the world we're living in, it's not something that you can necessarily regulate in a way that you could before, because there are various drivers that go beyond entertainment.

Paul: So Estelle and Douglas, one of the big challenges from listeners to this podcast is they love the idea of having a lifestyle built from digital, and obviously both of your incomes are tied up, the household income is all to do with this business. Is it profitable to enter the kids space, the 5-11 year old type of space? I'm just wondering in terms of how you actually monetize and whether it's worth it from your perspective.

Douglas: It's worthwhile, bear in mind that we're serial entrepreneurs, it's not the first business that we've built a business. We looked very carefully at the business rationale and how we would run it, and how we would raise capital from high net worths and institutions, as well as how to monetize the app. This is a subscription-based product, like Spotify or Netflix. You either pay a monthly subscription, every six months or every year, and the monthly price is £4.99 per family. It's immaterial to us whether you have one, two, three, four kids even five - it’s the same price per month. We've looked at alternative pricing options and we feel that's a very sustainable price for a variety of reasons. First of all, it's worth bearing in mind that we make no money from advertising and there are no in-app purchases, which from a parent's point of view is great news because you don't want your primary school children being marketed or advertised to. So we believe that parents will feel comfortable that their children are being given a pure experience, an entertained experience, and that's one of the components that sits within the price tag. Also don't forget there's a huge amount of video content there, which obviously we had to license, just like Netflix; there's a cost of using that. And I think the other aspect worth bearing in mind that maybe we should touch on is that our strategic partner is the NSPCC, and for every single month that someone subscribes, they pay through us and donate 20p to the NSPCC. So there's a huge charitable underpinning here. This is an entertainment platform but we're also looking to keep children safe online, and that's a key mission for the NSPCC, and it's important that we support them in doing that.

Paul: Great, I've learned an enormous amount from you. In fact, you have a similar vision to Toca Boca in a way, that they don't like to do in-app purchases or selling ads to children. How important do you think it is to have in your business a belief system? Something that you really believe in, you're trying to change, and obviously in your case it's protecting children.

Estelle: It totally underpins everything that we do, Paul, it really does. The socially responsible aspect of what we do is at the center of every decision that we make, whether it's partnership with established brands that help us distribute potentially the app. Our partnership with NSPCC is a perfect reflection of that, but it's also the way that we curate content, the type of content that we bring on to the platforms. I'll give you an example, and we haven't really talked about the content that we have on the app, but I think one of the very important aspects of what we do is the content and how we curate it. So the content is videos, games, audiobooks, art, tutorials and a messaging app. If you look at the video content, for example, we've got great, entertaining content, great entertainment brands that are very well known and that kids love, but we are also very keen on tutorials. We bring on a lot of art tutorials, cooking tutorials, science tutorials, magic tutorials, and it's the whole idea of getting kids active, getting them creating things, making things, wanting to do it with siblings or friends. So that's the whole idea of what we curate on the video content, and I would say that the tutorials make up at least 50% of our videos.

Paul: Actually, one of the big challenges from the app entrepreneurs that are listening to this is that it's often very challenging to get investment, and I'm guessing because you're serial entrepreneurs it must have been quite easy for you, just a case of picking up the phone... Is that the case?

Douglas: It's never easy... Raising money is never easy. What we'd say collectively is first of all we're very privileged that there are people that believe in our idea and have been prepared to back us, because we think we have a great idea and we think we're doing something good, not just with the NSPCC. Obviously, people made a fair amount of money in our previous venture, and therefore we are potentially - I'm putting words in their mouth - more appealing than other opportunities they might be looking at, because at least we've delivered for them once. Then there are those people who didn't invest in our previous venture who are saying, "Well, I don't want to miss out on this one", so obviously that creates a virtuous circle, and that's certainly helped us. For the record, we've raised just under two million pounds so far, which is no mean feat, it's a serious amount of money. So it has been easier, but the process remains the same: investors want to meet you, they want to look at your business model, they want to look at the market, and obviously the more they invest, the more seriously they look about whether they're going to get a return on their investment.

Paul: So this is appropriate to anyone who has funding, or even the guys that are bootstrapping their own projects and businesses. What would your advice be on where you spend the money? Obviously, it's relevant to what you're doing, but do you have any guidance for us on where it's best to actually spend the investment that you're getting?

Douglas: I suppose my overall advice would be... To me it's obvious, if you don't have an app that works, then what's the point in marketing it? So it's WHEN you allocate the money that matters. If you look at the money we've allocated, it was much more geared towards technology to start as it should be, so it functions and works, and then as you begin to have an MVP and it's something that's working properly, then you move more to the marketing and the embellishment, and where you allocate cash changes. But as we all know, if the app doesn't actually work then you've really got nothing to market. The initial investment - and this is the hard thing - is in turning a dream into something that works in the app store, and until it works in the app store you effectively have nothing to prove for your money.

Paul: Also, people are challenged by whether to employ developers themselves or use third-party developers. Do you have a view on that?

Douglas: Well, our previous business we contracted more through third parties, and I think it's fair to say that we found it much harder. In this instance, the team is completely in-house, vested, they're all shareholders and we're all sharing the same journey. I think one of the key things I'd always say to anyone is if your team is aligned with you and they all believe that they're going to benefit from the association - I'm not just talking financially, but just being a part of the business. I'll give you an example: we all have hoodies in the office with different characters from our Oomeez. The Oomeez are the playful, cartoon-like characters that you'll see in parts of the app. When you join you get a number. Now, it's probably a bit hackneyed you might say, but everyone quite likes that. "Hang on, was I number 4? Was I number 5? Was I number 11?" You know, it's a sense of "I'm part of that team."

Paul: Yes, actually we have to shout out to Ed Burleigh, who put us in touch.

Douglas: Yes, I know. He hasn't got his hoodie yet, but he will have it soon.

Estelle: Can I add something to your question about where you spend the money? I think what we've done this time, our second time building a business, is that we have spent more money, and certainly time, prototyping at the very beginning, and it's definitely a critical part of the journey, and it's something that needs to be done very well and definitely not where you want to not spend money. I think that we were very lucky to be introduced to somebody who did the prototyping with us, and we ended up recruiting him as our CTO at the end of this process. So that would be my number one priority piece of advice in terms of where to spend money early on. The second thing is not so much spending the money, it's more looking at the size of the market, because you can build the best possible product, but if you are going after a tiny market, then your business model is flawed. It's sometimes incredibly difficult to get a true sense of the size of the market and how the market is going to hopefully grow in the future; it's sometimes very difficult to actually get a very clear view on that and it requires a fair amount of research and industry surveys.

Paul: I guess it's a shame that Netflix can't tell you exactly how many people are logging into the kids only section.

Douglas: It is a shame, yes.

Paul: But we just assume it's massive, because obviously with Netflix now funding its own content, and happy to throw away $100m on House of Cards and all these other programs, then I can imagine the market is huge.

Douglas: Yes, the market ought to grow for two reasons: one, we touched on it earlier, tablet usage should grow, and also as the cost of the tablet comes down, particularly if you look at the Android tablets, the tablet is no longer as much of a luxury item as it used to be two, three or four years ago. And because our app works best on tablets, and also it's easier for children to consume the various aspect of Azoomee, that will be one of the drivers that is very important for us.

Paul: So there's two more things we need to do guys, before we say goodbye to you. One is that I'm really interested in how you obtained feedback, because I know it's all about building a community, especially through the prototyping, the beta stage, and I just wondered if you had any guidance for us on how you've gone about getting feedback on your prototype, on your MVP, and almost building up a community whilst you're in this beta test.

Douglas: So we have, as Estelle alluded to, throughout the process we have undertaken market surveys, and before the product was actually launched we did three different market surveys and large ones, nationally, to talk about the various components of our product and what the appeal would be and why that would be valuable to use it. Because if you break down Azoomee into different components, video, games, messaging, the art app etc, it's useful to understand what people want. And indeed, there's another survey going on right now. So there's the market research, which to some extent has given us guidance. In the beta test - we know a lot of the people on the beta. Remember, we're fortunate that this is a market we know well in the sense that we have three young children, all of whom are potential Azoomee users, and a lot of our friends have children of this age, so it's quite - I'm not going to say it's easy, but there are a lot of children we were able to talk to through their parents as to how they used it. It is pretty useful having that direct access to the market. But we will continue and need to undertake much more thorough focus groups and market testing as we go forward, because the app itself was only officially launched last Thursday.

Paul: Right, okay, so it's pretty young. What sort of market surveys - are you actually appointing a company to do these for you, are you undertaking them yourself?

Estelle: Before I get to that, just to follow on Douglas' point, one of the very interesting, key pieces of feedback that we got from these surveys is that parents are very interested in the educational content that we have throughout the platform, and that anything educational resonates very well with parents. They understand that it has value, they understand that, and I would go even further - they are prepared to pay for it because there is an educational component to it. One of the series that we didn't discuss, which is a series that we produced ourselves, you mentioned Netflix producing their own IP - so we produce our own IP called Search It Up. Search It Up is an animated series, two-minute cartoons that essentially guide children on how to be a good digital citizen. It's a bit of a mouthful, but what it means is essentially imagine little cartoons that explain what's a password, how you use it, how you create a good password that you will be able to remember, what happens when you put a photo online and how long it stays there, and all these very important topics that children between 5 and 11 need to start understanding, particularly as they are going to continue spending a fair amount of time online later on.

Paul: That's wonderful.

Douglas: And it's worth adding, Estelle has not mentioned two other series we've curated, which are art series, and this goes back to the whole tutorial point of trying to make sure that the app is valuable as well, because it teaches active play. I'm using my screen so that I can produce an origami whale, or a plasticine snail, and we like that. So there's a very strong artistic craft component to Azoomee.

