Wireless Charging In The Age Of Connectivity

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. I love this show, I get to meet some of the most amazing entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs from literally around the world. Let me tell you just briefly that before I set up this podcast, I got into technology and I always wanted this type of technology that would charge our devices and all the sorts of things that we use in our daily life. Finally, after 374 episodes, I've got a founder on the phone who's going to be talking to us about wireless charging in the age of connectivity. I'm really excited. Stay tuned for this; of course, you can get show notes from going to theappguy.co, it's episode 374.

Let me introduce my guest, it's Omri Lachman and he is the CEO and co-founder of Humavox and we're going to talk about wireless charging. Omri, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Omri: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul: Thank you for coming on. I'm so excited by this subject. In 2009, I had this idea of throwing all your devices into a bag and having them charge automatically because there are wires everywhere. You've done something about it, obviously, so how did you get the idea for Humavox?

Omri: Actually, back at the time, my co-founder, Asaf Elssibony and myself were childhood friends and he comes with electronics and engineering backgrounds... We stumbled upon this from even, I'd say, an emotional place. We were looking at wireless power at the time, and all we could see at the time was magnetic field induction aiming to charge smartphones. It is a pain we all know as users, we all have smartphones, they all go out of power. But at the time, as I said, from more emotional reasons, we were looking at more meaningful electronic devices like healthcare devices - home healthcare devices - that are not used mostly by you and me, the tech fans, it's used by common people, our folks, our kids. Those devices seem to occasionally need wireless charging more than our smartphones. The existing technologies at the time... And by the way, as we speak, the more common technologies for wireless charging are those magnetic field inductions, and the physics behind those technologies is actually a huge block from addressing any other device that is smaller, curved and cannot be precisely placed by the user. So it means that wireless charging wasn't and still isn't really seamless. That was a strong enough of a drive to get us to do something about it.

Paul: It's massively disrupting because the vision for the future is that the whole world will not need any leads to connect to their devices. But where are we at the moment, then? Give us an example of what you can do from a wireless charging perspective.

Omri: Like I said, we wanted to bring wireless charging to a way it's addressing - or addressable - for multiple devices, not just smartphones, tablets or laptops. We wanted something that can actually be seamless. Everyone likes to say 'seamless', but when we say 'seamless' it means that we don't need to think about it. Like Wi-Fi - it's just out there for us to use. So we looked around and realized that if we want to turn this into a real seamless experience then it can't have just one user experience or user interface for charging. It's can't be a pad, or a mat, or a surface on top of which we'll place devices because across the board, across market categories, across users, the experience is changing, the interface is changing, the user is changing, and we want to be able to allow the same user - or a different user, for the same type of device - to charge the device in an intuitive way. We basically looked around and realized that the common denominator for all of these, let's say, smaller-shaping devices now called the IoT and wearable tech, the common denominator is that this is not a smartphone. We will probably not be just throwing them on the kitchen counter or bedside like we do with our phones. We will probably store them, especially because it's tinier, it's more expensive, it's more personalized. It's not something we carry, it's something we wear. So we wanted to create something that would cover all those various scenarios and allow the device makers or the manufacturers to basically blend wireless charging into their design desires, rather than try to fit their designs into the physics of wireless charging. So what we actually do, we developed a way that allows us to turn a volume into a charging zone. What is a volume? It's a phrase that we kind of fumbled our way until we came up with it, because initially when you look at our website or you look at our work, it looks like we're doing charging boxes. We're not doing charging boxes; actually, we're not even a product company. When we say a volume, that's actually those places in life where we keep our devices, or where we just place them when they're in idle mode. A volume can be your car's cup holder; when you step into your car and you just throw your smartphone in that cup holder because that's what people do. That's what we mean when we say, "Let's blend wireless charging into life. Let's tap existing usability patterns, that users already do, and let's blend wireless charging into those experiences."

Paul: Omri, first of all, this is great. I have to say, you're not doing some whacky experiment behind you because I know that there's a big thunderstorm, we can hear the crack of lightning. Talk about nature...

Omri: Yes, that's just the guys in the lab.

Paul: ... experimenting with the charging. So let me just try to understand this then for the benefit of me and the audience here: are you saying that we can remove our leads connecting physically to the device, but we have to actually put them into some kind of volume, rather than have them charge for example on our wrists?

Omri: Correct. One of the things that we're doing right now is charging over distance. Just to give you some background... Opposed to the existing and more, let's say, common methods of charging, we're using RF - radio frequencies - and usually a higher frequency band, so around the bands that are used for wireless communications; it gave us several benefits. One of the first things we did was actually play around with shooting power over distance. When we did our own surveys and talked to consumers, we realized that people are not really looking for secret laser beams to charge their devices while in their living room or next to their bed. There's a lot of consumer psychology around everything, and ultimately when we're talking about wireless power, wireless energy, at some point people would like to know where that energy is coming from, how effective this energy is... So we realized that for wearable devices, whether it's for healthcare, sports, mobile, whatever, users will keep taking the device occasionally off their wrists, off their body, whatever type of product we can think of.

Paul: I have say to Omri, I obviously would love a future where when I walk into my home, everything then is charging through some kind of Wi-Fi where I don't have to think about it. If you think about smartphones, remember all those scary stories when we first had smartphones, that they were going to melt our brains and we mustn't put them anywhere towards our head. That was, obviously, discredited, but with any new technology, there is a kind of fear that comes with it. Is that what you're saying?

Omri: The main issue right now when we're thinking about power over distance, whether it's throughout the room or even across half a meter, for example, is the fact that wireless charging is all about efficiency. As we know, the rules of energy preservations are still there for those of us who practice the physics of the technology. So when you're actually transmitting energy, especially in those forms of wireless charging that can actually be targeted for a certain distance, the energy loss is quite substantial. I might just say that right now one of the things that we did at Humavox was join the newly-emerged organization for wireless power standardization. We're actually working with some of the other companies in our space, we all have a common goal.  We pretty much understand what the various flavors of wireless charging are doing out there, and realistically I think we're very far off from a point where someone can actually shoot the necessary voltage throughout the room in a way that will be safe and effective for charging. What we're actually talking about right now is trickle charging, it's the ability to shoot raindrops of energy throughout the room that may not charge your device but may keep... I always find myself going back to the example of filling a swimming pool with shot glasses; that may take time. But if the swimming pool is actually full, and then we have those shots or raindrops of water or energy, then this will probably make things last longer. This is the commonality where we see ourselves with some of the other wireless charging technologies that are targeting power over distance. Right now, regulation authorities, FCC, and equivalents are very clear on what they permit with respect to power over the air, especially when the regulation is already out there. I mean, we're using the same frequencies used for Wi-Fi, GSM, Bluetooth, so it's very clear what you can and cannot do. But I think that this is one of the key achievements or progress for wireless charging. Having a single standard organization that will allow several of us various flavors of wireless charging to come together and create something that is serving the purpose, and the purpose here is the life of consumers - you, me and the rest of us.

Paul: Omri, this is one of the biggest problems that I think I've faced. I guess it's a modern world problem, but certainly wires everywhere. I'm sat here next to a plug point because I need to be close to it, the different connectors... It's just a pain and I have always longed for a world where we don't have to think about charging, it just happens around us.

Omri: Correct.

Paul: This is a wonderful problem to solve. Now let's talk about you and your journey because you've got a great idea, you've got a great company. How did you and your friend actually get it off the ground, and start the company and get the funding?

Omri: I'm coming with some personal, let's say, mileage on the entrepreneurial highway. Ever since I can remember myself, whether working for my family's business, which is very far from the high-tech domain, it's actually in the industrial space, ever since I can remember myself, I was working around CNC turning and milling machine, forging, raw materials cutting, everything that takes a material and turns it into a product; ever since I can remember myself, I was starting something from scratch, from an idea, bringing it to a point where it's being used by users and then moving along. I'm also doing some early stage investments myself. It was how you take this idea and how you take this ship and actually start sailing. I have a pretty clear idea, for myself as the person steering the ship, as the CEO of the company. Let's just say... I always have this comparison where I say as a startup company, we're leaving the harbor. We know, or we think we know where our destination is, and then the water is always stormy, no matter what; it's always stormy. And for as long as we have those lighthouses that would remind us what is the real goal for which we took this journey, we'll be able to get there. If we have the right crew, and each member of the crew is really fulfilling their position and destiny, then we'll definitely get there. So what I'm trying to say here is that it's all about the people, and if you the right crew and if you really remember what your true goals are... Because throughout the way you can encounter numerous goals that usually tend to confuse the entrepreneurs - how do you raise money? How do you put the right slide in the right presentation, for the right investors? All of these distractions and background noises can definitely get your ship to shift from its course. For as long as you can remain focused and clear out those background noises, then you'll definitely get there.

Paul: That is wonderful advice. I'm thinking for anyone who is coming into this new, for example listening to you, getting inspired by the potential of doing something themselves, what would you suggest to them? What would be the biggest thing to focus on, if they had to focus?

Omri: Remember that whether you're developing an application, a web service, or wireless charging, focus on who you're developing for, not on who you're trying to sell this technology to. Because engineers will probably keep working with engineers, and that's perfectly fine because without those tremendous engineers we can't have products, but ultimately and usually we're developing for users. And for as long as you really find the right market and the right user for the technology, product or service that you're about to develop, then that will definitely get you there. What I'm trying to say here is ask the right questions, not the buzzwords or trendy questions that show on various web magazines, that can definitely distract people; really ask the right questions, and moreover, the most important thing is listen. I've seen this, and this is probably coming from my investor perspective where I get to take the side corner of the table and look at the teams working and see how you can so easily get distracted, just by listening or focusing on stuff that you read on some blog, that are completely irrelevant for you, but that seems like the right thing to do because billions of people are talking about it on Twitter right now.

Paul: That's wonderful advice. Just the amount of noise out there... How actually did you get feedback from consumers and users? Give us some tips on how you went about that.

Omri: The simple term would be 'have no shame.' Go out to people and talk to them, and whether you're having a coffee and asking your waitress what she thinks - of course if your product is relevant for her. But really go out there and talk to people. For wireless charging as a concept, as a vision, it doesn't take a lot of questions because some things just go without saying: yes, everyone wants a cord-free world, so I don't really need to go out there and ask people whether they want it or not. But then it really comes down to the deployment. Wireless charging in its first generation, like every... You know, there's this famous [unintelligible 00:19:20] research on the adaptation of life-changing technologies, or life-changing contributions and there's always this first curve for several years where this technology pops into life and usually fades in a certain way, and then starts this 15-25 years curve when the technology is really aggregating into life, and that's where we are right now. It was really looking at what happened with wireless charging so far, why have we been hearing about this for ten years, yet I allow myself to believe that you don't have a wireless charging pad on your table right now; I know I don't.

Paul: No, I don't.

Omri: And there is a reason for that. Someone was doing something wrong. I mean, they did a whole lot of right for sure. I'm fortunate enough to share a table occasionally with some of the admirals who were steering this in the first generation, but the approach was wrong, in many ways. Now we have the ability to learn from that, and focus on markets, on verticals and segments where maybe it's not as sexy; when most entrepreneurs start their startups, they all want to sell to the Samsungs and Apples out there, and I do, too, but maybe it's more right to find those users or consumers who really need what you're doing, and through those platforms you can actually escalate and bring the goodness and the benefits of your technology and product. Wireless charging again, as our topic for this conversation, is something so huge... I mean, it's really supposed to take cords out of our lives. It's not something that can be pulled by a single company. The same technology will not be charging electric vehicles and hearing-aid devices; you can't use the same technology for both. You know what, I'll revert on that because I can't say the word "can't", but it's most likely that it won't. This is the beautiful thing about the standard organization right now, it's that we see several flavors, several different technologies starting to sit around the same table and see how we can bring this basically to the benefit of common good. But when you that and you really find those areas, and I believe this is what Humavox did, and even some of the feedback we're getting from our competitors - which we're fortunate to be able to talk with occasionally and get their feedbacks - it seems like we did some right things along the way. So targeting those markets where the technology may not be as shiny, yet way more meaningful.

Paul: Omri, there's two more things I've got to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that I did hear you say that you do take investments into other companies so I'm just wondering, speaking to you from an investor with all these entrepreneurs listening to this show, what would be your big questions that you would focus on and ask when potentially making an investment in a company?