Paul: So the final question then, and I don't often get the chance to ask this, but I'm a parent, I've got twin boys, I firmly believe that being a work-from-home dad and being in charge of my own destiny is beneficial for the kids, but I'd love to know from a husband and wife with three children, what's the pros and cons of the lifestyle that you have as serial entrepreneurs?

Douglas: I think one of the benefits is... Yes, obviously we're always on, because one is with one's own company, but we're also able to create time for the children in a special way, so that we can go to that swimming gala this morning, or we can go to... You know, we have more freedom of movement, because it's our business. It doesn't mean you work any harder, but you can work around all those wonderful events in your children's life that you want to go to, but if you were working for someone else you would always have to make excuses for, either to your employer or to your children. So I think that's a massive bonus, and it really shows up in terms of both holidays and also, as I said, being very engaged with them. I take my children to school every single day, and if that means I have to work a bit later in the evening then that's a price I'm prepared to pay. I think that's a massive benefit.

Paul: Yes Douglas. I do, as well. There's not many men I meet at the gate, I have to say, but it's nice to be someone that has... And you must be the coolest parents on the block, being app entrepreneurs and sharing an app that you've built for kids, you must get a lot of kudos from your children's friends.

Douglas: I don't know, I mean I hope they say that. I have no idea if they do say that, but they're very proud of what we're doing. They actually love coming to the office, they love to test the games and videos. I think, to be honest, it's the content of what we do, rather than the fact that we're entrepreneurs, that excites them. But they are great ambassadors, and we don't want to let them down.

Paul: All the show notes are going to be on episode 438, and for everyone listening, it's theappguy.co, and just search for Estelle and Douglas Lloyd. Guys, how best can people reach out and connect with you, and I guess get a hold of Azoomee.

Estelle: It's in the App Store and the Google Play store on tablets, and obviously the best way to get in touch with us is either on our Twitter page, our Facebook page, or LinkedIn, which is more for professional purposes. So either of these three, or come and see us in our office in Old Street.

Douglas: We're where you'd expect us to be.

Disruptive Entrepreneurs And Their Investors

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. The show goes around the world and we interview the best experts that we can find, CEOs, founders running their own companies. Now, I'm often asked a lot about the funding side. There's a lot of challenges for startups and for anyone that's really involved in this disruptive marketplace, so I've got today a great guest. I'm gonna read you a quote from his website - I definitely recommend that you go and check it out, it's venturefirst.com, and there'll be full show notes on theappguy.co at episode 437. So let me just read this out, it's a message from the CEO and it says: "Innovation is the wild card that drives positive change in our society, economy and day-to-day lives. We are currently experiencing a new paradigm in economic expansion that is closely tied to disruptive entrepreneurs and their investors. At Venture First, we strive to facilitate this ecosystem by guiding companies through the minefield of challenges, while facilitating better communication and analysis for their investors." This is a quote from the CEO, John Shumate, and he is here as a guest on The App Guy Podcast, so John, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

John: Thanks so much, I'm thrilled to be here, and looking forward to talking to you.

Paul: Help us to understand what you do first. What is Venture First and how is it helping startup founders/entrepreneurs?

John: Sure, so we really try to focus on, as you said, working with early stage entrepreneurs and working with investors into those groups. We do a few things. First, on the venture side, we've developed a really good relationship with angel investors and with venture capital groups, because we do a lot of their portfolio valuation. We value their company, we value their options, all that sort of stuff, so we already have a great relationship with those groups. Then on the entrepreneur side, we get them ready to fundraise, typically. You know, different entrepreneurs know different things, but we will help them with things like building their financial model, thinking about their growth plan, thinking about what sort of deal terms they should look for, trying to connect them with the right investors and make sure that they craft the right deal, and that they don't get completely screwed over on terms, those sorts of things. We also do some M&A activity as well, helping companies buy other companies, or helping these entrepreneurs, once they've been successful, sell their companies. So those are the big buckets.

Paul: Okay John, there's a lot to cover, and we're talking to the right audience, because these guys are always asking me about funding, about angel investors, getting warm instructions, but let's start first with the M&A, because it's a good indicator of economic activity. I'm wondering, are you seeing a rise in your M&A activity, or a slowdown? Tell us about what's happening in the M&A space.

John: I think overall there's been an uptick recently in M&A activity. I think there is a concern that there could be potential headwinds in the markets, and there could be a decrease in activity over the rest of 2016, though I'll tell you, for the most part, most of those statistics typically affect later-stage deals. I still believe that a good, early-stage deal, that's going to be sold to the right acquirer - which is typically a strategic buyer, not a financial buyer - I don't think any of those headwinds typically apply. If you are a disruptive company and your technology is changing the way people think about a particular industry or vertical, and somebody wants to buy you, to either eliminate you as a competitor or hopefully add you on to build something more synergistic, there's still going to have interest now, and there's still going to be a strong valuation place on it. So I don't think that should be a big concern for an entrepreneur right now.

Paul: Also, I was asking with the view that many of the listeners here do leave corporate jobs, the safety net of a nice salary, to go in and do their own startup, and often we try to predict whether we're in a bubble or not, and M&A does seem to sometimes give us a tip-off that we are. Do you feel like we are in an inflated environment, or do you feel like it's sustainable for the long term?

John: Well, it depends. I think there are different tiers. Typically, when you listen to CNBC or one of these stations that talk about whether we're in a bubble, they're typically talking about the stock market, public equity markets. I think there is, given economic conditions, probably some arguments that it's a tad inflated at the moment. Entrepreneurs, like most of the people listening to this podcast, are probably people that are wondering more about funding, or other deal activity, and their valuations in the early stage space. There's been a lot of talk about whether that's a bubble or not, and I bifurcate that a bit. I think if you look at the unicorns out there, the ubers of the world, who are driving these crazy valuations, I think it's pretty clear that some of those big boys are in a bubble. There is a certain hysteria that's chasing those deals, and it's not even necessarily a rational pricing event that's occurring, and people are just rushing to try to get to that IPO and get that initial pop that typically happens - it didn't happen on Facebook, but on most of them you typically get that initial pop, and that's what everyone's clamoring for. But I don't think, at least from a fundamental perspective, that that is a bubble that affects sort of the rest of us, that that affects your average early-stage company, average-sized early-stage company that has a nice growth trajectory. Now, I will tell you, to caveat that, I do think that the venture capital markets have a little bit of a trend where the limited partners - the investors in those funds - are starting to demand a little bit more accountability and showing some profits, instead of just continuing to build revenue and not show profits. So I do think there will be a little bit more scrutiny on valuations for the rest of the companies. There might be a little bit of a downtick, or a little bit of a normalization of that. But at the end of the day, if you've built an app and you're looking for an exit, and you're really doing a great job in disrupting things, I don't think it's gonna be a big driver, unless you're one of the unicorns.

Paul: Right, okay... Hopefully we've got someone who's running a unicorn listening to this, you never know; or potential unicorns. So let's talk about valuations. Actually, more appropriately, getting warm introductions to angels and VCs. A lot of people come with an idea, they have a business plan, they've got their pitch deck - how do you help get them warm introductions and help them with their pitch?

John: First of all, I think the best way into a VC or an angel investor is a warm intro. And that doesn't have to be me, you might be friends with somebody who's had a successful app that's been funded and had a successful event. Having them introduce you to their investor, they're obviously going to take a lot more interest in that. Or having another co-investor introduce you. Anytime you can get an introduction, it just carries a lot more weight. I had lunch with a VC today, and I was asking about how they get their deal flow. She was pretty honest, she said "Frankly, we barely look at anything that people send us over e-mail or on the company website, because we think so much of it is junk. But if somebody that we know introduces it to us, we take a look a hundred percent of the times." So I'm not saying don't ping those funds, because that's not always true, but if you can find a warm intro, do it. One of the things that we can do if you don't already have warm intros is we can search our contacts, search our database, try to think of who are the right investors, who are the right funds for you, and then we can make some intros to those. And those don't have to be exclusive, those can supplement other intros or other contacts that you have.

Paul: That's really helpful. Actually, I get approached quite a lot with seeking those warm introductions, and just recently there's a guy going over to San Francisco to try and raise a round. What type of money do you typically work with? If someone's listening to this and they have a particular target in mind, is there a certain size that you only work with? Tell us about that.

John: Frankly, we're doing a 30-million-dollar capital raise right now for a larger healthcare company. It's a pretty decent amount of bandwidth. I would think that if you're doing more than that, you're gonna be working with a more traditional investment banker in London or New York. Our sweet spot is working with anything from seed stage up to about series B. That's a pretty wide range. That's anything typically in US terms from a half million, up to about a five-million-dollar raise, our sweet spot.

Paul: Fantastic. And what preparation can someone do to help get on your radar, for example. What do they need to have in their resources? Give us some sense of what an entrepreneur needs to have to be prepared to have these talks with you to raise a half a million to a million dollars?