Omri: I don't want to catch trendy buzzwords, so I won't say "my investment philosophy" because I don't work in being an investor; I have some rich friends who do. So I don't have a philosophy. I only invested so far in technologies or products that I believe can that can have a significant impact on common people's life. It can be a medical device, it can be a financing or payment service, but for as long as I believe that it can actually impact life. I don't invest in good businesses or good ideas, I invest in greater people that have great ideas, but only if those ideas can really make a change across the globe, across all people categories. The first thing I ask a person is, "What are you trying to change? What problem are you trying to solve?" Because I meet a lot of guys and girls, entrepreneurs of all sorts, and some of them have some great ideas for money-maker, business product, applications, whatever. That's not my cup of tea. I'm looking for those dramatic impacts, and I'm looking for that sparkling shine in the eye when someone is talking about their product or their invention or their idea. I'm looking at them and usually, I have the capability of understanding whether I believe or not that the person in front of me is actually capable of grabbing hold of the steering wheel and drive this boat or this wagon and execute their idea.

Paul: Omri, that's great because you've just said "What problem are you trying to solve?" is one of your big questions. That is one of the massive themes to come out of all these episodes, with all these great entrepreneurs and founders. It's all about problem-solving, and I try to reinforce that message time and time again. Too many of us get distracted by the noise, as you say, and don't focus on solving a problem.

Omri: For sure. I mean, I can give you one thing that I'm always telling the people I meet. I always start by saying, "Let's put the presentations aside, at least for the first part of the conversation." Because mostly I would see 10-20 slides, 80% or 90% out of which would be stuff taken from the web because someone said it should be in the presentation. Realistically, I just want to hear out the person talking, not reading. I want to be able to understand. And I'm never putting myself... First and foremost, I'm an entrepreneur myself. As I said, I'm not working in being an investor, and as such, I understand the other side most likely better than I understand the investor side. It's really all about understanding what you're trying to pull, why are you doing this? I would say that the majority of the people I meet are great, but they saw something or heard something and came up with something for their personal lives. And that something may be presented as the problem, but in many cases by the time the conversation is over, I think that they themselves realize that the problem maybe isn't as big as they thought it is, and sometimes maybe I turn out as the bad cop, but if I managed to save that person the resources, trouble, pain and gain of getting out there and potentially maybe even raising money, because... I would say one thing that is maybe very important for me to say in this context - and this is actually a part of a philosophy - I always envision this as if there is a virtual pool of money out there, meant to be invested in startups and in new innovations and disruptive ventures. And if someone is squeezing into that pool and managed to drain some of it to something that is maybe not as meaningful, then that resource just went, instead of someone that can actually be using that resource to bring something really greater. So I think that it's sometimes the investor's responsibility to not be judgmental; because probably 90% of the stuff I see, I can't understand. So I'm never being judgmental, but I think that it's about responsibility for everyone to really ask themselves whether this is a cool application that's going to be making some money and maybe there are many ways to execute it, or this is really something that I need to go out there and raise funds from private investors at first, that will be putting in those hundred thousands of dollars on something that may be not as great.

Paul: And Omri, this is a show about apps, so the final thing we're going to part with is, we cannot say goodbye without asking for one or two app recommendations that you could give us... Maybe one or two apps that we haven't come across before.

Omri: One of which would be... And I would first say that I'm very far from being non-biased here, one of them would be Yallo, which is a company I invested into. That's not an endorsement, in any way; I invested because I really believe that what they're doing is tremendous and great. They're reinventing basically the dialer experience. So that's definitely something I recommend, it's available on Google Play and now on iOS.

Paul: And I would say everyone listening to this should have that on their phone, because Yosi Taguri, the CTO was on Episode 358, and if anyone is listening to this and hasn't listened to that episode they should go back and listen to it because it's fascinating.

Omri: Yes, I definitely recommend it, and again, not because I'm a stakeholder there, but because it's really tremendous. The other recommendation would be to something that we all know, but I think it's one of my most used applications, which would be Flipboard.

Paul: Right, yes. Absolutely. What sort of sources of news are you pulling into your Flipboard?

Omri: Well, mostly technology sources, I guess it's not a shock.

Paul: You're allowed that. Omri, I have to say this has been just the most enjoyable conversation and the first time we've actually had a guest who has had to go through a horrendous thunderstorm and keep so professional and so energized. So thank you so much for bearing with us while all hell breaks loose behind you.

Omri: Yes, it just turned into a blizzard.

Paul: Now, all your contact details will be on the show notes, so for anyone who cannot write this down because they are driving, or mowing the lawn, or running away from a thunderstorm, it's Episode 374. Go to theappguy.co and search for Omri Lachman. But for the time being, Omri, how best can people connect with you, reach out and get in touch?

Omri: Either e-mail or LinkedIn would probably be the quickest and best ways to contact me.

Paul: Terrific, okay. Omri, thank you so much for coming on The App Guy Podcast, and all the best. I'm definitely going to have to get you back on when I actually have a device that's charging wirelessly, that's not my toothbrush.

Omri: Well, I invite you, Paul, and all your listeners at CES; we'll be showing some cool stuff and that's coming quick around the corner. And you can always catch up on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter what we're doing, what we're up to. We'll keep heading towards a cords-free world and hoping to make an impact.

Paul: Well, we're all supporting you, we've all got your back. Literally, I think this is the first time a hundred percent of this audience is behind the idea. Thank you so much for coming on.

Omri: Thank you so much for having me, Paul. I appreciate it.

How To Get Your Content Discovered

Paul: Welcome to The App Guy Podcast. I'm your host; it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where I help all entrepreneurs, anyone who wants to know what it's like to work in a startup, or the startup scene, entrepreneurship, helping people - this is the podcast to give you an insight into what it's like to get into the scene and to help other out and to live a pretty awesome life with regards to entrepreneurship and startups. Do stay tuned for this episode, I have got a great guest. Actually, I've known this guest for quite a long time digitally, in the digital world, and it's the first time I've had him on the show. His name is Hans van Gent, and he is the creator of Inbound Rocket, but he's also got a full-time job in the fifth largest agency in the world, which is Havas and he can talk us through digital advertising, content marketing, a lot of stuff. So we're going to learn a lot from Hans. Hans, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Hans: Thank you for having me, it's a great honor to be part of the podcast series. I've been listening to the podcast, for some time already, and it's always very helpful.

Paul: It's great that you've come on. Now, we have a history together; we've known each other in various Slack groups, and we've been helping each other out, and that's the wonderful world about digital now, that you can build up good relationships with people that you've never met. Tell us about your full-time job first because you are doing advertising. How did you get into advertising? Talk us through how you started working in the digital world?

Hans: Well, it's a bit of a funny story, I think because to be honest I don't have any background in advertising. I studied computer sciences when I was still at university, and I was working happily in that scene. I was working at a small internet provider in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. At one point I had a girlfriend who was working in advertising, so I got to see a bit of the trade, and I helped her out with things that she got stuck on, and at one point I was thinking to myself, "You know, maybe this advertising world is something for me. Maybe I can switch to this world." But of course, having no official background in advertising and no education in there, it might be a bit difficult to get on board; so then I was thinking to myself, "What could be the easiest way to get onboard?" And that was actually through project management. I thought it doesn't matter if you don't know the trade; as long as you can manage projects, then you can work in any company, so that was sort of my step in the door into advertising, four or five years ago. I've been growing in there, I've been learning a lot from the industry and currently, I'm working at Havas Worldwide in Brussels, where I'm the Client Service Director for the digital department; I'm responsible for the entire digital business of the agency there.

Paul: Hans, the most inspirational thing, which will be very appealing to those listening, is the fact that you're working full-time, but you have a secret passion for the startup scene, entrepreneurship and helping people out. Because when you get home, you start doing all this work in content marketing, and you're the creator of Inbound Rocket, so maybe we could focus on that. Firstly, how on earth do you find the time to do all this stuff that you do online, outside of your job?

Hans: Okay, advertising is not really that much of a normal job, like a 9 to 5 job, although there are some similarities. You work a certain set of hours during the day and then in the evening when you come home, you can either sit on the couch, watch some mind-numbing TV and basically waste your entire evening, or you could do something useful with your life.

I'm a very strong believer that if you know something yourself, and there are people that don't have that sort of knowledge, then you should try to help out those people. I have got a lot of friends who are in the startup scene, so that's how I got introduced into that part of the world.

In 2012, I ended up being a contestant in the StartupBus in Europe, and that got the ball rolling a bit more. I ended up being the director in 2014 of the StartupBus in Europe, again next to my main job. We've been organizing weekends where we teach people the basics of entrepreneurship. Through all these different types of events that I do next to my main job, I started to see that most companies fail not because they don't have a good product - they might have the most brilliant product in the world - but they fail because they end up not having any customers.

One thing is, of course, are you really solving a problem that is big enough that people are willing to pay to use your product? In the end, though, even if you are solving a problem for people, if people don't know about you then you're still not doing any business. So from that learning and from what I saw happening there, I came to the conclusion: Okay, how can I help people in that space? I ended up looking around and seeing that a lot of these startups use WordPress as their content management system for their website. They end up installing a lot of different plugins, like 20 or 30, all doing their own little thing. They delete a couple, install some more, and in the end, it's all little islands not working together.

There are a couple of big companies out there who help with marketing automation, but those prices are just way too high for startups and small, medium enterprises. So then my logical conclusion was, okay, if these small, medium enterprises and these startups are running on WordPress and they still need to get customers, why don't I try to help them with that? So I had the idea for Inbound Rocket. Having a technical background, I started validating the idea and working on the first version. But at one point - you know how these things go - if you're not a hardcore developer, it's really difficult to make big steps. Via my network I approached this amazing guy in the U.S. Funny story, I never met the guy in real life; he's an awesome guy, but I never met him in real life, and we're trying to build a business there.

Paul: I know what can help... I mean, if you can imagine that someone listening to this is maybe working for a startup, or they've got their own app and they're really struggling with discovery, you've got a great way of helping with discovery because you do a lot of stuff with content marketing. I see you posting all the time, you're writing, you're posting on various websites, and you even share a lot of the traffic that that generates... What's been the best thing that's worked for you with regards to content marketing?

Hans: I think the mistake that a lot of people made in content marketing is that they first have the idea: "Content marketing is big. I should do something with content marketing." They might start off good; they might produce a couple of articles, but, in the end producing content is really difficult. You have to take the time to investigate your market to be able to write some good stuff. A lot of companies, in the end, their blog, it turns into some glorified status update, and they say, "Look, we hired somebody" or "We've got a new release" or something like this. But content marketing is just a different way of solving the problem you're trying to solve with your product or service. If you look at it from that sense, it becomes a bit easier to come up with articles on how you can help your customers. You have a product, you have a service, you have an app, and you think, "Okay, I can help people with this", but the app is just one part of trying to fix somebody's problem. With content marketing, you can expand that reach, and you can expand on helping people, trying to solve their problems.

Paul: Yes... This comes on the back of an episode, and if you haven't actually heard this episode I do encourage listeners to try to go back and listen to Janet Murray, episode 386 where she said, "No one really wants to read about a new hire, or a new release, or a new update." It's a completely boring subject. Obviously, very relevant to the company or the startup, but not to the world. It doesn't matter. So having a story and having something compelling, or... She mentioned having something that helps the reader know that there's something in it for them. So what I'm learning from you is that you write things that help people, help people achieve or get answers to that question, or just with that knowledge. Is that right?

Hans: Indeed, I once read somewhere online or heard it in a podcast, this brilliant anecdote: Someone said that the big problem is that even if you're thinking that you're on the right track, a lot of people, when they start writing, they are approaching it in a way that is way to difficult. Because what happens is that if I know a certain subject, and I know a certain subject well, automatically your brain thinks, "Oh, the rest of the world knows this", and then you don't write about it because you think it's useless and nobody cares about this. But the anecdote I'm referring to is that, okay, look at it like this: if you go to high-school or you go to university, the first day that you arrive at the university, indeed, you don't know anything indeed. And after four years of being at the university, you know everything: you know where the toilets are, you know which teacher you need to approach for whatever subject, etc. But on the other hand, every day there's a new bunch of freshmen arriving, on the internet. Just like every year, there's a new bunch of freshmen arriving at university. Even though you might think, "Okay, I know the world, I know everything," because of the fact there's always a new bunch of freshmen arriving, even with something that for you sounds very mundane, and you think, "Sure, I know this subject. Everybody know this", there are always a lot of people out there who still don't know this, and you can still help them. Even by just writing out those kinds of things, you can get a good grip on the market and educate a lot of people, and thus attract a lot of traffic.

Paul: I'm going to encourage everyone listening to this who is getting inspired to go and write something. If you're listening and you're an app entrepreneur and you haven't written anything, or blogged about anything, or posted anything, right now. It's great traffic; it's great for your profile. Let's talk about what we do. We met through a Slack group, and we do help each other out. What have you learned over the year of posting things on various sites? Have you got any good recommendations for us?