John: Well, to talk to us, really they need more of the business model and the technology expertise, and hopefully a good idea of how to make the pieces work. A lot of times we'll come in and help them put together their materials. We'll help them think through a very detailed financial model, which investors really like to see. And even if a group like us doesn't help, what an entrepreneur should really think about is not just saying, "Well, the market is this size, and if I get two percent of that market, it's gonna be a billion dollars", or whatever it is. What they need to think about is what does it take for me to get a sale? Is that click-throughs, is that introductions, how long is that sales cycle and what does it cost me? In that way, you can figure out how much capital you need to drive that sales line, and then typically, in most technology companies, the salary line is the big line. You have a bunch of hopefully intelligent, somewhat expensive developers on there, and you need to think of what your team really needs to look like. This is something that we can give some advice on, but you really need to figure this out. What does your development team look like, what does your sales team look like, what does the whole crew look like and when do you need to bring those people on, and what do they cost? Then, obviously, you need to think of your technology cost and all the rent, and other soft costs. Then we typically help build out a monthly financial model that shows how much cash you're gonna need to get where you need to go. And whenever erase, we always try to advocate raising for about 18 months worth of activity. If you raise more than 18 months, you're typically deluding yourself too much because by 18 months hopefully you've created enough value to increase the valuation a good amount. But if you get too much less than that in runway, you're always raising and you don't have enough time to run your business. So if you budget conservatively that you're going to take six months to do your raise, 18 months will make sure that you'll have a full year that you can just focus on your app or your business, and making sure that you're blocking and tackling, and getting the job done.

Paul: Some really golden nuggets in there, John, wonderful. Actually, a lot of the people listening are entrepreneurs that are building apps, that have apps. Do you have any easy way of valuing an app? I know it's a big question, but often it's quite difficult to value apps, given that we don't know where sometimes the revenue is coming from, but do you have any guide for us on how to value an app?

John: Yes, it's really difficult and it does vary from app to app. At the end of the day, these apps are typically going to be valued on some multiple of revenue. Most of the exits, at the end of the day, are going to be to some strategic who's going to roll you up into their cost structure, so I would probably focus less on these types of businesses, on the bottom line, or [unintelligible 00:15:15] or the cash flow; I'd really focus on the revenue line. At that point, depending on how fast-growing your app is and how exciting it is, you can be three to six times revenue, or sometimes the targets that you can be looking at. Something that doesn't have as much pop might be down in the two to three times revenue range. Now, there are some apps that you can really think about it more as a multiple of users, or heads, or views, or those sorts of things, but that really depends upon the industry that it's focusing on, it depends on the user group, and what I would recommend doing in those situations is look at the valuations of other similar apps in that space, and try to get an estimate of how many users that they have, and you can do the math to come up with similar multiples.

Paul: Actually, John, many entrepreneurs often - and it has been the case in the past - give away their app for free and go for users, go for growth... Are you seeing a lot of investors still go for that model where "Don't worry about the revenue, don't worry about the profit, just focus on growth and retention" - is that still the case, or is that changing?

John: I think that's true to a point. I think investors are fine with that initially, for the first couple of years, but I do think they want to start showing some revenue traction even in the mid-stage, and most importantly, I think they want to understand, at least mentally, what the path is to revenue. So if you have a freemium model where you say, "Look, we're gonna give this away to most people, but here's where our up-sells are gonna be, and by year three we're really going to be generating some revenue, and by year four it will start taking off" - I think that's great. If your story is, "This is a free app, there's no premium option, and we're gonna garner this number of users and by the third year in we're going to be an obvious acquisition target for this half dozen companies" - that's another story. But I don't think you want to have the story that just says "Hey, we're just gonna be free forever. There's not target/exit opportunity that we're looking for here, and no path to revenue." You need to spend some time thinking about that.

Paul: John, there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye. One is that we often find that many people listening do leave corporate jobs, they're attracted to the startup world. You worked with a lot of entrepreneurs. You are a CEO of your own company yourself, and I wondered if you could try and give us some sense of what a lifestyle is like as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of your own destiny, and if you could try to figure out the types of people that are attracted to this kind of lifestyle. Does this make sense?

John: Yes, absolutely. Well, it's definitely different. I know that it can seem like a more risk-averse environment to be in a corporate job that might have a larger salary. However, I'd always point out in that situation that you're beholding to someone else and you never know when they might be acquired and your position might be eliminated, or they might not need you anymore, you're at the whimsy of what they're gonna do with your position. That said, there's a lot of things that are attractive about that, and it's very stable. I think what you'll find with people that do well in early stage environment is - I don't want to say they're risk-seeking, but they're definitely more risk-neutral. It doesn't bother them to see something different every day, it doesn't bother them that sometimes their cash position is going to be high, and sometimes they're going to be sweating whether they're gonna make payroll, and I tell you, that'll test your nerves very quickly, no matter who you are. But it's very interesting, I've seen people who have left large corporate environments and done very well in the early stage space. I've seen people who lost their jobs in the corporate environment and tried their hand at this and were very good at this. Then there's others who simply can't handle the nerves of it, and you do have to be Cool Hand Luke to a certain extent. There is absolutely higher reward in going this route, but there's higher risk. So if you can stay calm when everyone's freaking out, it's a good place for you.

Paul: I have to say, John, that I do have some empathy and feel about the stress that meeting payroll is. I actually did run a company before where I ended up putting payroll on my own credit card.

John: I've done it before. I haven't done that for a while, but early on I've done that before, I understand.

Paul: Yes, it's really interesting to hear you talk about that. Well, the final thing then is: in your role, do you have any particular resources or any online tools that we could be using to really help us out? What helps you out in your day-to-day role as a CEO of Venture First?

John: Sure, I can tell you... We were talking about valuations and what other deals look like, and I know a lot of times entrepreneurs are very interested in terms of a larger competitor's deal, or how that might affect them, but it's hard to get information on those private deals if it's not a public company, so there's a resource that I really like venturedeal.com. It's 25 dollars a month on the subscription, and what they do is they scrape the SEC filings in the United States for early stage companies, so you can look, by company or by industry, or by VC, and search deals that have been done, and a lot of times you can see some of the terms from those deals, and the investors who have invested in them. Which is really nice, when you say "Hey, I know companies A, B and C recently did a round with some large groups. I wonder if those groups would be interested in me." So you can go look and find the exact groups, how much they invested, what terms sometimes, and it will have their LinkedIn or their contact information, so it becomes a good target source for you.

Paul: That's a wonderful resource, absolutely. I'll put a link on the show notes, it's episode 437 for anyone listening, on theappguy.co

John: Yes, they fly a little bit under the radar, but they're good. I'm a big fan of a variety of different productivity tools. Our team uses Asana to track all our tasks and be organized as a team, and then we also use MixMax, which is a scheduling assistant, which instead of going back and forth about scheduling a call or a meeting, you can just send somebody your available time so they can pick it, and it's immediately on your calendar. So those are some more simple tools, but I find them very helpful.

Paul: That is wonderful. That reminds me, I did actually sign up to another service, that is artificial intelligent machine-learning to schedule your meetings.

John: I've seen an advertisement for that, and I found it very interesting. How did you like it so far?

Paul: I'm on the waitlist, which is really annoying.

John: I'm also on the waitlist. Maybe if we give them cred on your podcast here we can get off the waitlist.

Paul: Yes, I think it's x.ai. If you're listening to this, please get us on. I desperately want to try that, because it's really exciting.

John: I feel the same way.

Paul: Great. John, this has been a wonderful chat. I'll make sure that we put links to you and Venture First on the show notes, but in the meantime, how can people reach out and connect with you and your company? What's the best way of getting in touch?

John: Yes, e-mail is usually the best with me, and I'm john@venturefirst.com, and you can also follow me on Twitter.

We Have Helped Generate About 750 Million Dollars For Our Clients

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I'm your host, it's Paul Kemp, and this is the show where we go around the world and try to identify the best people that can help us with our app entrepreneurial journeys. In this endeavor today I have a contributing writer to Inc. magazine. She is the founder of her own company; she and her partner run this company as well, and she also has a podcast, it's called WTFFF?!, about 3D printing, and we're going to have a good chat about what we can do to avoid risking everything. So let me introduce Tracy Hazzard - Tracy is the founder of Hazz Design - Tracy, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Tracy: Thank you so much for having me, Paul.

Paul: Now, your podcast, WTFFF?!, you have to remind me, what does the FFF stand for?

Tracy: Fused Filament Fabrication, which is 3D printing. It's really geeky.

Paul: We love geeky on this show, we're absolutely obsessed with anything geeky. Are we able to chat about 3D printing? What's your involvement?

Tracy: We're a product design and development firm, and we do product design and develop anything consumer retail, so hard products, things you buy at mass-market, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, that kind of thing. So we started 3D printing as a part of our prototyping process, about 15 years ago. So we've used it for a long time, but the desktops just made it so accessible. But what we discovered was after 20 years of designing in CAD, that everything we knew just had to get thrown out the window and we had to learn how to design again, in a totally different medium.

Paul: Right, a lot of people listening to this show do actually design hardware that attaches to the phone, and I love the fact that you mentioned prototyping. We can use 3D printing for prototyping.

Tracy: Yes, and one of the most interesting things is that the app growth in 3D printing is huge, because right now one of the limitations is that it's difficult to drive your own printer, it's difficult to search for designs, it's difficult to do a lot of things, in a world in which we're so accustomed to our tablets and our phones. So that app growth in 3D printing has been huge.

Paul: Are you able to share with us the most futuristic thing we can do with our phones in one hand and a 3D printer in our home in the other?

Tracy: I think that really for your average consumer, the exciting part is that for once we don't have to buy everything in black, and we'll be able to just download and print out whatever we might want as a gift, or something for our home, or even kids just experimenting and downloading a whole different set of transformers, or something like that. So I think that's really exciting and fun - all of a sudden we are the producers, we are the manufacturers -  and I think driving that off our phone is the logical solution. Or maybe even driving it off our tablets or something. So that's really fun, but from a technological standpoint, in terms of industry, I really think that the idea that we're going to be able to have zero inventory in manufacturing is actually the most futuristic, advanced idea, because it's going to blow all the different things we can do with it.

Paul: And I'm sure you'll be getting rid of all the sales as well, with the excess stock in that world.

Tracy: I mean, isn't that terrific? We'd have a much more sustainable environmental impact across all of our retail stores, and all sorts of things. I think that's going to be fabulous.

Paul: Well, it's definitely a really exciting area, but I digress. So you have an 8-step process called Prove It, and you are planning to chat about phase one. Can you elaborate a bit on your Prove It process?

Tracy: Yes, so over the years - in the last 12 we've developed about 250 products, and they generate about 750 million dollars for our clients, and we have what we call a 'commercialization rate', meaning the success rate of how commercially successful those designs are, and we have an 86% commercialization rate. We got that through refining our process by how we design and develop products. So it's really for a couple of designers, because my husband is my partner, and we are very analytical about how we approach it, and we've developed this - it's 7 + a bonus step, so it's 8 steps, and we do things in a very different order. The sequence is what makes it different. What we discovered was that most products fail because they're either the wrong product for the right market, or it's the wrong market for the right product. So when you get the majority of those and you can fix that, then you have a higher success rate, so that's why we do Prove It first. So we actually don't make anything before we get market or product proof on it.

Paul: This is actually reminding me of a chat I had very early on in this podcast, a few years ago now, where we were learning about... And it's in relation to apps, where you actually get almost customers for the app first, before you even built anything; you get the proof of concept first. Is that kind of where we're going?

Tracy: Yes, it's kind of where we're going, but also a little bit of exploration on your Why, like why are you making this app? What is your goal? Do you want to have a business? Do you just want to make a lot of money right now so you can do something else? You have to really think about that, because if you don't develop your criteria for how you're going to develop your app to fit those goals, then it's always going to be a mismatch, and you're always going to be trying to force-fit something, and that's a method to failure.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. I mean, how many app entrepreneurs approach me and say, "Hey, can you promote my app? Can you mention my app?" and it's almost like pushing something on the world, because they feel discovery is the challenge, which, you know, it is a challenge. But sometimes, if there's a real need, then the app does get discovered from organic means. You mentioned Why, as well. Apple is really famous about giving us why they do things, and it's obviously proved quite successful for them. How important is it to have a Why in the equation?

Tracy: It's actually essential. When I work with clients who don't have a Why, I have to work so much harder. Because there has to be a screening criteria. You have to decide, should this be included, shouldn't that be included? Should our mission - in the case of Apple - be this high level of high-touch design? Do I need that here? And if there isn't a Why, you don't really know whether or not that's critically important, so you don't have any way to determine a hierarchy, and it has to happen; there are always tradeoffs. Your Why can tell you where you can make those tradeoffs.

Paul: Do you have any guidance on how we get to a Why? Because a lot of people are obviously doing passion projects, they feel like it's something that the world needs, but is there a more scientific way to get to a Why?

Tracy: I think you just have to dig deep and think about your long-term dreams and where you want to go with things, and I do think it's great to dream. This is the step before you're going to turn it into action and reality, so this is the okay part, to sit back and dream. My Why, for actually why I do everything in my business is to save inventors and entrepreneurs on risking everything on flawed plans and wrong products and resources. That's my Why, and my Why comes out of the fact that we've done that. We've done that way too many times. My husband and I have started working together because he was such a great dreamer and such a great inventor, but he didn't have quite the focus to make it all happen, so he was risking our family and our livelihoods. So that Why, I know I can provide that structure, I know I can provide the process, so that's what I do best and that's what drives me, so anything that I do, I pull that into it.

Paul: Tracy, I want everyone to really pay attention now, because there are so many app entrepreneurs who have seen the big hits with WhatsApp and Instagram over the years, and they read the news articles and they feel like they can do the same, and they've invested sometimes hundreds of thousands of their own family money, friends money and lost everything, and this is why I do this show, because it's almost trying to unravel the truth. How many founders have you come into contact with that have almost lost everything?

Tracy: Way too many. I have to say it's probably on one or two a week lately, because I've been doing so many events and things where I'm talking about my process. So it's at least one or two horror stories a week, and in the consumer product world you get companies who are kind of preying on that. There are these marketing companies who get them all in and say, "Hey, we're going to market your invention, we'll get it licensed", I'm sure that's probably going on in the app world as well, and it's just a rabbit hole of spending money for no return.

Paul: So how can we try to prevent ourselves from maybe going down that rabbit hole of spending too much? Have you got any tips for us to try to really prevent ourselves from risking everything?

Tracy: Yes, so the number one way is that the wrong way to prove that you have something great is to ask your friends and family, your employees or your consultants. Do not ask them what they think, they are yes-men and women, and they will always say it's great, or they will do the opposite and say that it's not great - your friends and family who don't want you to be an entrepreneur will say no to you. So you can't get a truthful answer there, so you have to go outside of that. The second part of that is that too many entrepreneurs think that their app, their product is the answer to every problem in the world, and everyone should have one, it should be on every device, and that thinking doesn't work in this world market today. It's too broad, and it's too expensive, and Apple and all of those other guys can outspend you any day of the week. So what I've learned by working with all these big companies is that they make the same mistakes you do, they just have more money to cover it up. I call it 'launching without a lot of runway'. You have the ability to launch your app without a lot of runway, you have to do it with very little resources. We liken it to the Doolittle Raid in World War II, so you have a 467-foot runway and that's it, or it's death - you're out of money, you're out of business, so you can't go 468, but the big guys can add more runway.

Paul: I love that analogy of launching with a smaller runway. I guess the hardest thing for founders of app companies and other is the ability to actually know when to quit and say no. Do you find that to be a big challenge?

Tracy: Yes, and I like to be really analytical about it. You get a little caught up in that your inventions are your babies, but after as many designs as we've developed over the years we started to develop a detachment from them, and that's a good place to actually be. So if you can detach yourself from this thing that you've been working on day and night for weeks and weeks, maybe even months, if you can detach yourself enough or find a way to get some quantitative data that says "I should do this" or "I shouldn't do this", that's probably the easiest way for you to kind of have that objective view of whether or not you should go forward. Because I know a lot of people think "Oh, I'm three feet from gold, this is gonna happen, it's so great, and if I could just get this one more thing, and this one more thing, this five more thousand dollars" - I know how that ends, and it usually ends badly.

Paul: Yes, because actually a lot of people listening to this do go and listen to maybe my past episodes or others where we're talking about companies like Y Combinator, or 500 Startups - all these incubators and they encourage founders to dream big numbers, it's gonna be a billion-dollar company, and the reason they do that is because 90% of them fail and they need to go after the ones that don't and win big. But is it wise to have massive ambition at the start?

Tracy: I think it is wise to have massive ambition, but you have to have a qualifier. I have a review process at the end of the Prove It phase. So after we've gone out and we've gotten market proof in some way, shape or form - usually through both a combination of market research and product research, we actually do both at the same time, and we don't design anything at this stage. We have a concept, a big dream concept and a few things we want to test, but we haven't actually made anything, so we haven't really spent a lot of money. What we're doing is we're developing our criteria. So instead of going for a minimum viable product, we are going for "What does the market care about?" and "Is the market that might care about this feature or design I've dreamed up, will they really value that?" So when we look at those two areas of things, we really design a criteria list for the maximum valuable product we could possibly develop.

[commercial break]

Paul: Tracy, there's two more things I wanted to cover before we say goodbye. One is that I'd love to know about you personally as well, because you are a contributing writer to the Inc. magazine, you're running your own company - for anyone listening who is thinking about maybe becoming an entrepreneur, starting their own company, we have had quite a few people who have done this - is it a lifestyle that you would recommend?

Tracy: It's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure. Every day is a roller coaster. Even I still have, because our business is very seasonal, because it's driven on royalties for the mass market, so we have a really heavy Q4 every year. It's always got it's up and downs, and sometimes I wonder, "Why am I doing this?" I have my rent in a week and I'm still having trouble paying it. I know the money will come, but it's just not here today. So it's really frustrating, but at the same time it's really rewarding. I'm in charge, I'm completely responsible and accountable for how things grow in my business, and I'm not tempered by the corporate process in that, or things that are holding me back; I can change that, I can make that happen. So you have to just be that kind of personality. I feel really lucky in that I have a partner. A lot of partnerships don't work out really well. We've been married for 24 years...

Paul: Alright, so your partnership is both in marriage and in business.

Tracy: Right, which is actually really scary for a lot of people, and it goes really wrong for a lot of marriages, I heard. Everyone is always very shocked that we do this, but we have a balance in what we do, so it's not like we're tripping over each other's decision-making process, that's not how it works here. But when you have someone else to rely on, and someone else who's supporting you, it's great. What I found was that when we weren't working together, and he was an entrepreneur and I wasn't, there was actually a lot more dissension in our relationship and a lot more problems that happened, because I wasn't quite as supportive of the risks he was taking because I wasn't involved in them. We're involved in our risks today. So anyone who has an entrepreneur for a spouse or a better half, you end up in that business whether you like it or not. So if you can't embrace it, you'd better have that discussion early on.

Paul: I love that, because we have had quite a few couples on this show who run their own companies and have been successful. I've experienced this as well, where the support of the people around you - especially your wife or your husband - is essential. For me personally, it was a very hard switch going from expecting a monthly salary and having a nice, comfortable career to then, as you said, a rollercoaster of a ride, which is entrepreneurship. Okay, the final thing then - this is a show about apps, Tracy, so I can't let you go without asking what's on your phone, if you have one or two apps maybe... If your phone's handy, pick it up. Maybe you don't have a phone...?

Tracy: I do. You're gonna laugh... I have an Amazon phone.

Paul: Right, okay. I didn't even know they did phones.