Hans: Well, it all depends on your market, on the app. Of course, if you have a certain project and if you have a certain product, then that product is solving the problem for what in advertising we call a certain Buyer Persona, somebody who is your ideal customer. And your ideal customer has certain spots on the internet where he or she hangs out. It could be on Facebook, but your ideal customer could hang out on Reddit, or on all sorts of forums, websites or communities online, I think before your start writing if you try to define - just like you defined who is your ideal customer for your app - if you know your ideal customer, then you know also in what tone of voice you need to start writing, what type of content you can start writing, and you know where those people are hanging out. So if you want to start promoting your content, go to the places where your customers are. That could be anything, ranging from Quora to Reddit, to LinkedIn or Twitter, it doesn't matter. It's very difficult to say, "Okay, go to this website," because what might work for me doesn't necessarily have to work for somebody else.

Paul: How about this, then? How about we do a case study, and we treat you as a consultant? So in the previous episode, just to kind of link this show together, the previous episode was a video app; it was a unique video app that's got a unique proposition of changing the way we edit, in real time editing. If I was to try and promote that video app - because I'm sure that's very similar to a lot of people listening to this - where would I go and what would I do?

Hans: I think, for starters, for somebody working with video it's very logical to go to video places like YouTube or Vimeo, instead of writing something. Because content marketing is more than just writing; it can be the creation of visuals, or in your case, what you're doing here with podcasts is a form of content marketing by itself. So it could also mean that content marketing for this person when trying to attract an audience could happen by creating useful content on a YouTube channel, or on Vimeo; Twitter would be suitable - you can tweet a video, as well. In this case, it makes more sense to go into that direction and see where the audience is there.

Paul: Yes, and it also can be a complete waste of time if you don't get it right... Because I've spent years on the web, and it will suck up huge amounts of time, and if you spend it posting to various places where nobody is going to read it and nobody is going to watch it, it does consume a lot of time. How can we ensure that we can get discovered with our content, as well as the apps? Should we partner with people who have already made audiences? Give us some advice on that.

Hans: What is always really helpful indeed is writing on different platforms, guest-writing, for example. When you know there's another company out there who has a bigger reach than you; maybe you can swap an article, saying "Look, I will write an article for you guys, why don't you write an article for me?" Another good way is approaching the thought leaders in your industry. What I've seen happening on our blog, at Inbound Rocket, for example, is some post where in one week, I created a post about a certain subject, and in the following week, I did a follow-up post where I let in the opinion of industry thought-leaders on the website. I think you were part of one of those posts, as well. And one, it's very easy, you can just create a Google Form and stalk these people, send them a tweet, "Hey, can you give me five minutes of your time to fill in this form and be featured in my post?" A lot of people are helpful, and you know, five minutes of their time is nothing. On the one hand, if they help you with these five minutes, they get more exposure as a thought leader, so it's like an ego boost for them; and as soon as the post is online, they are always really eager to share, of course, because it's their face on another website, and it's their opinion, so it helps them in the ego again. But on the other hand, as soon as those industry thought leaders start sharing that content, of course, they have a lot of followers, so it ends up having a lot of traffic for you again.

Paul: Okay, I love this strategy, and I'm just going to try and break down what I've learned from you. So this is a post that you put together, that had all the different thought leaders that you knew had some influence, and you wrote about them individually and what they were advising.

Hans: A concrete example in this case - at one point I wrote a post about how you can optimize your landing page. There are different things like social proofing, etc. to make your landing page more convincing. On the other hand, for startups, it's really difficult if you're just starting out to have the social proof because nobody wrote about you yet, you don't have user reviews, so the case for really early startups is a bit different. So I approached a couple of industry thought leaders and said, "Okay if you need to start a new business right now, and you need to create a landing page, how would you make sure that it will help convert?" I asked them just this one question, I put it in a Google Form and just stalked a bunch of people on Twitter. From the 30 people I ask, I get maybe ten responses, and I include those responses in a new post.

Paul: It's absolutely genius, Hans, what you're advising. It's a great strategy for anyone who's thinking about trying to increase their discoverability for what they're doing. So there are two things we need to do before we say goodbye. One is that I love to try and tease out potential new ideas for disruptive apps. Now, we can either just ask you outright if as you're going about your business - and I'm assuming you're incredibly productive - do you have an idea for an app? If you do, great; if not, we can explore another way of doing this.

Hans: Well, I have an idea already, for some time, and I was listening to one of your podcasts the other day and I think somebody already mentioned it a little bit.

Paul: That's the thing in the app world - everything's already been done.

Hans: Well, it's not being done yet at the moment, so this is a golden opportunity, I would say, but I just really don't have the time for it. The fact is that a lot of times... I'm from the Netherlands, but I'm working in Belgium right now, and I don't know when these public holidays are in Belgium, so it's always a big surprise for me; like one week from now we have a day off, and I never know these kinds of things, and that makes it really difficult for me as well to, in advance, plan a nice weekend away, like a city trip with my girlfriend, for example. So what would be ideal for me, if there was just a website or application where you could say: okay, two weeks from now, in that weekend I can leave on Friday evening, I need to come back on Sunday evening; this is my budget, tell me what I can do. Because right now you go to ten different websites to get your plane information, then you might find some cheap flight but you still need to find a hotel, you need to find activities, and it would be awesome if you could just tell me, "Okay, two weeks from now you could go to Rome, you're sleeping here, you can visit this concert. Or you could go to Berlin, you visit this museum, and you're staying here." Just give the budget envelope and give me my options.

Paul: So Hans, for everyone listening who has the ability to develop apps, they need to take this guidance. When you hear these stories, time and time again, and these needs, we're definitely on to something. I was only talking about this the other day... We need someone, as a family here, to curate our weekends, curate our life, in a way. Because I don't want the hassle of booking, all these different options. I just want... Here's my budget, and I want them to tap into my Facebook feeds so they can see what I like to do, and I want them to tell me, I want some service or app that tells me what to do. I pay the app, and it just takes care of everything.

Hans: It costs so much time that by the time you find a decent flight, the hotels are too expensive; and you just want to get a small weekend away, and I don't need to spend two evening or three evenings trying to find something nice to go to.

Paul: Hans, it's a perfect idea, so I want someone listening to this to build that because that is a genius idea. All the best apps that are massively successful are doing some curation, and what about curating the one most important thing, which is our lives; taking especially the weekends, curating it so that we don't have the stress and hassle of booking all these different things individually. It's a genius idea. Okay, the final thing then... This is a show about apps, so do you have an app or two that you think we may not know about but could be a good recommendation? Please don't close the recording, as well. This is usually the bit where I lose the guest.

Hans: Well, on my desktop I've been using Grammarly lately a lot, especially since I'm writing more. As you might have guessed from my accent, I'm not a native English speaker, so writing in English sometimes, even if I think it's correct, it still might give some weird stuff and especially if you're doing content marketing, you want to be correct in your English or in the grammar you're writing, and Grammarly has been a major help for me, trying to spell all the different quirks I do wrong in my writing.

Paul: Okay, I love Grammarly. You introduced me to that a while ago, and I've been using it and I love it. I think it's great. I haven't yet gone for the upgrade. It's basically for anyone, you need to go and check it out; I'll be putting links on the show notes. Grammarly gives you a free and then a paid version. You have these critical issues, and then you have the advanced issues. When you pay for those advanced issues, are they worth it?

Hans: Yes. So I've got a paid version indeed because I love the product, and if I love something, then I will reward the people who made it and I will always pay for it. So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to pay for it, but the other thing is indeed the options to have some more in-depth knowledge about your writing, it's awesome.

Paul: You're making me feel guilty now. After this, I will go and pay for it. You're right, there is a maker behind these things, and there's no better endorsement of the product than actually paying for it.

Hans: Indeed. A couple of years ago I wanted to start using an application for my coding called Coda, and in the AppStore it's not possible to do a review, test it out for two weeks and then decide to pay for it. Maybe it's changed by now, but I'm not sure. To be honest, what I did have I torrented the application, I used it for three hours and them I said, "Okay, it's good." I deleted the application, and I still bought it.

Paul: Wouldn't you wish that every app user is a bit like that? I mean, look at some of the reviews that you get for free apps... I do feel like we're living in a society where sometimes there's no appreciation for the creators. But when you're a creator yourself, then it gives you a huge amount of appreciation for the things that are created for us. Do you feel like that's fair?

Hans: Exactly, that appreciation is important; the guy needs to pay for his lunch as well, and he needs to pay for a roof above his head, so it makes a lot of sense to help out. And because of the free economy, a lot of these things are so cheap nowadays. It doesn't really matter... I'm a paying customer for example for Evernote. I love Evernote, as well, and I'm more than happy to pay for it, it's only a couple Euros a month. Of course, in the end, you always have to be careful that you're not paying for a hundred different things a couple Euros a month, because then it's still expensive, but...

Paul: Yes, I can confess I am a paying customer of Evernote. So, Hans, that is great, I will put links to that in the show notes. So for everyone listening, it's Episode 394. To get to that, you just need to go to theappguy.co and just type in 394 or Hans van Gent. What's the best way of getting in touch, Hans? What's the easiest way of reaching out to you?

Hans: Well, if you're looking for me just type my name; I think by now in Google I'm occupying the first couple of pages.

Paul: That is the best answer I think I've ever heard on this whole show. Just google me.

Hans: Yes, well if you're active online for more than a couple of years, you start to occupy that first page, for a bare minimum. So it's way easier than handing out business cards... Just search for my name. But you can always find me on... I think the easiest is reaching out via Twitter, that's @jcvangent, or with that same username basically on every social network.

Paul: You have just proven to anyone who has maybe a slightly unique name that they need to be content marketing because the benefit of that is that you google the name and you will be everywhere on the first two pages. So that's almost a justification for that time and effort into the content. Hans, this has been a great chat. I'm so glad that we could get you on the show finally, and all the best with Inbound Rocket. I do recommend people to go and check out inboundrocket.co, and thank you for coming on.

Hans: Thanks a lot of having me. After listening to all you episodes, it's been a real honor to finally be on one myself.

 

No one likes to be stalked (but we love stalking)

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 some great founders on the show to help you in your app entrepreneurial journey. If you're listening to this for the first time, there's a whole rich archive of episodes dating back several years, 400+ episodes to get through. You can find those on iTunes. Let me introduce today's guest, who's going to inspire us with his journey. He's got a wonderful, rich history of being involved in lots of different mobile stuff. His name is Rich Pleeth, and he is the founder of Sup, and you can just go to supmenow.com, check it out. Rich is going to talk to us about that app and much more, so Rich, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Rich: Thanks so much. Episode 405, how exciting!

Paul: It is. It's great to get here. We've had lots of amazing chats. In fact, a lot of this stuff you've been involved with. You mentioned GetTaxi in the pre-chat, but you've done stuff... Maybe it's good to start off with a little bit of history about what you've been doing in the app world.

Rich: Sure, so I actually started my career at L'Oreal, which is why I have such great hair, thanks to their wonderful products. I did one of their first digital campaigns using YouTube, and a few weeks after I did that campaign I got a LinkedIn e-mail from a recruiter at Google, asking me if I'd like to come and interview at Google, and I said I'd love to. So I went down to Google and I interviewed there, and after 12 interviews I managed to get an interview at Google, which was great, and I launched Google's first Go Mobile initiative, so it was really encouraging brands to go mobile, if they should go with a mobile web application or they should actually get an app, which was really interesting. I then moved off to go and lead Chrome marketing in the UK, so myself and my team, we managed to get Chrome to be the number one browser in the UK. We then launched Chrome Books, and I was also responsible for doodles in the UK, so how the Google homepage changes with various different things. From there I went to GetTaxi, as their global CMO, so I was leading the expansion across the globe. They're now in about 52 cities including New York, London, Moscow and Tel Aviv. I did 74 flights in 2014, which is a lot of flights. So I was always in a new city, or a new place every day. What I found was I'd always miss my friends, so I'd check in on Facebook, hoping that a friend would say, "Hey, I'm also in Madrid", or "I'm also in JFK. Let's grab a drink!" And it would happen an awful lot, but it would always happen two hours or two days later, and it would never be instant. And people don't use Find My Friends because you can stalk people - and stalking people is really fun, don't get me wrong, but being stalked is not so fun. So we came up with Sup, which is a beautiful, seamless experience to see your friends more, but without the creep factor, because we don't have maps, so you can't actually see someone's exact location, you can just see if they're in your area.

Paul: Rich, I don't even know where to start because you've got such a huge wealth of success that keeps following you around.

Rich: I don't know if it's success, a lot of it is luck.

Paul: Well, I mean, we're all using Chrome thanks to you, perhaps, and our Chrome Books, getting taxis... How do you focus on one thing? It seems like you've moved around quite a bit. Is it hard to stop yourself just falling in love with all these different solutions that you're bringing out?