Tracy: It is very unusual, because hardly anyone has one anymore, because it tanked terribly. But one of the interesting things I found out was that - so I'm a huge Amazon shopper, and I've been shopping in Amazon since 1998, so I've always been a fan - one of my friends actually developed this phone, and he said that - he couldn't tell me until afterwards - but the avatar they created, the name was Tracy, and every time he was designing he only thought of me, and every time he read the brief that they gave him for the avatar, it sounded like me, that they may have actually pulled my profile. So actually the phone is designed for me, so I think I'm the only person in the world who loves it.

Paul: You're in jeopardy of becoming the coolest guest on this show.

Tracy: Well, thank you. But anyway, my three favorite apps on here is OneCast, which is my podcast one. They don't really have your typical podcast player on here, but I have OneCast and I love it because I listen to podcasts just about everywhere I go. So that's absolutely my most-used app. I love my Easy Voice Recorder, too. Because I'm constantly in events and other places or doing interviews, I use that all the time. But the real kind of personal app that I use is honestly a weight tracker. It's crazy, but it's just like, I use it all the time, I'm always conscious of what I'm eating, and I record it in there. People have Fitbits and other things, but I just have a weight tracker.

Paul: Well, Tracy, a few episodes before you we had a guy who had two billion downloads for his app, it was the Talking Tom app, and he said one of the biggest needs in apps is for us to take care of ourselves with health, and weight, and food, so that doesn't surprise me, that the weight tracker is one of your top apps.

Tracy: He is absolutely right, that is such an important thing. Actually, the one app that I'm always searching for is a better shopping app, like a list app. I think they're not designed for the way most people shop. So we make lists for the different stores we shop at. We have a list specifically for Costco, a list for Trader Joe's, a list for a regular grocery store, maybe a list for the liquor store, or whatever. So we actually break them down into the places we're going, not a general list, and I have yet to find one that's really great at that.

Paul: Okay, well there's a challenge for anyone out there, if you can recommend...

Tracy: Yes, it's a simple idea, but it's so missed.

Paul: Finally I did want to ask you, you are a contributing writer for Inc. magazine - how easy is it to become a contributing writer for a publication like that, and is it worthwhile with the effort that goes into it?

Tracy: Paul, that's a great question, actually no one's ever asked me the question quite that way before, and I'm really glad you did. So I stumbled upon becoming an Inc. writer, it just happened to be one of those things. So I have a column, it's called By Design, and my goal is to write about entrepreneurs and innovation. They've put me into the Innovate section and I write exclusively about innovation and design, and my goal is to make sure that I write about Success by Design - things that will make you successful through the use of design, whether that's tips for entrepreneurs on bringing design in, or designers who want to be business owners and entrepreneurs, how to help them do those things as well. But what happened was I was giving a talk at an event about makers making profits, so the idea of turning from a maker into an entrepreneur and the things you have to think about that are very different from the making process. So in this case, you don't think about the What, you think about who you're going to sell it to, and how you're gonna price it. So I gave this talk, and it was such an unusual talk, and the L.A. bureau editor heard it and asked me if I would join this new section, Innovate. So that's how I ended up doing it. It certainly was a dream for me to be a contributing writer for a magazine, but it was not one of those things where I had gone out there to seek it. But what I've discovered is it's an entrepreneurial program in and of itself. I am responsible for making sure that I get out there and I get as many readers as possible, I am responsible for driving views through the way that I write my articles, and through the way that they get promoted in the social media. So I am really responsible for that, not Inc. Now, I'll get a boost from Inc., like I just got an article that was on the cover of this section, of the category, and it did tremendously well because of that. But it's my responsibility to boost my own column, and that's a really interesting thing that I hadn't thought of, so unless you really have the time for that and the inclination, it takes a lot of time to write this, and not a lot of return for that.

Paul: What I've learned from you Tracy is that it can be beneficial as well from a credibility standpoint, but also just getting yourself out there, speaking about really interesting topics. These opportunities come up, and that's how that opportunity to write for Inc. came up for you, so it's really interesting.

Tracy: Yes, absolutely.

Paul: Tracy, this has been a terrific chat, wonderful, I've really enjoyed it.

Tracy: Me too.

Paul: Full show notes will be on Episode 431, so for everyone who is listening, just go to theappguy.co and search for episode 431 with Tracy Hazzard. But in the meantime, Tracy, how can people reach out and connect with you? What is the best way of getting in touch?

Tracy: The best way is to find me on social media @hazzdesign, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you can find me.

Paul: Okay, wonderful, Tracy. All the best with your partnership, and Hazz Design, and Inc., and WTFFF?! and great chatting with you.

Tracy: Thank you so much, Paul. [00:27:52.03]

Making Great Audio Accessible By Bridging It To Social Media

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. This is the show that goes around and helps app entrepreneurs, app developers, anyone working on a side project regarding apps, this whole world of apps. We help you by finding the best people to speak to in the industry, and then deconstructing their success, what we can learn from them so we can actually take that into our own businesses and our own lives. Today, to help with this endeavor is a great guest because he's in the whole field of audio, his name is Parviz Parvizi and he is the co-founder Clammr, which is a social discovery app and a platform for audio. So Parviz, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Parviz: Paul, it's so nice to be with you.

Paul: It's great that you're here. Please tell us about Clammr and what it is that it can do for us.

Parviz: Sure, so we made Clammr to make great audio easier to share, and also discover. One of the things that we found to be a challenge for our own selves - my co-founders and I - is that there's all this great audio out there, but it's often hard to really dig into. If you think about audio, it's kind of the wrong unit size for discovery, especially in spoken word - podcasts are 15-20 minutes, hour plus - so if you know about something, that's great, but if you don't know about a podcast or you're not familiar with it, it's a big commitment to dig into it. And we actually thought if you shrink the unit size down, if you actually have a platform where you can have these bite-sized moments and introductions and highlights from podcasts, that actually makes it easier to discover new podcasts and new audio. So that's really why we've built Clammr, for the purpose of making great audio more accessible, and also bridging it to social media, which I can get into.

Paul: Parviz, it is great, you're tackling this big, massive challenge. But I wanted to know why did you do this? What inspired you to actually tackle this problem?

Parviz: Yes, it goes to something personal with one of my co-founders - David - and I. We actually met in law school many years ago, and we were in the small group. At law school you take the same classes, with the same 12-15 people in your first semester. And the reason I bring up law school is because we both bonded over the fact that we were slow readers, which combining law school and being a slow reader is a pretty big challenge. So we always bonded over that, and we're both big self-learners, so audio for us has been this really great hack for self-development, at the same time as being on the slower side of being readers. Over the years we've always shared audios with each other, sending links to each other with a timestamp and saying "Hey, fast-forward to this part, check this out!" or even putting audiobooks on Dropbox and referencing particular parts, and it really came out of that definitely kind of out there, weirdo behavior on our part, where we were engaging in this behavior of sharing audio with each other, where David said one day, "Hey, why can't we just tweet these moments at each other? Why can't we do the equivalent of tweeting something to each other, and then sharing that little nugget? And then if you want to hear more or if you want to hear the whole thing, you can do that." That scratched a niche for us, and it was tied to something that we were doing, and we thought that actually something like that would make other people's lives better, and we picked our heads up and said, "You look around and every major format has a bite-sized social flavor: text has Twitter, images have Instagram, video has Vine, audio doesn't really have anything like that, and audio isn't really present on social media in a significant way other than for music." And we thought, you know, if you could actually have almost a butler who curates all these great moments from audio, that you could kind of get this power feed and then decide what you want to listen to, that could be a really cool experience. So little by little, we started off just spitballing it and then creating these clips for each other and putting them on Dropbox just to test out what the experience would be like, and then it really took on a life of its own.

Paul: This is fascinating. You know, we love to get behind the idea, and many of us have these ideas but few of us actually go ahead and create something, so how did you get it off the ground once you knew what you wanted to do? Did you have to quit some kind of job to get this done? Tell us about how it actually became a reality for you.

Parviz: Yes, it became a bit of an obsession for us in addition to a reality, it's really where it came from. Again, we just feel that the way the world is headed, in a lot of ways when you reflect on it, human species has been around for 200,000 years, and we've been coding our knowledge in text and written form for less than 3% of that time. And there have been a lot of good reasons for doing that, in terms of storage, transferability etc, but we're just getting to a point where that more natural motif, speaking and listening, doesn't suffer from its traditional disadvantages of things like storage and transmission, so it's a little bit of a back-to-the-future move. But in terms of how we actually got from that initial germ of an idea to rolling out a company - it really came step by step. Initially, we just wanted to test the basic concept, and so as I started to reference earlier, we simply made a series of these short clips for each other, and curated great moments that we were listening to in our daily lives, and said "Okay, why don't we over the next week grab our favorite moments in a clunky way, and put them together in playlists and show them with each other?" We did that as our very first step. Then we started sharing it with some friends and other folks, just to get initial feedback. We still didn't just go all in, we then set up just a really simple website version. Neither of us had programming backgrounds, and I think that's definitely - for launching a product in the year 2016 - something that's definitely a disadvantage, in that it's a basic skill at this point that people have, and it's very helpful for iterating. So we, for a really basic website, we just spent a little bit of money, got someone to help us out and get something up just so we could play with it without having to, say, go launch QuickTime and Dropbox, or whatever. So we started showing that around friends, testing it out, and then we really decided to jump in full time on it, and pull together a team. So Ken and Oren, who are two other co-founders, who have programming backgrounds, they joined the effort and then we really went at it in terms of developing an app and a website. And in a lot of ways our app is a bit of a sandbox for us... I don't know if you've run into others who've had this on The App Guy, but we love our app, we love people using it, in a lot of ways though we see it as a proving ground, because we think of Clammr as really a social layer for audio, and a platform. We're less trying to strictly aggregate audiences with Clammr and instead trying to really bridge audio into other social media. So one of the really big ways people use Clammr is they share moments to Facebook, to Twitter, and the Clammrs play natively in those places; it's not just a link, but it actually shows up as an autoplay embed.