Rich: So I have a really big weakness, I very much crave a challenge, so I always need to be challenged. And I've had such a fantastic time at Google, but towards my end of my time at Google, Google was a 55,000 person company, up from about 15,000 when I joined, and it had become a little bit political, a little bit bureaucratic, and you couldn't challenge the status quo every day as we had done when I first joined. That's why I decided to move to GetTaxi. It was much smaller, obviously it was very much a startup mentality, and moving on to my own thing is really... That's what it is. I have one thing, that I'm not particularly good at all. Like, lots of people are brilliant, I have lots of people on my team who are brilliant at things, whereas I'm really not brilliant at anything, I am just immensely curious. I like finding problems, I like figuring out how I can solve them, and what I say to my team is that I'm here to make sure that you guys do not have any road bumps, you don't have any barriers, you can just carry on doing what you love doing, what you are brilliant at. And because of that, I tell people I'm not particularly good at anything. I just am hopefully okay at problem-solving, but I am great at picking out great socks, so I will say I'm great at one thing.

Paul: Actually, you've just picked up again on this big running theme that I have throughout the entire history of my show, which is the focus on solving problems in the world. How important do you feel that is in creating an app, or selling up a company?

Rich: I think that's just so crucial, because my job... I'm a total generalist, okay? I'm not particularly focused on anything. I am a generalist, and my whole thing is I have a brilliant CTO, I have brilliant iOS developers, I have a brilliant UX designer and I have a brilliant head of growth. But when they have a problem, or they can't get through to something, or they need something, that's when my job kicks in; I can make sure that I can help them with the problem myself, within our weekly one to one or just in an informal catch-up, or whatever it may be. The number one thing I think that makes a very strong leader, opposed to a boss, is that they're problem-solving, they're worrying every day about how you can get to the next level. Our developers, for example - we didn't have fast enough internet this morning; it's just a very small problem that we had, and I have to go figure that out, how we're going to get faster internet in the next 10 minutes, to make sure these guys can do it. You know, little problems like that, and then you have the bigger problems, which is we need to get another hundred thousand users in the next two weeks, how do we actually solve that? So I think that a really big part of it, especially now that there are so many startups around, you need to be nimble, you need to be able to move extremely quickly, and you need to be able to problem-solve.

Paul: Rich, one of the things that I'm picking up on is that you've been successful in... You've mentioned L'Oreal and Google, and the actual campaign there for Chrome, and all these things that you've been involved with. App discovery is one of the biggest challenges that I'm often asked. Any advice on how you actually get your app discovered, downloaded and used?

Rich: This is the thing. Everyone's talking at the moment about how do you discover apps, because there are so many startups out there, there are so many apps that are launching, and the App Store has probably over a million or a few million apps and more are launching every week. So how do you get out above that noise and actually make people want to download your app, and the first thing is to create... I look at it like SEO. Everyone, when I was at Google, would say, "How do I make sure that people are finding my website?" And the number one thing is to make a brilliant website. So for me the advice is, with an app, if you're trying to get above the noise, create a brilliant app that's solving a problem, that people are going to actually want to use. If you can do that, you can get press out of it, you can get investment out of it, and hopefully you will get Apple to feature you, as well. And then there's also obviously all the paid channels you can go through, but growth hacking is something we spend a tremendous amount of our time on. It's really exciting because you can figure... You know, you probably do 500 growth hacks every few months, and probably 499 or even 500 of those will fail, but you're going to find out one, maybe it's your 1500th growth hack, and that could work and that could suddenly get you a million users. So it's just trial and error, and trial and error, and figuring out what works, what doesn't work. You have to make sure you're having a lot of fun along the way, because if you're not enjoying it then there's not much point in doing it.

Paul: Yes, I actually agree with you, Rich, because I've spent the last year... Persistence, it really does pay off in all the apps I've been involved with. It's amazing when you appear as a best new app, and you kind of realize what got you there and you start using that technique. So in terms of actually starting your company, you've gone from the safety net of being employed to now running your own thing. How did you overcome that fear of making that change and just committing yourself to your own startup?

Rich: So I've always had that fear, I have to say, because I've always wanted to do my own startup. When I was at Google I was thinking, "Do I go do my own startup now, or do I go to another startup?" And I went to another startup because I wanted to learn, and I think learning is so important. And do I regret not doing it sooner? Maybe, but I've learned so much and I've met so many people that I felt it was a really good time to do it. When I quit my job I had to give my laptop in, I had to give my phone in, and I'd never owned my own laptop because my company had always given it to me; I'd never had to pay my own phone bill because they'd always given me a phone. I'd never had to get health insurance, or get travel insurance because that's already being provided for me. And suddenly you're out on your own, I was like "It's Monday morning, what do I do?" I had to go to the Apple Store and buy myself a new phone, buy myself a new Mac, and then my calendar has gone from a beautiful, colored rainbow of many meetings in there to nothing. I now need to start my own things, and I probably had a 20-minute panic attack every day that I was unemployed, and I was like "What do I do now?" I'm literally no better now that I'm just sitting around not doing anything, and it was like, "You've got to get out there." So I got business cards printed, which I think is brilliant because then you're like, "I'm a professional now." So I got my own business cards printed, and then it's really a matter of hustling, you know? I went out and I went to every single networking event I could possibly go to, every single founder event or founders group I could get into. And some of them are great, you meet fantastic people, but some of them are rubbish, and you meet one person or you meet nobody, and you're like "Well, this was a waste of an evening." And you have to fully immerse yourself, get out there and meet as many people as you possibly can, because you never know when that person might be like, "Oh, my friend is investing in startups. You should meet him.", or "You can help that person out." I think that's the nicest thing about the startup industry: no one is there to take, everyone is there to give and help, and so many people I've met I've managed to help out, get investment or get a good lawyer, or get a good accountant, or introduce to some graphic designers, or help them get other people. And as long as you're willing to give, people are willing to give to you, and I think that's the great thing about startup culture: everybody wants to help everyone out.

Paul: I love that, I really do. I mean, it's what we live by here. In terms of actually getting the funding, did you have some prior connections that helped with that process? I'm assuming that you started this as a funded startup and not bootstrapped.

Rich: So we started it in March when I quit my job, and we had no money, we had no leads, or who could give us money or anything. I'd been helping raise money for GetTaxi, but we raised 150 million dollars, so we raised a lot of money. And so when I finished at GetTaxi I contacted some of the people I'd managed to meet, and a lot of that was because I was very interested in that... People who I'd been talking to of funds and introduced me to other funds, and their friends, and stuff, so I had a very small network there, and it was really just going out, building a great pitch deck and getting out and hustling. We had our first break with JamJar, who are the co-founders of Innocent Drinks, and I messaged Richard Reed who I'd happened to do a little bit of work with at Google, and I said, "Hey man, I haven't spoken to you in probably 3 years, since the very early days when I was at Google. I've just quit my job, I'm doing this startup..." and I went over to him and presented him the deck and he loved it. I was just really lucky that we got that stamp of approval from a very major VC that's very well respected, and it made it significantly easier to go raise. But until you get that full amount you are hustling every single day. I probably did like 300 meetings with people, and some of them just have no interest, they think your idea is horrible, and you just walk out of the room, you feel a bit terrible about it, and then you have to go to your next meeting and be super positive and super enthusiastic, "This is the best idea ever!" even though someone's just told you that this is never going to work and you should go get another job. I've even had e-mails from people that they've accidently CC'ed me on, saying that this is such a rubbish idea, the founder should just go and get a job, but he was a nice guy. And you're just like, "Oh, hi guys. I think I was actually CC'ed on this." But then you've got to pull yourself together in the next 10 minutes and go to a meeting and pitch like your life depended on that, and you didn't hear any of these negative comments. What I always say is people are going to hate your idea, no matter what, even if it's the best idea. People would have hated Google, people hated Airbnb, and you can see some of the e-mails that the founder got there, about how much people hated it and were like, "This guy is going to fail." You just have to believe in your idea so much, and no one is ever going to believe in your idea as much as you do. If you look at Larry Page and Sergey, no one believes in Google as much as they do, and no one ever will. No one believes in Sup as much as I do, no matter what they say. I talk about Sup all the time, I dream about it, I talk about it with my friends, with my parents, with everybody, and no one is going to believe in it as much as I do. And if you believe in the idea and you think it's fantastic, and that it's going to change the world, that's how you can go and change the world.

Paul: Rich, this is just such a fantastic chat. You're covering all these big themes that often come up. I mean, you also mentioned the importance of networking, and also believing in your own idea, which I feel like a lot of us maybe do get lost in trying to chase what's successful. Let's talk about Sup because we haven't really spent a lot of time talking about the app, and I'd love to give people an idea of what it is doing. So could you give a real case scenario of how someone would actually use Sup?

Rich: Sure, so first of all you should go download Sup. You can just type in Sup into the App Store and you can download it, or go to supmenow.com and get the app. It's a beautiful, seamless experience. We've gone with pink because why not, because it's in your face, it's really nice and bright, and it's a really beautiful design. If you ever play with it you can see how close some of your friends are to you just by pulling your finger down the screen and people fly in and out in a very beautiful way. The real idea was that I wanted to see my friends more. I was always in new cities and I have a lot of friends on Facebook who I have no idea if they were in the city I was in at the same time. Sup lets you safely see if someone is in your area without stalking them. You can't see their exact location on the map. I was in New York two weeks ago fundraising and I got a notification that one of my friends, James, who's actually an investor at Bulletin, he was in New York at the same time as me. He was 400 meters away from me. Now, we haven't managed to see each other in the last six months, because we've both been immensely busy, but because we were 400 meters away from each other in New York we managed to go grab a beer. So how great is that? I would have never known that James was in New York. We both got a notification, we were less than 500 meters away from each other and we just walked two blocks and managed to grab a beer together, which was awesome. And now what we're seeing is time and time again people are sending us Instagram posts or tweeting us that because of Sup they've managed to see their friends more, and they've managed to have some time offline. Instead of just messaging people on WhatsApp saying, "Hey, is anyone around? I'm in central London." or "I'm in the West end, anyone around?" you can now go on Sup and you can see if anyone is within your 2000 meter radius, which is less than 20 minutes walk, or within 20 meters, which could be in the room with you. Even this weekend I was in a bar, we were actually watching American football with one of my house mates, and we went on Sup - because he's also an investor - and we saw that both of us were obviously sitting in the room, but we saw someone else was in the room, as well, that we didn't know, and it was one of our friends who was also watching American football in the same room as us. So these magic moments happen when people come together, and Sup lets people come together and makes sure that you don't miss out on those moments. We know that missing out obviously sucks and that people hate planning; you love being spontaneous and saying, "Oh yes, let's grab a drink because you're around the corner", and Sup lets you do that more.

Paul: I'm already in love with the idea as well. How does it pull your contacts?

Rich: Sure, so you log in via Facebook and what it does at the moment is you can then invite friends - so I'd urge you all to invite friends because you get a better experience if you have friends on it - but then it goes on and at the moment you can see everyone on the app, but then you can press one button and it will show your friends only, so then it will show your Facebook contacts on there. I have around 164 of my friends who actually use the app, so I have a great experience. One of the key metrics we're working towards is making sure that everybody on the app has five or more friends on the app, so we're really encouraging people to invite their friends to use the app, as well. If you think about it, when WhatsApp launched not many people had WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is totally useless if none of your friends have it; and WhatsApp slowly built it up that some of your friends got it and then some more and more, and now all of your friends have it. And with Sup, some of your friends have it now, but it's just going to take a little bit of time to get all of your friends on it, and then it's going to be a beautiful experience. And one of the exciting things we're doing is we're going to be adding lenses, so just as you'd put sunglasses on if you're going out in the sun, you'll be able to put a lens on. It could be your friends lens, it could be your professional lens, it could be maybe a dating lens, or it could be people who are ex-Google lens. And that's really exciting, because one of the big problems that LinkedIn have, for example, is that you connect with people all the time when you go to events, or you meet them wherever you may be, but then you never see them again. What we're trying to do is we want to bring LinkedIn offline, so people can see their friends and their connections more, but actually in real life, rather than just seeing random updates on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or LinkedIn.

Paul: Yes, and actually I think one of the big challenges as well is how to use Facebook in a business sense, because it is primarily more friends and family. A lot of business people, I don't actually use Facebook, that's LinkedIn, and I can imagine that that dynamic is something you're trying to overcome by having Sup.

Rich: Yes, and it is really interesting, because LinkedIn have this tremendous problem that it's becoming a little bit more spammy, you get recruiters and stuff on there, whereas I'd love to see some of my LinkedIn connections, but we just never communicate and it would be a bit weird just sending them a message, whereas if, say, the CMO of TopShop was having a coffee near my office in Finsbury Square and I got an alert saying, "Hey, the CMO of TopShop's nearby", I can send him a message and say "Hey dude, do you want to grab a coffee quickly?" he may say "Yes, let's do it." Or he can totally ignore it, it doesn't matter, but at least we've had that connection, and then maybe I can e-mail him the next day and say, "Hey, sorry we didn't manage to meet up. It would be great to catch up some time." And magic happens when these connections come together. The whole reason why we've raised money is because I networked. I went out and I hustled for three months to go and meet as many people as possible. And I think with this new LinkedIn integration you'll be able to see your context more and hopefully progress your career better or progress your organization better.