We've also created a series of Clammr buttons that we've embedded inside of other people's audio players. I think last month we reached 16 million people who are being exposed to that button, and it's embedded inside of Libsyn's player, inside of PowerPress, and some of the leading audio players. And again, when someone's listening to audio, they can hear a moment and just press that Clammr It button to share it out. So that's been another aspect of how we've thought about the app. We certainly early days focused on the app and having a decent experience. In a lot of ways it's provided lessons to us in terms of really building out a platform where we want really a network of soundbites to be around and available in people's lives, where they actually consume content and make their audio decisions.

Paul: I'm learning a load from you, Parviz. The first thing is not trying to recreate the wheel without social media platforms, and I learned that also from an episode with BuzzFeed, the VP of marketing; they made the decision to just be everywhere, no matter what the platform is. Almost be platform-agnostic, and that's what we have to be, I guess, with our apps.

Parviz: Yes, I think so. I mean, it's time-dependent, right? If you're in the year 2015, 2016, and you're trying to build a consumer experience, certainly you can take inspiration from Facebook and others, but I think simply saying "I'm gonna create a social network" is a little bit tone-deaf to the reality we live in, and also not taking advantage of the reality we live in. People have already created social graphs for you, so why recreate another one? Why not take advantage of that? I think BuzzFeed is a perfect example, they've done a brilliant job leveraging social graphs.

Paul: I wanted to ask you then, since you've been running, was there any particular time where you had a specific breakout, where you just knew that this was working, because of the spike in downloads, or something you did, some kind of growth hack? Was there any moment you could talk through?

Parviz: I think there were a couple moments. One is we - maybe a little earlier than we should have - but we just went to a trade show not long into some of our development - this was last year, New Media Expo, which is part of the National Association of Broadcasters. New Media Expo was kind of the biggest podcaster conference in the US. It's now defunct, so I'm glad we got in that last year, but great gathering of podcasters, and we said "Let's go a bit native with the audio community and really just expose what we're doing and get feedback. That was one great breakout moment because we just got a lot of great feedback from the community and really got to know the community well. And we came in really just with our ears open, that was really primarily the reason we were there. And one big breakout there was just to learn that this problem of discovery was a really big deal. We actually even ended up doing a survey of podcasters afterwards, publishing an article about it, and that really helped in terms of building a core community. We had some podcasters even start a private Facebook group for Clammr power users, that we participate in. We got this kind of core group who started giving us feedback, and that helped really solidify our thinking to say "Look, this really needs to be something that's a social layer and a discovery layer, and not a destination-type move." Because we'd certainly had in our minds, in an ideal world, from where David and I had started from, if I could wave a magic wand I'd have an app, just turn it on and it has all the content in it for me already. But again, if you're in 2015, 2016, that's hard to make happen when people are already spending a lot of their time and energy as content creators on existing social platforms. So that really was one moment, getting that feedback from the community and really helping shape our direction. The other really came this past December, January, when a set of our partners started embedding this Clammr button into their players, and we saw a lot of increased creation and exposure from that. So folks like Blubrry with PowerPress player, Libsyn, Simple Podcast Press, Awesound, some of these other great folks.

Paul: That's wonderful. What I've learned from that as well is that it's great to have good partners by you, and really add value to them because that gives you the exposure that you need.

Parviz: For sure, and I think we got lucky in that the podcast community is such an open, friendly, collaborative one that when we first created the plugin it had bugs and things like that, and we really appreciated that folks kind of stayed with us, gave feedback. It was obviously beneficial for them to have this capability available to their users, but like anything else, developer time is scarce, and the fact that they were willing to take a look at our early draft and give us feedback was incredibly helpful.

Paul: Parviz, one of the things I'm really interested at the moment is - because I'm building my own community around a Slack group, I wondered from your perspective, do you have any guidance on building a community, people that are testing your app, that are giving feedback, that are participating... You already mentioned the Facebook group, but do you have any tips for us to help build our communities?

Parviz: Well, one thing I'd actually... It's not a tip from having done this well, it's more looking back in retrospect and giving feedback to ourselves, is I'd say starting as early as possible would be incredibly helpful for building a community, and here's a part of what I mean by that: I think when we started really engaging with the community is when we had an early beta version of Clammr, and we had something that we could show people. And that's great, but I think we could have helped ourselves even more by simply participating as active members of the community and not being shy earlier, like six months earlier, and just establishing ourselves as thoughtful people on the topic of audio, on the topic of podcasting. Because then you can really kind of be more peer-like with people, where you're in the same boat with them, rather than "I have something, I want you to try it out." While I think the podcasting community is one that's just been incredibly open and collaborative, there's always an aspect of, you know, when you have yet another app, people are busy and there are a lot of apps, and they think "Oh, you just want me to download your app", right? There's a little bit of a fence that goes up, at least with some people. So I think just participating in the community without even having anything is a great way to just build a bunch of friendships in a peer network, before doing anything else. So even things like publishing articles, running a newsletter - those can be incredibly helpful. After we went live, we published a [unintelligible 00:16:29] in TechCrunch over the summer, and then another one over the winter. Those were great, those were actually great relationship-building tools. People would write to us and they would share their thoughts with us, and we'd have these back-and-forths, and we'd actually build a set of very good relationships. There's no reason why we couldn't have done that before having an app out there. So that would be my biggest tip: engage early, not just when you have something that you want people to try out.

Paul: So there's two more things, Parviz, that we need to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that we love to learn about the lifestyles of app entrepreneurs. We've had people who have actually left corporate jobs and who listen to this show and have joined the kind of lifestyle of app-preneurs, and you had in front of you a law school, which I'm assuming that you had the chance of going into law, and having a very corporate type of career; you've chosen the life of a co-founder, of your own company. Tell us - was it worth it, and would you recommend this lifestyle to others?

Parviz: Yes. It's a good question, I haven't reflected on what I do as a lifestyle, so I'd have to think more about it; it's actually provoking some thought that I probably can't just immediately react to, I have to marinate on that one. Actually both Dave and I, when we graduated, we both went and got these kinds of blue chip, corporate-type jobs. We had started a business in law school together, a winter hat company actually, and it was a lot of fun. We knew we liked working together, we knew we wanted to jump and do something together. I was lucky enough my former employer actually paid for law school, but we both we wanted to save up a little etc. Talk about the extreme of corporate jobs: he was an M&A banker at Morgan Stanley, and I was a McKinsey consultant, so you can't get any more corporate than that. But we both kept a line open with each other, and we were always kicking things around, and we even invested in a couple of things together. When we really jumped ship it was really less of a lifestyle decision and more of something we felt we had to do; I can't think of it in a different way. It felt pretty continuous; in my case, I'd been serving media companies and wireless carriers and telecom manufacturers, all around the topics of digital consumer behavior, digital strategy, so it felt like a natural next step to actually go do something, rather than the mode of being an advisor - which is a great job, it has many benefits, but it felt like just another toolkit, and another opportunity to grow.

Paul: But how did you actually cope? Because I actually jumped ship from a similar kind of thing, it was an institutional asset management company, and I found it quite challenging adjusting, especially the difference in salary, worrying about the income. Do you have any tips on how to transition from basically a monthly salary where you don't have to worry about money at all, in a way, to then running your own business and worrying about payroll, and paying yourself, and all that sort of stuff?

Parviz: Yes, so part of this also comes to how you might think about the process of exiting. If some of those things are necessary, having the higher salary etc. then you sort of shift how you do it. In our case, we got a little bit lucky, I'd say, if nothing else. We actually started off creating a set of just content-focused websites, like a ranking website, that was pretty fun; it was kind of crowd-sourced rankings, and we generated revenue out of those. That was actually one of our initial sparks - we got really into that, and we were doing that for a while together. So we pretty much off the bat had steady incomes, and both of us also just happened to be in - this is something I've heard others say too, I didn't think about it expressly, but I have a very low-cost lifestyle, a low burn lifestyle. David now has a couple of kids, but his is also low burn relatively speaking, you know, with having two kids. So we didn't really have habits that were expensive in our lives, so that also was helpful. But I think we got lucky in that the first thing we jumped off and did was something that was a cash flow generator. It wasn't something that would necessarily generate a lot of equity value, it was really just cash flow, ad-based businesses, but that was helpful and also gave us some confidence to really then take a swing of the bat as we started getting obsessed with the Clammr idea. We said, "You know what? Yes, it's a bit of a risk", but to focus on something that's really not... Clammr was not gonna generate immediate revenue, but it gave us some confidence that even if it's a fail, we at least feel like we have some skills that we could fall back on things that are a bit more cash flow generating if we need to.

Paul: I love that, you've just picked up on a theme of this show, which is no matter what the risks are, the learning that you get from running your own company, your own startup sort of outweighs the risk of failure.

Parviz: Yes. And that's why when you asked that lifestyle question I really thought of it as a continuation of my education, as opposed to a lifestyle... We have this little rule, David calls it 'the Parviz test', because I guess I said it to him once, which was when you're choosing to do something, you might ask yourself the question "Even if this thing doesn't work out the way I want it to, if I think of the worst-case scenario, would I still do it? Would I still be happy that I did it?" And I think starting something like this definitely falls into that bucket, because it's a life experience, you learn from it regardless.