Paul: This is a wonderful chat. So there are two more things which we'd like to do before we say goodbye. One is that we do get a whole bunch of makers, creators, app developers on this show and we often like to look for trends or new ideas, and I wondered, as an entrepreneur, are there any trends that you're seeing in the marketplace that you perhaps can talk to? Anything that we could maybe flesh out an idea for an app?

Rich: Yes, so I think one of the really interesting trends... We were just talking a little bit earlier about financing - the most interesting trend I see at the moment is that if I put in front of you a portfolio of companies and I said, "Hey, you can invest in Microsoft as one company, or you can invest in 20 of the hottest startups, including Uber, Airbnb, DropBox, WeChat... Which one would you rather invest in?" And I think everyone there would choose 20 new startups that could all become a juggernaut and really may be the next huge thing. The trend here is we're seeing that the older companies are becoming slower and less agile to iterate, and Facebook has done incredibly well here, and I think their stock is hugely undervalued, because if you look at the top apps downloaded in the world, Facebook is in the top four. They own Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It's just absolutely incredible how they've managed to consolidate that top position there. What we see there, obviously they tried to buy Snapchat and I think that probably Mark is really regretting the option of only offering 3,5 billion dollars and not offering them 20 billion to start with and buying SnapChat because then they'd have 5 of the most popular apps in the world. So I think we're going to see that a spread out of new mobile-first companies come about that will be changing the way that we interact with people. Instagram, for example - fastest growing social network. SnapChat has a hundred million daily active users, and I think that as that progresses we're going to see that these smaller players become more and more important. Obviously, in the last year we've seen Apple and Google both grow in dominance while Microsoft has decreased in dominance, and I think that they're both winners - Apple and Google - and Google is going to continue to win in new markets while Apple is going to continue to win in the Apple ecosystem where it's people with higher wealth and disposable income, and it's really exciting to see where we're going to be in the next few years with apps. And I think that the big trend is... You know, can you imagine a future where you don't know if any of your friends are around you? That's what we're solving here with Sup. If you can imagine a future where you just don't know that your friends are also in Hawaii when you're in Hawaii, then that's just crazy. And I think that that's where the excitement for us comes, that hyper-local is just taking off, and I think that Sup is going to be really interesting in terms of the mobile web in the future, and looking at how apps evolve and how we want to see our friends more.

Paul: Just listening to you on Facebook, it is pretty amazing. As someone who's had some apps hit the top charts, it's... They seem to come and go, but the top chart seems to be still dominated by those apps. Can we compete with the dominance of the big players?

Rich: Yes. It's really interesting... Can you compete? Well, we're looking now... WhatsApp was competing and they went and bought them for 21 billion dollars. Let's be honest, I'd be very happy with 21 billion dollars in my bank account. I think I could pretty much go and do anything, I'd have a great summer in 2016 with a yacht somewhere. But I think you can compete. And how you compete is that as a startup app you are far more agile. You can pivot, and pivoting is a really big thing. We want to see what works, what doesn't work with the app, and we can kill stuff immediately. Whereas with Google, if they're trying to do something with Google+ for example, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on launching, hundreds of millions of dollars on the team and getting it ready, and it just doesn't work. Whereas startups can go and they can create a new platform, they can see if it works. If it does work, they can invest in it, they can pivot, they can see how it goes. I think there's always an opportunity to be more innovative and more exciting and faster. And it's all about speed. If you can do something that is brilliant, that people love, that people want to use, and people are going to use it twice a day, then you are on to a winner and you should definitely just go and pursue that.

Paul: Rich, we're in danger of you going through every single big theme of this show, because you mentioned pivot, and that's another big one. So it's almost like a quiz show here...

Rich: I'm getting the right answers.

Paul: You are. The final thing is, I often ask about a tip for an app, but I actually think... You've mentioned that you're in a lot of networking groups as well, and I'm guessing that you also use Slack, which I know has been mentioned quite a lot. Do you have any virtual networking groups that you could recommend to us?

Rich: Yes, I think some of the good ones on Facebook that I'm part of are London Startup Events, which is great, I'm also a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Network, which is based actually in New York, but it's really very active in Europe, as well. Then on Slack, which is a product that we run a lot of stuff off... I'm a member of Tech London, which is very good and you have a load of stuff on there, which is awesome: you can do introductions, you can do marketing, skills, whatever that you may do. Another one is Nomads, which is about $70 to join, but it's really good. It's called Nomads, but it's digital nomads, and you can go in there, you can chat to people if you need advice... I often will post on Facebook if I need advice, or in digital Nomads or in Tech London, and usually someone will message me and say, "Hey, I've had this problem before. Do you want to have a Skype call about it?" As I said, if you are willing to give... And whenever anyone asks for advice I'm always one of the first people to say, "Yes, sure. Send me an e-mail." And I want to say to your listeners, if anyone has any questions or anything about this talk, or they want to just bounce an idea off me, you can always e-mail me. My e-mail is Rich@supmenow.com, and I always reply, and I will always get back to people. Or just send me a tweet @richpleeth, and I'm always super happy to help people out because I know that the startup ecosystem is all about giving and not about taking. So I'm super happy to help people; never be afraid to ask, because people have been through the problem you're having before and I have problems every day. I'd love to talk to you about how you got your apps to the top of the AppStore, and sharing ideas is how you learn. And if you stop learning you're going to fail, because you just need to be learning every single day, and I make sure I'm learning every single day from my team, from VC's that I'm meeting, from mentors that I'm chatting with... And you just have to make sure that you keep doing that.

Paul: Wonderful. Rich, all this stuff is going to be also on theappguy.co, just search for Rich Pleeth, episode 405. It's been a wonderful chat, I've really, honestly enjoyed it and it just sets up for an excellent 2016 for this show. Thanks for being an awesome guest, Rich, and all the best with the growth of the app.

Rich: Thank you so much, it's been really lovely to talk to you. Thanks!

Be Socialable : Be Valuable

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show that gets the best CEOs, the best founders, so that you can do something awesome with your life, understand how it is these people are successful, and you can then learn from these people, these founders, these entrepreneurs, so that you can become successful as well. I do go around the world, and I am in a wonderful location because in Italy there's a terrific startup that's actually starting to take over the world. The name of the company is Buzzoole, and it's the CEO and co-founder I have today. His name is Fabrizio Perrone, and he is the CEO of Buzzoole. Fabrizio, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Fabrizio: Hi, Paul.

Paul: Thanks for coming on. So I know that Buzzoole is a very innovative startup. It's certainly innovative in terms of big data and predictive analysis, and has won loads of awards. I think you've been nominated as Top 15 European Startup, and you have a massive growth rate. Tell us what it is, what is Buzzoole?

Fabrizio: Okay, so we created Buzzoole with the main goal of unifying the power of word of mouth and the digital PR campaign and the conversation effect to the media investment, with the easiness of display advertising purchasing. I had previous experience in a digital PR and social media agency, and I understood all the inefficiencies of this industry. We tried to solve these, and thanks to the technology we were able to develop a platform that was defined by VentureBeat as 'the Google AdWords of buzz marketing', so a platform where brands can schedule their digital PR investment so they can create conversation about their brands in a genuine way, by themselves, putting the budget they want with a pay-as-you-go model. Of course, the basis of this platform is a huge technology that is able to analyze more than 1,000 influential topics inside the conversation of our user and to understand and detect real influencers in each market.

Paul: This is great. So, as I understand it, you were looking at the inefficiencies of hiring a PR agency, which is usually very expensive, and you have gone to help brands by getting mentions from top influencers. Is that right?

Fabrizio: Yes... Not really just top influencers, because our goal is to go beyond celebrities. I said that the influencer market is in a hype, and a lot of brands care about getting mentioned by celebrity X or Y. What we are trying to teach is that involving real people is much more effective and efficient in terms of investment. Of course, if you need to engage with the top 5 influencers of a specific industry, in a specific country, probably you don't need any technology, you don't need any agency, because you already know who they are, and you already know how to engage with them. You just call them, ask them how much they want, you pay them and you engage with them. Our logic is different. Try to find not just five celebrities, but try to find 50 or 100 common people, that have a real influence and an authentic audience in this specific topic, and try to engage with them in a genuine way; so not just paying them, but involving them with brands experience thanks to our gamification system. Thanks to this approach, we can have campaigns that are much more effective, because they are perceived as being much more genuine, and this will amplify the engagement of that campaign, and the engagement is on average up to ten times more than the celebrities' campaign, just because these people are closer to their audience and are perceived as more genuine. On the other side, it's much more efficient because, of course, involving a large number of people could be very costly if you do it manually. But if you do it with the help of technology, you can save up to 90% of the internal management cost, and the final result is that, compared to the same reach, our customers are saving 70% of their investment, and they are able to plan this budget with the same easiness of a display budget. They can put the budget they want, they can stop the campaign, they can optimize it, they can monitor it in real time, watch ROI analytics and so on.

Paul: So let me try and understand it, and also help the listeners to understand it. Obviously, it would be easier for them to go to your site, Buzzoole.com, but in the interest of anyone listening who may be driving and just wants to understand - I, as a brand, I have the ability to pay for lots of ordinary people to be promoting me, rather than paying a huge amount for a celebrity, for example Kim Kardashian, to tweet about me. It's better to go to the people that have real engagement, the ordinary people. Is that right?

Fabrizio: Yes. We recently released some content titled, "Move over, Kardashians. How the average Joe's are changing the influencer world", because thanks to data, we analyze the engagement rate and the cost to a celebrity, as opposed to a real influencer, as we call it. On average, real influencers have an engagement rate that is 25% higher than a celebrity's, and they have a cost per engagement that is about 3%. So, of course, it's a more efficient segment to involve. This doesn't mean that celebrities are completely worthless. Of course, for certain reasons, for certain brands, involving a celebrity could be the right choice, for example for a positioning need. But in terms of efficiency of the investment, and to consider this kind of investment not as a special project as a launch, but as a new media channel where brands have to invest in an always-on way, this is the way to do it.

Paul: So you have some amazing brands that you have worked with: Red Bull, Nissan, Bacardi, Ford, Alfa Romeo - these are huge brands. Tell me how you encourage the users to talk about the brand? How does that actually work from the user perspective?

Fabrizio: On the user side, they are included in a wider gamification system. Users can sign up to our platform and connect their social accounts, and have a free dashboard where they can learn how their influence is declined through social media, and then they can use a free tool to improve their influence and personal branding. For the user side, we are like a gym to their personal branding, and of course they can be involved with the brand they love, for campaigns. Mainly, they are getting three kinds of rewards: first of all, they are getting visibility - growing into our platform, earn badges, earn ranking, give visibility to them. A lot of users that grew thanks to our platform and our technology now have direct relationships with top brands, so they can grow thanks to our platform. They can earn an exclusive experience with a brand, being chosen in campaigns, and they can also earn credits doing several actions within the platform, not just participating in the campaign. They can convert these credits into Amazon gift cards when they reach a certain level. We try to engage with users in a genuine way, trying to get them rewards for the action that they took within the platform. Of course, we try to engage with them in the sense of adding value to the brand's brief. Also, thanks to the badges and the exclusive rewards for the best creator, who have the best engagement, and so on.

Paul: Fabrizio, I'm loving this chat because you're reminding me of a chat that I had three years ago now, when the show just started, about tapping into influencers, and if anyone's interested they should contact me and I'll let them know exactly what episode that was. So I'm going to try and understand you, what Buzzoole is - I'm going to summarize what I've learned from you. I believe it's a way of tapping into your connections with your brands, using my social accounts. I connect them, you help me grow my social accounts, and I get rewarded through credits and through other experiences. What actually happens... How do I promote the brand? Do I just choose what they will automatically tweet or post image-wise, or do I have some involvement in how I promote the brands on there?

Fabrizio: No, we never do automatic content, or stuff like that, because we really want users to be able to add value to the brand's content. Of course, the type of posts could change to suit certain goals - it could be a blog campaign, a Twitter or an Instagram campaign... So depending on the channel there will be different types of content, but usually, you receive from the brand all the information to create your own content, with certain specifics, like hashtags, or something like that. So you create you content, saying whatever you think about these brands, and these specific activities. It could be a second screen campaign related to the television. We are doing lots of campaigns with, for example, Master Chef or X Factor, to obtain second screen attention, or more traditional campaigns for product launches, contests, sample campaigns where brands send samples to users and they want to get product reviews or very vertical Instagram campaigns. Other brands are using us to push their social content, in substitution to Facebook advertising. For example, in that case, users have to create buzz around the social content of a specific brand.

Paul: This is fascinating, and it's relevant to our discussion here. This is a show about apps, and you have your own app, as well. How does the app integrate with the platform, Buzzoole?

Fabrizio: The app allows users to connect the accounted, managed campaign that they have on their desktops. We are now releasing a new version that will improve all the functionalities. Of course, the app is really important for us because it's the way to reach our users in a faster way. Our focus will be stronger and stronger on the mobile app.

Paul: Also, I was listening to you describe the brands, and I wondered how the brands retained control over what you post, because I could imagine they want to only encourage positive promotion, and nothing too negative or, I guess, crude. How do they stop the bad posts?

Fabrizio: On average, you have to consider that users that are participating in our campaigns and that are subscribed to our platform want to grow, and they want to be trusted influencers. The main resource that every influencer has is his credibility, so doing something completely against a brief is something bad for the influencer's reputation. Brands can, of course, create briefs that leave higher freedom to the user, or can enable a feature that is called 'double-check', which is like a pre-approval of the content. This is recommended for brands that could have legal problems or something like that; when the user prepares the post, they can ask the user to send a draft through the platform to pre-approve it, or ask for any changes.

Paul: Great. On this show, Fabrizio, there has been a long-running theme of understanding the real problem that the founder is trying to solve, and I think what you're trying to solve is this problem of people spending a lot of time on social media, building up influence, but not getting any reward from the platforms, or not getting any reward from brands for word of mouth. You're actually stepping in and saying, "Hey, you've got this influence, you've spent a lot of time building up your influence, here's how you earn rewards from just doing what you're normally doing on social media." Does that sound like the problem you're solving?

Fabrizio: Yes, of course. We are trying to create a loyal community, a loyal brand ambassador community. This is something different, because influencer marketing is not something new, we didn't invent anything. We are trying to make an existing process more efficient. Of course, if you look for a platform that could pay you for something that you post, you can find tons of platforms that could do that. What we are trying to do as a unique selling proposition is to combine our technology to really individuate a specific user that could have an influence on a specific topic, and engage with him in a genuine way. Also, helping them to grow in terms of personal branding, and as a genuine brand ambassador, so not like a paid user that could one day, for example, talk about an automotive brand, and a week later talk about computers. We want to help users to stay close and to get rewards for promoting brands they love.

Paul: Wonderful. So there are two more things that we need to do with you, Fabrizio, before we say goodbye. One is that we always like to try and understand the success that you've had, and try to, in a way, copy from you the lessons that you've learned. So could you talk through the growth of Buzzoole, and if there's been any point in time that has just been quite unique in terms of a spike in subscribers or publishers? What was the big spike, and has there been a big spike in your growth, over the years that you've been going?

Fabrizio: Of course in terms of clients we've had a huge growth. If you consider that we launched our product in June 2014, and we were about 5 people, and at the end of 2014 - 6 months later - we had more than 250k in revenues and we were 10 people. In 2015 as a whole we had a growth of 30% month over month; starting with revenues of 30k/month, at the end of the year we will have more than 200k/month in revenue. We're close to more than 1.5 million of revenue in 2015, and we are more than 30 people. We are opening in London, we have been chosen by Unilever as one of the best 15 startups in Europe, and we also entered into a UK program called Global Entrepreneurship Program by the UK government, so the UK government is also helping u. Thanks to The Bakery, which is one of the best accelerators in London, we are also entering into the UK market. I think these are the most impressive metrics. In terms of users, we also had a huge growth. Until April 2015 we had something like 15,000 and now we have more than 60,000, so it's four times what we had eight months ago. In terms of staff, we are now  more than 30. I just hired one person in the UK that is refusing a Facebook offer to come into our project, so this is amazing, we are very proud of it. Our future plan is to create metrics into the UK, and by September open a new round to go to the U.S.

Paul: That sounds fascinating. So the final thing to talk about is understand your personal journey. Many people listening to this are considering becoming founders of their own startup, or working for a startup. In your opinion, is it worth the ups and the downs, and the pain that you have to go through to become an entrepreneur, become a founder? What would you say to anyone who is thinking about going into that lifestyle?

Fabrizio: I can say that it's really difficult. If you see a company that is going well, you just see that, but you don't see all the pain, all the bad moments that the founders went through and, of course, we had a lot of those. We had lots of good moments, we had lots of celebrations, but we also had lots of moments where it seemed to be really difficult. I can remember challenges in terms of finding the right people... In June 2014, when we were launching the product, we had one month of cash left, and we were starting to get some clients, but we were really risking running out of cash. The best talent that you can have is determination. Never give up, and always believe that you can do it. I know it might sound cliché, but it is true. I had previous experience in other companies, and this is my second startup, to be honest. After my degree, I started a company, in 2008, and I sold that company in 2013, so I already had more experience. My first company was a digital marketing agency that was focused in Italy. It was not about international growth, it was about getting clients in Italy. We were a small agency, we were lucky and were able to sell the company, but we had to create a new team that had all the required competencies and the determination - those were the most important needs for a successful startup.

Paul: I love that. I loved the quote that you said, "Always believe you can do it", that's what I'm taking away from you. Fabrizio, this has been a wonderful chat.

Fabrizio: Thank you.

Paul: For everyone listening, you can go to theappguy.co and search episode 417, and you'll get links to Fabrizio and the actual platform, Buzzoole. But for now, Fabrizio, how can people connect with you on Buzzoole? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Fabrizio: Of course, people that would like to have more information can drop us a line at info@Buzzoole.com, or just subscribe to the platform to have your dashboard and your social analytics technology. For all the brands that could be interested, you can reach us at brands.Buzzoole.com. You can follow us on Facebook, on Twitter and you can ask for a live demo in the brands platform, so you have a lot of ways to get connected with us. You can also follow me, I am @Fabrizio on Twitter. Let's keep in touch!

Paul: Well, thank you very much for coming on this show, and talking us through your journey. This is why I do this podcast, to understand the real story, the ups and the downs.

Working At Apple, eBay and IBM Was Nothing Compared To Starting Our Own Company

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I'm your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we get some great founders, co-founders and we learn about their journeys with their apps, so it helps you as an app builder, as a maker, as a creator. In fact, what I do is I go all around the world and find the most inspiring app entrepreneurs and we talk to them about their journeys. Today I have some good friends of mine who are the co-founders of the Veloxy app. This is a wonderful calendar and Sales enablement app. Let me introduce Samir Majumdar and Sauvik Sarkar, They are the co-founders of Veloxy. Guys, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Samir: Hi Paul, thank you very much. This is Samir, co-founder of Veloxy. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk to you about our journey, about the app, what we have been doing, and about what life looks like in our trenches.

Paul: Yes, I love the way you say trenches, yes. And you've got Sauvik there, I want to say hello to you, as well.

Sauvik: Yes, sure. This is Sauvik, co-founder of Veloxy. We started Veloxy one and a half years back, and it's been a pretty interesting ride so far.

Paul: We're going to find out all about that, Sauvik; we're going to go through your journey, so let me, first of all, ask you how did you guys meet? How did you get together? Because we have learned on this show the importance of co-founders. How did you guys get together? Maybe you can start, Samir...

Samir: Sure. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I worked at some big companies, as well as quite a few startups.In my last company, where I was vice-president of engineering, I worked with Sauvik there for quite a few months. I immediately found out that he's one of the best. Just to talk a little bit about the journey, in my previous company, Ingenuity Systems, I was one of the first ten employees. I was responsible for development of all products. During that time I had worked with sales executives and sales professionals.We implemented SalesForce, Marketo, and Informatica with our product line. At that time, I saw all the frustrations that sales people were having. In spite of us spending a lot of time and resources in integrating Salesforce with other products, people were not really using it. When they were in a meeting with the customer, they were not able to access right documents and they were not aware of a critical product issue that customer reported few days back. Disaster! All those issues were because information was scattered all around the place. Everything was not in Salesforce and it’s not realistic to think that everything will be in Salesforce. Emails and calendars have tons of relevant information. That's when I thought, "Hey, there must be a way to solve this problem", and when I met Sauvik, we started talking about it, and that's how this whole thing started. I will let Sauvik talk about his journey.

Sauvik: Thank you, Samir. I worked at big companies like EBay, Apple, IBM, and then I met Samir in one of the companies. While we were talking about stuff, we talked about sales people, both of us had the same experience. Although CRM spent is around $24B in 2015, research shows that CRM adoption is less than 50%. Sales professionals have no incentives to use CRM system as it does not help them in closing more deals. So we came up with the idea that there should definitely be a better way to do this and what better way to solve a problem where sales people are moving around and are mostly mobile, than with a mobile app. That's when we got together days and nights and brainstormed this idea of creating a powerful platform and a mobile app that solves this very basic problem - how to make sales professionals more productive, how they can use their time more efficiently. At the same time the app should make data entry to CRM systems seamless and automated where ever possible. Having high quality data in CRM system will be incredibly beneficial to sales executives and the whole organization who has invested so much money in the CRM systems.

Paul: So, Samir and Sauvik... You've picked up on a big theme, which is:

“solving a problem”

So many of the successful entrepreneurs actually come back to this theme. So, I wanted to remind the listeners/readers that it's so important. The thing I'd like to just ask you both:

“how did you overcome the fear of leaving your steady jobs?”

Samir: That's a very good question. Frankly speaking, I have been entrepreneurial for many years. Before Veloxy, I worked at another product. We even launched it. It was a marketplace for re-agents. The market is completely fragmented. Scientists don’t know where to find the best for their experiments. So we created a marketplace for reagents where we'd list reagents from all those vendors and scientists can come and buy reagents from our site. Although the company had enough traction, I did not take the leap of faith to jump full time there; that was a lesson. I didn't stop there either. When I met Sauvik, we started Veloxy. Life is too short. I thought, "Hey, I have to do this. If I don't do this, I will repent for the rest of my life." This is a problem that I'm very passionate about; it’s near and dear to my heart. I want to see people productive. These days there is no excuse for people not to be productive, especially with all the mobile phones and the access to data that people have. The unfortunate part is people are not taking advantage of that. So that's when I said, "Okay, let's do it full-time. We have domain knowledge and technical expertise. This is a problem that can be solved and we can solve this problem together."

Paul: Yes. Sauvik, again, the same question to you because, as Samir says, in his words, you are the world's best from the technical standpoint, so I'm guessing that you could have your pick of jobs. I mean, you've already been working at EBay, Apple, IBM, they're all wonderful companies. So how did you overcome your fear of quitting and doing your own thing?

Sauvik: Absolutely. My thought process resonates very closely with Samir. I created a lot of apps in the past, mostly as an individual, and I also tried to involve other people in there, but one of the most important things, I have noticed and also felt that you need a really good partner to have a great startup. There are exceptions, of course, but at least, there should be two people in a startup. Both partners/co-founders should be very passionate, so that's why when I met Samir I felt that he has got this in-built passion for doing new things and solving real problems. When I talked to him, we kind of resonated with the same feeling about productivity and the opportunity that it provides. We have both seen that sales people's lives can be improved dramatically using the latest modern technology on the mobile platform.

Paul: Sauvik, before we leave this thought, I just want to say that what I've learned is that it's important to have a good co-founding team where you both believe in the problem that you're trying to solve... I've really learned that. So let's talk about that problem because I think the listeners still need to understand what it is you're trying to do. Give us an example of a sales person and how they would use Veloxy to solve the problem, and what the problem actually is.

Samir: Sure. Sales professionals are typically very busy. They have back-to-back meetings, and they have too many things to do and too little time. Research shows that they are wasting 65% of their time in non-selling related activities like looking for documents, team meetings, meeting with their boss, updating CRM and other administrative work. They are spending only 35% of their time doing real selling - the selling that will make them money, that will help them reach their revenue target, that eventually will help their company. There are a lot of things that they're doing which are not directly contributing to their bottom line, and that's where Veloxy comes into play. Veloxy helps them in organizing their day, organizing their meetings, e-mails, deals pipeline, leads, tasks and more. Veloxy aggregates relevant data across SalesForce, Google, Exchange, and your local phone. Veloxy also integrates social networking information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, CrunchBase, Google Scholar and other sources into one place, contextualizes and presents it to sales professionals in a very user-friendly, easy mobile interface. Veloxy proactively notifies them about very important things that might have fallen through the cracks. No longer sales professionals have to worry about missing out things. Today, sales professionals are trained to look for information. We are changing that paradigm with Veloxy. They no longer have to look for information when they use Veloxy; Veloxy will take care of that. Some very simple examples: let's say they are dealing with 20, 30 deals. Out of those, some deals might be at a very late stage, but we don't see any activity on different systems. Based on our proprietary “Touch Point” score algorithm, when Veloxy determines that a deal is at risk, it sends a notification to the sales professional. "Hey, what's going on?" Maybe the deal is on track, but at least, we are watching out. When they receive an important e-mail from somebody, Veloxy notifies them. If they forgot to respond to an important e-mail, Veloxy notifies them. When someone changed something for one of their deals in SalesForce, they get a notification. We are changing their behavior, where they no longer have to constantly look for information. Another typical example - sales manager sends too many e-mails to their sales reps asking "What happened to this deal? Did you update that deal? Is that deal going to close on time?" Using Veloxy they no longer have to bother their sales reps. The manager gets immediate notification when something important changed in a deal of his/her team members. Thanks to Veloxy, now they can use their weekly sales meetings to discuss strategy on how to close different deals rather than asking for deals status.