Paul: Well, Parviz, this is why I do this show, to meet people like you, that give me a reality check as well, because I left my six-figure corporate salary and I wish I had followed your advice at the time. What I've learned is one, having some income that you're generating, even it's from a side project, and I guess the second one is to have a low-cost lifestyle, which is quite beneficial The last thing then, Parviz, what should we be doing to enjoy Clammr? How can we use it the best, to get the maximum out of it?

Parviz: Sure, so let's split it into two sides: creators and people who are more purely audio consumers. I think on the creator front, really think of it as a tool. Clammr is a way to amplify your social presence, and to make your audio usable and discoverable in the places where people are actually finding content, which is on social media, on places like websites. We actually have a user guide that we've documented, because why not, and in there we have a section that says "Okay, I'm now using Clammr, how do I actually grow my audience?" We just did a study actually, and the podcasters who are using Clammr, they reported a three times higher engagement on their social media posts that use the Clammr format, versus normal ones. So I'd say take a look at the user guide and the tips, and they're for people who are audio creators. It really comes down to posting on social media; everything in Clammr is an open object, so you can embed Clammrs on your website, and that's a way to expose things like past episodes to people who visit the website, and we're actually just rolling out a premium product, which is we partnered with Entrepreneur.com to create a Recommended Podcasts section next to their articles, that has podcasts featured in there, where people can actually play the preview without leaving the site. So that's an opportunity for folks using the same content they would with Clammr to basically promote it on a premium site as a way to get some additional audience exposure. I think one of the real challenges in podcasting today is unless you're somebody who has an existing relationship with the radio world, there are no systematic ways to promote your podcast. So we're just getting that off the ground, we've had a bunch of people sign up; Microsoft signed up, in terms of blue chip, big companies, and then a whole host of independent podcasters have, as well. So that's on the creators' side. On the listeners' side, getting the most out of Clammr - give the app a try, and give the website a try; it's mobile-responsive for Android. I think the biggest thing you can do is to really customize it for yourself. We have a set of playlists, but go find the people who you're linked to on Twitter and Facebook - we have a mode where you can find everybody who you're following on Twitter and Facebook - follow those people, follow the specific sources you want to create a customized feed of audio for yourself, rather than the sort of generic feed that some of the playlists have.

Paul: Okay, well obviously I'm a creator and we've just created an episode, so it might be a little bit specific, but let me understand - this episode we've created, should I be clipping out some of the best extracts from our chat and then using Clammr to then post that onto social media?

Parviz: Exactly, exactly. You can grab the highlights. Your podcast doesn't necessarily lend itself to this, but I'll throw it out anyway: we also have integrated GIF search on Giphy, so you can mash up the audio with GIFs or just still images, as well. I think that works for a lot of podcasts; it may not work for this one in particular, but maybe I said something goofy that I didn't realize, that ties to a GIF, right? So I'd say keep that in mind too, but yes, exactly, you would go to the app or the website, and there's a button that says create, and you can basically highlight and extract up to 24 seconds, and then add a message and send it out. In that user guide there's some tips - this is maybe way too specific for your audience, but one of the things that we definitely recommend is using tagging. I see a lot of early users who will just tweet out a moment from their podcast, but they don't mention anyone, they just tweet it out. One of the things that's happened with Twitter that's become pretty clear in recent years is Twitter is really not a reach platform, Twitter is an influencer platform. I.e. if you're just tweeting stuff out, unless you happen to be someone who has a large audience and they actually hang on your every word, it's kind of like going into a black hole. So the way to really make use of Twitter is to mention people who you actually want to reach, who you want to influence, who you want to get on their radar screens. So being a little bit savvy about how you share them out, not just sharing them, but using the @ mention, and ditto for Facebook, given that they're applying algorithms and it's not simply open exposure. Using the @ mentions and tagging appropriately to get the attention of people can help a lot.

Paul: Well, that is excellent, I'm really keen on giving it a try. I love what you've done as well, it's been so inspirational. So full show notes will be on theappguy.co's episode 439, if anyone wants to go and check out the notes. But in the meantime, Parviz, how can we reach out to you, how can we connect with you?

Parviz: Sure, so I'm the primary Wizard of Oz behind our Twitter account, so you can always reach us there, reach me there; I'm on Twitter, I have a personal account, it's just @pparvizi. Our Twitter account is @clammrapp. On Clammr itself there's a simple messaging function and I'm @parviz on that, so feel free to message me within Clammr, and you can always e-mail me on parviz@clammr.com, you can e-mail our whole team at support@clammr.com I really always love to hear from folks.

Paul: Parviz, thanks very much for joining me on the show tonight, and all the best with the future.

Parviz: Thanks Paul, it's been a pleasure!

Innovation Is The Wild Card That Drives Positive Change In Our Society, Economy, And Day-To-Day Lives.

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, this is Paul Kemp. The show goes around the world and we interview the best experts that we can find, CEOs, founders running their own companies. Now, I'm often asked a lot about the funding side. There's a lot of challenges for startups and for anyone that's really involved in this disruptive marketplace, so I've got today a great guest. I'm gonna read you a quote from his website - I definitely recommend that you go and check it out, it's venturefirst.com, and there'll be full show notes on theappguy.co at episode 437. So let me just read this out, it's a message from the CEO and it says: "Innovation is the wild card that drives positive change in our society, economy and day-to-day lives. We are currently experiencing a new paradigm in economic expansion that is closely tied to disruptive entrepreneurs and their investors. At Venture First, we strive to facilitate this ecosystem by guiding companies through the minefield of challenges, while facilitating better communication and analysis for their investors." This is a quote from the CEO, John Shumate, and he is here as a guest on The App Guy Podcast, so John, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

John: Thanks so much, I'm thrilled to be here, and looking forward to talking to you.

Paul: Help us to understand what you do first. What is Venture First and how is it helping startup founders/entrepreneurs?

John: Sure, so we really try to focus on, as you said, working with early stage entrepreneurs and working with investors into those groups. We do a few things. First, on the venture side, we've developed a really good relationship with angel investors and with venture capital groups, because we do a lot of their portfolio valuation. We value their company, we value their options, all that sort of stuff, so we already have a great relationship with those groups. Then on the entrepreneur side, we get them ready to fundraise, typically. You know, different entrepreneurs know different things, but we will help them with things like building their financial model, thinking about their growth plan, thinking about what sort of deal terms they should look for, trying to connect them with the right investors and make sure that they craft the right deal, and that they don't get completely screwed over on terms, those sorts of things. We also do some M&A activity as well, helping companies buy other companies, or helping these entrepreneurs, once they've been successful, sell their companies. So those are the big buckets.

Paul: Okay John, there's a lot to cover, and we're talking to the right audience, because these guys are always asking me about funding, about angel investors, getting warm instructions, but let's start first with the M&A, because it's a good indicator of economic activity. I'm wondering, are you seeing a rise in your M&A activity, or a slowdown? Tell us about what's happening in the M&A space.

John: I think overall there's been an uptick recently in M&A activity. I think there is a concern that there could be potential headwinds in the markets, and there could be a decrease in activity over the rest of 2016, though I'll tell you, for the most part, most of those statistics typically affect later-stage deals. I still believe that a good, early-stage deal, that's going to be sold to the right acquirer - which is typically a strategic buyer, not a financial buyer - I don't think any of those headwinds typically apply. If you are a disruptive company and your technology is changing the way people think about a particular industry or vertical, and somebody wants to buy you, to either eliminate you as a competitor or hopefully add you on to build something more synergistic, there's still going to have interest now, and there's still going to be a strong valuation place on it. So I don't think that should be a big concern for an entrepreneur right now.

Paul: Also, I was asking with the view that many of the listeners here do leave corporate jobs, the safety net of a nice salary, to go in and do their own startup, and often we try to predict whether we're in a bubble or not, and M&A does seem to sometimes give us a tip-off that we are. Do you feel like we are in an inflated environment, or do you feel like it's sustainable for the long term?

John: Well, it depends. I think there are different tiers. Typically, when you listen to CNBC or one of these stations that talk about whether we're in a bubble, they're typically talking about the stock market, public equity markets. I think there is, given economic conditions, probably some arguments that it's a tad inflated at the moment. Entrepreneurs, like most of the people listening to this podcast, are probably people that are wondering more about funding, or other deal activity, and their valuations in the early stage space. There's been a lot of talk about whether that's a bubble or not, and I bifurcate that a bit. I think if you look at the unicorns out there, the ubers of the world, who are driving these crazy valuations, I think it's pretty clear that some of those big boys are in a bubble. There is a certain hysteria that's chasing those deals, and it's not even necessarily a rational pricing event that's occurring, and people are just rushing to try to get to that IPO and get that initial pop that typically happens - it didn't happen on Facebook, but on most of them you typically get that initial pop, and that's what everyone's clamoring for. But I don't think, at least from a fundamental perspective, that that is a bubble that affects sort of the rest of us, that that affects your average early-stage company, average-sized early-stage company that has a nice growth trajectory. Now, I will tell you, to caveat that, I do think that the venture capital markets have a little bit of a trend where the limited partners - the investors in those funds - are starting to demand a little bit more accountability and showing some profits, instead of just continuing to build revenue and not show profits. So I do think there will be a little bit more scrutiny on valuations for the rest of the companies. There might be a little bit of a downtick, or a little bit of a normalization of that. But at the end of the day, if you've built an app and you're looking for an exit, and you're really doing a great job in disrupting things, I don't think it's gonna be a big driver, unless you're one of the unicorns.

Paul: Right, okay... Hopefully we've got someone who's running a unicorn listening to this, you never know; or potential unicorns. So let's talk about valuations. Actually, more appropriately, getting warm introductions to angels and VCs. A lot of people come with an idea, they have a business plan, they've got their pitch deck - how do you help get them warm introductions and help them with their pitch?