Paul: Yes, let's just jump in here, because I think we're getting the examples... Is this really an enterprise app? I mean, is this primarily for companies to distribute amongst their sales teams, or do you see it as a consumer app that is going to be independently downloaded by sales people?

Samir: We are seeing it both ways. We are seeing individual sales professionals downloading the app and using it by themselves. We have thousands of users, and we are getting very good feedback, and they're really liking the app. The other model is... Enterprises are loving it too. We are talking to Director or VP of sales or sales ops executives; they very quickly start to realize the value Veloxy brings to the whole enterprise and roll it out to the whole organization. So the model is working both ways.

Paul: That sounds like a terrific model as well, because who wouldn't want a load of sales people spreading 'word of mouth' about a great app that's helping them close deals? So I can imagine the spread of this is going to be quite rapid when it starts to get traction. Sauvik, maybe we can jump to you as well and ask you about what you feel is a good user example of someone using Veloxy?

Sauvik: Yes, sure. You know, one of the things that Samir mentioned was closing deals, and the other thing where Veloxy helps is opening new deals. One of the typical use cases that we have seen is people are traveling all the time, and they're at a certain location, they meet with a client/customer and they have time to meet with others in the same area, but they have no way to find out what other customers are there, that they can meet. That's where Veloxy comes very handy. Veloxy quickly shows them what other customers or prospects are there. In addition to the customers, Veloxy displays all contact information on a map, and they can see which set of customers are right at that location. They can also do a quick research. Veloxy automatically researches customers, their geo-location, their Twitter, their real-time LinkedIn profile, and also gets information about their e-mails that are going back and forth with the customer, so that the rep has a clear context within minutes so that he/she is ready to talk to the customer. I think that's one of the biggest features that a sales rep using Veloxy finds.

Paul: I'd love to pick up on one thing, which I know will help all those app entrepreneurs that are wanting to learn from you the good things and the bad things you've learned yourselves, because none of us have a roadmap; we don't know what works, what doesn't, but we can only learn. You mentioned at the start that you've been working on this for a year and a half... Can I assume that a lot of that time is on the technical aspects of the app, rather than on user acquisition and getting feedback from users? Have you actually focused more on the technology side up to this point?

Sauvik: Initially, of course, we focused on the technical side, built the product. We have been working very closely with the users and getting their feedback. We try to be very proactive and put those feedbacks back into our pipeline and try to make sure that we actually listen to all our users and deliver a product that is useful to them every day, several times a day. Most of the time it has been technical, but the product has also grown over the last year.

Paul: Samir, maybe I'd ask you then - what have you learned from that? Because I'm guessing that you've actually funded this whole thing yourself, between the two of you... Am I wrong? Did you get funding for the company, or is this all bootstrapped?

Samir: We are completely bootstrapped. Sauvik mentioned, along with the product development, we have been focusing quite a bit on the customer development. As a lean startup, both of these go hand in hand. Initially, we had to do quite a bit of platform development work. Sauvik worked on it by himself for quite a while, and once we had the MVP we started engaging with users and have been getting feedback on a daily basis. We get their feedback, we incorporate the feedback that is aligned with our long-term roadmap and the cycle goes on. The thing that has been quite rewarding is to see how appreciative the users are and how much they love Veloxy. They say, "Hey guys, we love Veloxy and we're going to tell other people about it." That is very satisfying and gratifying and there is nothing that can replace it. Seeing your users using the product that you built from scratch, it's like seeing your baby grow... It's surreal, seriously.

Sauvik: Absolutely.

Paul: So, Samir and Sauvik, I want you to imagine this right now: there are two people listening to this who are at the start of their journey, where you were a year and a half ago. What would both of you recommend to those entrepreneurs that are just about to start out? They quit their jobs, they've got an idea, they're about to start working on an app, they are doing it using their own money - what's the biggest advice you could give them, based on what you've learned over the last year and a half? Samir, maybe you can start with that.

Samir: I think one should spend enough time validating the need, and going a little bit deep into figuring out what is out there. As you probably know, Paul, this sales enablement or sales productivity field is quite crowded. There are a non-trivial number of companies who say "We solve this problem, too. We solve that problem, too." We have done thorough research and the reality is:

"nobody has solved this problem".

Everybody claims that they solved this problem. Everybody's trying to do some part of it here and some part of it there. Can you imagine a salesperson using six, eight or nine applications for their job? They simply don't have time. They should be using only one or two apps, at the max, to get their job done. So I think for entrepreneurs who are starting their journey, understanding what the pain point is and really validating it before they jump into building something is something I would highly recommend.

Paul: Okay. And Sauvik, what would you recommend?

Sauvik: I definitely agree with Samir. New entrepreneurs definitely need to make sure and vet out their idea and make sure that it solves a real pain point of somebody. The other thing I would probably recommend is  - as I've experienced, and Samir definitely has experienced - you know, life in the entrepreneurial field will be very stressful and there will be a lot of ups and downs. So you have to be very resilient and make sure you put more than 100 percent every time and stay positive. If you know that that is a real problem, just make sure that you keep on working on it. There will be times when you don't see a lot of results, and there will be times when you will be overwhelmed with results, so just make sure that, from an entrepreneurial perspective, you just keep steady and keep on working on it.

Samir: One more point I would like to add is - I think Sauvik alluded to that - I cannot stress enough the importance of having the right co-founder. Finding the right co-founder is extremely important, probably way more important that the problem that you are trying to solve, or what you are going to do. This is a stressful journey, but having someone who you can trust 150% is absolutely important. It's not that we don't argue... There are times when Sauvik and I argue for two or three hours. I'm serious. I will tell you, my wife jokingly tells me "You have never talked to me as much as you talk to Sauvik." This is the truth. We fight, we argue, but again, this is for one mission: to build the best sales enablement app for the sales professionals. The alignment has to be there, otherwise, things are not going to work.

Paul: Yes, I'm almost thinking back to the growth of Twitter. I don't know if you've read the book about the founders, but they were all falling out...

Samir: Yes.

Paul: So look what happened to Twitter. I mean, constructive feedback and being passionate about your idea is what I'm learning from you; this is really a very important point. There is one more thing we like to do on this show, before saying goodbye to our founders. One is we love to discover new apps, and I'd love to know if there's an app that you can recommend that's really helped you and your business. So maybe you have to pick up your phone, have a look at it... Sauvik, maybe we can start with you. Pick up your phone and let us know if there's an app that you can recommend, that you think is maybe one that we haven't come across before.

Sauvik: Yes, let me think... So we have used for our product backlog an app called Trello; we have used it to keep our backlogs. It's pretty handy, and two of us, or other people can also use it, and you can very quickly create backlogs and segregate by type of product, features, and it's very handy when you're on the go, because it's mobile-friendly; there's an app and then it's also available on the web. I have used it, and I think Samir has also used that pretty much every week.

Paul: Great, okay. That's Trello, there will be a link to that in the show notes of episode 414, theappguy.co. Samir, I would love to get a recommendation from you for an app that you tend to use. It can even be impersonal if you want to give us something cool.

Samir: Sure, we have been using UberConference quite a bit. We love it. It's for setting up meetings, getting user feedback... It's a conferencing app, and they have a web-based product, as well. We mostly use the web-based product.

Paul: Yes, I've used that once before. Have you ever tried recording over it? I must admit, my first experience of UberConference was quite poor quality, but it's very easy because there's not software to install. I seem to remember just going straight to a browser...

Samir: Yes, we have not recorded it, but we just use it for giving the demo. What we do is we use the QuickTime Player app and then we can do the live demo using that, and people can see it on the other side.

Paul: Great, there will be a link to that in the show notes - UberConference. Have they been successful, those pitches, demos? Who have you actually shown them to, potential users, or investors?

Samir: Absolutely... Investors, we mostly go and talk to them in person, but all the demos - I'm telling you, Paul, users are loving Veloxy. This product has legs, and we are going to really take it to the next level. Our goal is to reach out to thousands of sales professionals to use Veloxy. One thing I probably haven't mentioned,  Veloxy not only helps sales people closing more deals, it also helps organizations significantly because using Veloxy sales people are able to capture 150-200% more data into SalesForce, and data quality is significantly higher, which eventually helps organizations doing predictive pipeline forecasting. Unless you have enough high-quality data, no matter how good your forecasting algorithm is, it's not going to work. So Veloxy is a win/win situation for organizations as well as the sales professionals. It's a good time to be in this space. We are loving it!

Paul: I was just thinking, actually... It must be quite challenging, as well, because I can imagine the hardest people to sell to are sales people themselves. [laughter] This has been a great chat, I'm sure it's going to inspire others to do the same as you have done: find a great co-founder, come up with a great idea, both believe in it, and then quit whatever you're doing and passionately pursue it, because you need to do it. I love that - you just HAD to do it. So there will be links to you guys in the show notes of episode 414, but in the meantime, maybe Sauvik, you can give us your contact details. How can people reach out to you? And Samir the same, how can people reach out to you, as well?

Sauvik: Sure, so I can be reached at sauvik@veloxy.io.

Samir: Same for me, I can be reached at samir@veloxy.io. The last thing I want to probably mention quickly is although our app is mainly targeted for the sales people who are on the road, we do have an excellent calendar app, we call it “Your calendar in steroids!”. Paul, do you remember Tempo AI? It was a calendar app. In Veloxy, we have built a calendar on steroids. Anyone can use our calendar app. To all Tempo calendar lovers, try out Veloxy. You will love it.

Paul: Okay, so what you are saying is you can use it for the calendar, as well?

Samir: Absolutely, this is one of the best calendar apps out there, check it out.

Paul: Terrific. In fact, I would endorse that because I was always a big fan of Sunrise, the calendar; then they got bought by Microsoft, which is always a downside...

Samir: Yes, and Tempo was acquired by SalesForce, and they shut it down. Any Tempo users out there, we would love to have you try out Veloxy.

Paul: Yes, and actually there's just a final thought that I have to throw in, which is you get all these wonderful apps that seem to have rapid growth and you just love them; I'm thinking Mailbox for my e-mail. Then they get taken over, and it's just an acquihire by the company, and then they shut the thing down, which is really frustrating. I can't believe they've shut Mailbox down, that's just crazy. It was one of the best ever... I can remember the waitlists, you had to get on a waitlist to get on this thing. I thought that was crazy, but that's what big companies do, I guess.

What I Learned From 2 Billion Downloads

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. We have one of the most amazing guests we've had on this show, because in the past we've had apps that have achieved 660 million downloads, we've had apps that have achieved several hundred million, but this is a gentleman who had built app businesses that have in total achieved a billion plus downloads. It's amazing, his name is Narry Singh, and he calls himself a passionate builder of digital businesses. He's currently the managing director of the digital business strategy at Accenture. Narry, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Narry: Thanks so much, Paul. Delighted to be here.

Paul: So in the time that we have with you now, I would love to know, in your journey with the Talking Tom apps - which is over a billion downloads - how did all that come about? Have you got anything we can learn from you during that whole time with Talking Tom apps?

Narry: I would say a couple of things. I think the first thing which most of us that were involved with the journey [00:01:34] actually Talking Tom and Friends exceeded two billion downloads not too long ago, and are probably in the top ten apps downloaded, of all time. I think that Talking Tom and the initial series of apps were started by a very capable set of founders, of Outfit7, who came up with the idea of Talking Tom and the idea of actually having a character that wasn't really a game, but something that could help kids express their own creativity, and make them sound and look cool. I think one of the things that our co-founders very insightfully pointed out was that most kids might get tired of games, but they'll never get tired of a reflection of themselves. I think that that very subtle, but not so obvious observation on children and what is perceived to be cool, and quite frankly the monotony of playing the same game time and time again has contributed to the success. And then of course, most importantly, I think Talking Tom is probably - I am, of course, biased, but I think some of our characters are probably some of the most exquisitely animated and interesting to see animations on a phone that I've seen.