John: First of all, I think the best way into a VC or an angel investor is a warm intro. And that doesn't have to be me, you might be friends with somebody who's had a successful app that's been funded and had a successful event. Having them introduce you to their investor, they're obviously going to take a lot more interest in that. Or having another co-investor introduce you. Anytime you can get an introduction, it just carries a lot more weight. I had lunch with a VC today, and I was asking about how they get their deal flow. She was pretty honest, she said "Frankly, we barely look at anything that people send us over e-mail or on the company website, because we think so much of it is junk. But if somebody that we know introduces it to us, we take a look a hundred percent of the times." So I'm not saying don't ping those funds, because that's not always true, but if you can find a warm intro, do it. One of the things that we can do if you don't already have warm intros is we can search our contacts, search our database, try to think of who are the right investors, who are the right funds for you, and then we can make some intros to those. And those don't have to be exclusive, those can supplement other intros or other contacts that you have.

Paul: That's really helpful. Actually, I get approached quite a lot with seeking those warm introductions, and just recently there's a guy going over to San Francisco to try and raise a round. What type of money do you typically work with? If someone's listening to this and they have a particular target in mind, is there a certain size that you only work with? Tell us about that.

John: Frankly, we're doing a 30-million-dollar capital raise right now for a larger healthcare company. It's a pretty decent amount of bandwidth. I would think that if you're doing more than that, you're gonna be working with a more traditional investment banker in London or New York. Our sweet spot is working with anything from seed stage up to about series B. That's a pretty wide range. That's anything typically in US terms from a half million, up to about a five-million-dollar raise, our sweet spot.

Paul: Fantastic. And what preparation can someone do to help get on your radar, for example. What do they need to have in their resources? Give us some sense of what an entrepreneur needs to have to be prepared to have these talks with you to raise a half a million to a million dollars?

John: Well, to talk to us, really they need more of the business model and the technology expertise, and hopefully a good idea of how to make the pieces work. A lot of times we'll come in and help them put together their materials. We'll help them think through a very detailed financial model, which investors really like to see. And even if a group like us doesn't help, what an entrepreneur should really think about is not just saying, "Well, the market is this size, and if I get two percent of that market, it's gonna be a billion dollars", or whatever it is. What they need to think about is what does it take for me to get a sale? Is that click-throughs, is that introductions, how long is that sales cycle and what does it cost me? In that way, you can figure out how much capital you need to drive that sales line, and then typically, in most technology companies, the salary line is the big line. You have a bunch of hopefully intelligent, somewhat expensive developers on there, and you need to think of what your team really needs to look like. This is something that we can give some advice on, but you really need to figure this out. What does your development team look like, what does your sales team look like, what does the whole crew look like and when do you need to bring those people on, and what do they cost? Then, obviously, you need to think of your technology cost and all the rent, and other soft costs. Then we typically help build out a monthly financial model that shows how much cash you're gonna need to get where you need to go. And whenever erase, we always try to advocate raising for about 18 months worth of activity. If you raise more than 18 months, you're typically deluding yourself too much because by 18 months hopefully you've created enough value to increase the valuation a good amount. But if you get too much less than that in runway, you're always raising and you don't have enough time to run your business. So if you budget conservatively that you're going to take six months to do your raise, 18 months will make sure that you'll have a full year that you can just focus on your app or your business, and making sure that you're blocking and tackling, and getting the job done.

Paul: Some really golden nuggets in there, John, wonderful. Actually, a lot of the people listening are entrepreneurs that are building apps, that have apps. Do you have any easy way of valuing an app? I know it's a big question, but often it's quite difficult to value apps, given that we don't know where sometimes the revenue is coming from, but do you have any guide for us on how to value an app?

John: Yes, it's really difficult and it does vary from app to app. At the end of the day, these apps are typically going to be valued on some multiple of revenue. Most of the exits, at the end of the day, are going to be to some strategic who's going to roll you up into their cost structure, so I would probably focus less on these types of businesses, on the bottom line, or [unintelligible 00:15:15] or the cash flow; I'd really focus on the revenue line. At that point, depending on how fast-growing your app is and how exciting it is, you can be three to six times revenue, or sometimes the targets that you can be looking at. Something that doesn't have as much pop might be down in the two to three times revenue range. Now, there are some apps that you can really think about it more as a multiple of users, or heads, or views, or those sorts of things, but that really depends upon the industry that it's focusing on, it depends on the user group, and what I would recommend doing in those situations is look at the valuations of other similar apps in that space, and try to get an estimate of how many users that they have, and you can do the math to come up with similar multiples.

Paul: Actually, John, many entrepreneurs often - and it has been the case in the past - give away their app for free and go for users, go for growth... Are you seeing a lot of investors still go for that model where "Don't worry about the revenue, don't worry about the profit, just focus on growth and retention" - is that still the case, or is that changing?

John: I think that's true to a point. I think investors are fine with that initially, for the first couple of years, but I do think they want to start showing some revenue traction even in the mid-stage, and most importantly, I think they want to understand, at least mentally, what the path is to revenue. So if you have a freemium model where you say, "Look, we're gonna give this away to most people, but here's where our up-sells are gonna be, and by year three we're really going to be generating some revenue, and by year four it will start taking off" - I think that's great. If your story is, "This is a free app, there's no premium option, and we're gonna garner this number of users and by the third year in we're going to be an obvious acquisition target for this half dozen companies" - that's another story. But I don't think you want to have the story that just says "Hey, we're just gonna be free forever. There's not target/exit opportunity that we're looking for here, and no path to revenue." You need to spend some time thinking about that.

Paul: John, there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye. One is that we often find that many people listening do leave corporate jobs, they're attracted to the startup world. You worked with a lot of entrepreneurs. You are a CEO of your own company yourself, and I wondered if you could try and give us some sense of what a lifestyle is like as an entrepreneur, as a CEO of your own destiny, and if you could try to figure out the types of people that are attracted to this kind of lifestyle. Does this make sense?

John: Yes, absolutely. Well, it's definitely different. I know that it can seem like a more risk-averse environment to be in a corporate job that might have a larger salary. However, I'd always point out in that situation that you're beholding to someone else and you never know when they might be acquired and your position might be eliminated, or they might not need you anymore, you're at the whimsy of what they're gonna do with your position. That said, there's a lot of things that are attractive about that, and it's very stable. I think what you'll find with people that do well in early stage environment is - I don't want to say they're risk-seeking, but they're definitely more risk-neutral. It doesn't bother them to see something different every day, it doesn't bother them that sometimes their cash position is going to be high, and sometimes they're going to be sweating whether they're gonna make payroll, and I tell you, that'll test your nerves very quickly, no matter who you are. But it's very interesting, I've seen people who have left large corporate environments and done very well in the early stage space. I've seen people who lost their jobs in the corporate environment and tried their hand at this and were very good at this. Then there's others who simply can't handle the nerves of it, and you do have to be Cool Hand Luke to a certain extent. There is absolutely higher reward in going this route, but there's higher risk. So if you can stay calm when everyone's freaking out, it's a good place for you.

Paul: I have to say, John, that I do have some empathy and feel about the stress that meeting payroll is. I actually did run a company before where I ended up putting payroll on my own credit card.

John: I've done it before. I haven't done that for a while, but early on I've done that before, I understand.

Paul: Yes, it's really interesting to hear you talk about that. Well, the final thing then is: in your role, do you have any particular resources or any online tools that we could be using to really help us out? What helps you out in your day-to-day role as a CEO of Venture First?

John: Sure, I can tell you... We were talking about valuations and what other deals look like, and I know a lot of times entrepreneurs are very interested in terms of a larger competitor's deal, or how that might affect them, but it's hard to get information on those private deals if it's not a public company, so there's a resource that I really like venturedeal.com. It's 25 dollars a month on the subscription, and what they do is they scrape the SEC filings in the United States for early stage companies, so you can look, by company or by industry, or by VC, and search deals that have been done, and a lot of times you can see some of the terms from those deals, and the investors who have invested in them. Which is really nice, when you say "Hey, I know companies A, B and C recently did a round with some large groups. I wonder if those groups would be interested in me." So you can go look and find the exact groups, how much they invested, what terms sometimes, and it will have their LinkedIn or their contact information, so it becomes a good target source for you.

Paul: That's a wonderful resource, absolutely. I'll put a link on the show notes, it's episode 437 for anyone listening, on theappguy.co

John: Yes, they fly a little bit under the radar, but they're good. I'm a big fan of a variety of different productivity tools. Our team uses Asana to track all our tasks and be organized as a team, and then we also use MixMax, which is a scheduling assistant, which instead of going back and forth about scheduling a call or a meeting, you can just send somebody your available time so they can pick it, and it's immediately on your calendar. So those are some more simple tools, but I find them very helpful.

Paul: That is wonderful. That reminds me, I did actually sign up to another service, that is artificial intelligent machine-learning to schedule your meetings.

John: I've seen an advertisement for that, and I found it very interesting. How did you like it so far?

Paul: I'm on the waitlist, which is really annoying.

John: I'm also on the waitlist. Maybe if we give them cred on your podcast here we can get off the waitlist.

Paul: Yes, I think it's x.ai. If you're listening to this, please get us on. I desperately want to try that, because it's really exciting.

John: I feel the same way.

Paul: Great. John, this has been a wonderful chat. I'll make sure that we put links to you and Venture First on the show notes, but in the meantime, how can people reach out and connect with you and your company? What's the best way of getting in touch?

John: Yes, e-mail is usually the best with me, and I'm john@venturefirst.com, and you can also follow me on Twitter.