Paul: We're a bunch of app entrepreneurs ourselves, you've been extremely successful - was there a breakout period where you just knew it was going to be this huge success? For example, did you point a PR agency to get publicity, or has all this come about through word of mouth and sort of an organic download trajectory?

Narry: I think when I was at Outfit7, the parent company that created Talking Tom and many other apps, I think in the four years prior we had probably spent about 60,000 dollars total on PR, and I think 50 of that might have been a mistake. Our user acquisition strategy... We had initial success with Talking Tom - the very first Talking Tom - about six, seven years ago, but we built upon it, and I think what we did was a couple of things. I think the timing was also good, the app store wars weren't as competitive, but I do think that there were a couple of things. Number one was we created some very interesting game in social dynamics, where the more you shared what you did and created with Talking Tom, the more interesting it became to you. I had my nieces at the time do a duet with Talking Tom, and Talking Angela, over a song with Nicki Minaj. Of course, she published that on all her family's walls and Facebook posts, and things like that. So there was an inherent virality in Talking Tom, and its entire franchise.

I think the second thing is that one of the things we realized early on, there were about 18 apps when I was with the company at the time: Talking Angela, Talking Tom, Talking Santa... The talking genre, if you will, on the AppStore was created by Outfit7 and a few of us, but what we decided to do was rather than focus on individual characters at that time, we called them Talking Friends, and we created a kind of a sense, if you will, of collectability, very much like Pokémon, where if you had one, you actually wanted to have the rest of the collection. I think that dynamic also helped create some additional downloads. I would say the third is we experimented, not always successfully, but very early in our transition focused on China, and we had - keep in mind, this is about five, six years ago... It was very unclear that the Chinese download market would be as much as it was, or the monetization would be ever figured out, but we made a pretty big commitment in Asia and China, and that contributed massively to some of our downloads.

Paul: It's such an amazing journey. Let's get straight through some of these then. I want to ask you, if there's one thing a startup can do to get noticed, what in your opinion could they do? This is in the app startup business - what one thing can they do to get noticed?

Narry: Paul, it's a very tough market out there. You and most of our app entrepreneur friends know that it's a brutal marketplace. It's highly consolidated towards the top hundred apps, but what I would say - and I know this doesn't sound the most helpful - what I would say is be obsessed with the product, and be very clear on what are the one or two primary motivations for someone to open your app. Not three, not four, not five, one or two. We obsessed about the most excruciating details of the user journey. So a lot of people would open up our app - when would they open it up? Would this be standing in a coffee line? What would the dynamics be? So I would say the one thing you can do to get noticed is - and it depends on category, of course; I'm talking about the entertainment category, the gaming category, which is where we belong - be obsessed about the product, and understand what that one motivation is, that your users have to open that app the first time, and is there a reason for them to come back. This is maddening advice for most app entrepreneurs because it's so simple, but unfortunately, it happens to be true.

Paul: Very, very valuable. Now, the other thing I want to touch on is that normally on this show we have founders that have quit corporate jobs to go and start running their own company. In a way, you've gone about in reverse, because you've built very successful startup businesses yourself, and now, in fact, we're due to cut this off because you're rushing to a client meeting. I just wondered was has it been like to go from running your own thing to then now being part of a very large corporate like Accenture?

Narry: It's been mostly good, it's been different, and I was quite prepared that it would be different. The way I look at it is kind of our job and my team's job at Accenture, in a way, is to actually build a new business, and a new practice within Accenture, that leverages all of the assets that Accenture has and, of course, a breath-taking distribution network of clients. In a way, in the app world, if somebody gave you an embedded distribution base of a hundred million monthly active users, you'd be quite delighted. That's the analogy of one of the motivations for Accenture. There's a massive, global scale, there are some assets, there are people, but yes, it is different. I think that for most of us entrepreneurs, I think you have to be very prepared, to be patient. There are definitely differences in speed, in terms of getting things done, but I think you would trade off speed for scale. And as I said, it's been different, but for the most part, it's been a wonderful trade-off.

Paul: That's terrific. The other thing we wanted to ask you - this is from the listeners of this show - when you're evaluating an idea - and that can be for a digital business, or maybe even a tech idea from a client - do you have a framework to weed out the weaker ideas?

Narry: You know, Paul, having made quite a few investments and, of course, being in Silicon Valley for so long, you see the quest for ideas to be evaluated a lot, and I have to say, I don't have any magical, silver bullet that makes it guaranteed, but there are just a couple of very simple, common sense rules that I apply. I think that the first one is the market need big, which is obvious. I think the second one, which is perhaps a little less obvious, is it's urgently required. I think even most great entrepreneurs usually get the product market fit right; what most of us don't get right very often is timing. So what I look at and focus on a lot in terms of good or strong ideas is not just if it's a good idea, but is it an idea whose time has come. I would say time and time again, what has become clear to me is that timing might be one of the most important factors for your success. You can be right too soon.

Paul: Yes. Have you got an example of something you've done that has probably been a bad timing?

Narry: I would say... I think there's a series of companies. In fact, I would actually argue that perhaps in the late '90s I was involved with a company called Cronos One, which was one of the very early B2B marketplace companies; it was a darling of Wall Street and then it wasn't. I think as I look back somewhat more objectively over the last 13 or 15 years, I would say that our vision for marketplaces, our vision for transparency and liquidity of pricing, our vision for connected supply chains was mostly spot on. I think what we got wrong was the openness, and the adoption, and the readiness of large enterprises to buy into that vision. I think it's becoming more and more clear right now, as you look at some of these large marketplaces that enterprises are using right now, that there's a chance we might have been a decade too soon.

Paul: Right. So this is very selfish for me, because I'm a broadcaster here... I've got a setup which is less than a thousand dollars, and I'm competing with all these companies that are old radio stations, that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars investment in equipment, so broadcasting is obviously changing... What are your views on digital broadcasting, podcasting - do you have a view on the adoption of it? How is it going to look going forward?

Narry: Paul, I have to admit, I'm no expert in broadcasting; I would love to broadcast my messages more. Look, honestly, I couldn't even venture an intelligent answer. What I will say is, as a user, for the most part... You know, most of us follow great content, no matter where it is. And I think to the extent that - and it certainly sounds like you have a wonderful curation of different kinds of speakers and backgrounds, again, I think great content wins every time. It doesn't have to be the size or the nature of the equipment, as YouTube and many other open media platforms have shown. I think it's all about the content.

Paul: What sort of content or audio shows, or stuff are you reading online? Maybe you can give us one or two places to go and get the content that you're looking at.

Narry: I think it varies depending more on mood. I wish I could be more absorbed in deeply intellectual and thoughtful stuff...

Paul: Okay... You are behind Talking Tom, remember?

Narry: Yes, that's what I was going to say... I have no problem and I do not apologize for silly tastes, that's what made Talking Tom successful, people being unapologetically silly. But I will say there are a couple of things... I find Feedly incredibly important and useful in my life, I find it a wonderful way to summarize, and I like the user interface at Feedly; I think the design is clever, I think the latency of the screens in-between our flipping is wonderfully done. So I'm a fan of Feedly as a way of getting my news digested every day. I think in terms of specific content, for most of us in tech, Recode.net - which used to be Decode - by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, is one of the most insightful and, quite frankly, breaking stories you can get in tech. So there's a series of things like that that I listen to.

Paul: Great. Actually, there seem to be not enough app entrepreneur shows; I mean, I'm one of the few. It looks like we've got about five minutes or less, so what I'd love to know is if you had some free time and investment - so just imagine that you had a lot of free time and unlimited investment - what massive world problem would you try and solve now?

Narry: That's a great question, Paul. About one of them I'll tell you: it's baffling to me that with all of the information there is about what makes a good diet, that we don't teach our kids more about food. It's baffling to me that there are not mandatory classes in curriculum all over the world, that talks about what good food is, what is carbohydrates, what are proteins, why do they matter. I just think that, at a very fundamental level, something that's so critical to the quality of individual's lives... And this is one, but I would say that I'd focus a lot on education about food and, quite frankly, make it more fun to be healthy.

Paul: Actually, one of the founders of Fit Men Cook will be listening to this... I was involved in the launch of that, helped out a little bit, and it reached number two in the AppStore, beating Minecraft, and it's constantly featured by Apple. So it does show that recipe apps, and trying to do the right thing, eating well - there's a demand for it. Would you agree?

Narry: I'm delighted to hear that. I didn't know much about the show, but I'm delighted and I certainly will check it out.

Paul: Okay. Finally then, just to squeeze another one in... Have we still got enough time? I know you have to rush off to a client meeting, Narry.

Narry: I do, in fact I just got to the door of the building; that's very kind of you.

Paul: This is wonderful. I mean, we're broadcasting and you are rushing to a client meeting. Can I squeeze one more question in?

Narry: Absolutely.

Paul: Do you see large organizations partnering more with lean startups? How do you see that whole integration, because you talked about the large resources of big organizations, but the nimbleness of startups - do you see more collaboration?

Narry: Definitely, and I think that's one of the more exciting areas of work that our team does - helping large companies get the best innovation from startups, but at the same time also helping startups to have scale, and leverage the distribution, the assets, the brand, the local geographic knowledge of large companies. I mean, look, I think large companies have struggled, for the most part, to get the best out of startups and vice-versa; these are different worlds, different cultures, different speeds, different urgencies, different motivations, quite frankly. But I think the time is upon us. There's a plethora of large companies doing everything from hackathons, to accelerators and corporate venture capital funds, and what have you. So we spend a lot of time figuring out what is the right engagement model for startups, but I'm very bullish about the idea that, for a certain species of startups that are at a certain stage where the technology risk is not that high, large company partnerships and, in fact, large company exits could be one of the most interactive things over the next five years, as the public markets dry up and as funding certainly seems to be getting a little bit more sensible in evaluations.

Paul: That is wonderful. Well, I'll let you go then... The last thing, how can people reach out and connect? Do you have any social media accounts that we could post in the show notes?

Narry: Absolutely. I would say the easiest thing is @Narry_Singh on Twitter.

How To Accelerate Your App For A Mobile First World

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. This is your host, I'm Paul Kemp. This is the show where we go around the world and meet CEOs, founders of just the most amazing app journeys that we can find, and it really does help us out in our journeys because we learn from these people. I'm actually delighted to be joined today by someone who is really supporting this show. He is Jeff Kim, he is the CEO of Neumob. Neumob - you would have heard me talking about that quite a bit recently, so I really wanted to get Jeff on and dive deeper into Neumob. So Jeff Kim, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Jeff: Paul, I'm very happy to be speaking with you. Thank you for taking the time.

Paul: Thanks for coming on. First of all, let's just jump straight into Neumob - what is Neumob and how can it help the app entrepreneurs and developers  that listen to this show?

Jeff: Sure. Neumob, our tagline is 'App acceleration for a mobile-first world', and in short, what we do is we make apps faster, on both wireless networks and Wi-Fi. We increase the speed of load times and wireless transmissions faster so that users have a better app experience.

Paul: Alright, that's a great tagline. How did you come up with the idea? You must have obviously been in the field of mobile. Talk us through your inspiration for this idea.

Jeff: Terrific, yes; I would love to say it was hatched in my brain, but it was actually much more pragmatic than that. Customers came to us and started seeking this kind of solution. I've been in the CDN (Content Delivery Network) space for the better half of 16 years, and in that space it's all about making websites faster. But along the way customers started coming and telling us, "Hey, our websites are fast enough. Can somebody help us with our app performance?" and we therefore figured out that there was no solution in the marketplace. That's how Neumob was born.

Paul: Okay, so you were saying that customers were coming to you - was this you in your company, or were you working for someone else?

Jeff: I was the president and COO of a company called CDNetworks a while ago, and actually the specific customer family was Beats by DRE, before they got acquired by Apple. They were very mobile-focused, mobile app and e-mail. All they wanted to do was focus on the app experience, and they specifically asked for a solution like this, and they surveyed the market and there was no solution. As we talked to more and more customers, we figured out that they had the same kind of pain.

Paul: Did DRE take an investment in the company by any chance?

Jeff: No, no. After the Apple acquisition, I think they went on their own separate journey.

Paul: The reason I ask is two years ago we had a chat with a guy who got some money from 50 Cent to start his startup, and he ended getting two million downloads. So the thing I've learned from you already, Jeff, and anyone can take this away in their own journeys, is to just listen to customer feedback, what they're asking for and build something that people want. It seems to make sense.

Jeff: You know, it's how the old business works, you just listen to the market, and the market is creative enough to tell you what they need and what they are looking for.

Paul: So what sort of customers are you working with? For anyone listening, do you cover the whole spectrum of small startups in the entrepreneurs and app developers right through to the big guys? Give us an idea of who should be using Neumob.

Jeff: Absolutely, we do cover the entire spectrum, and I'll start off with the small startups and the indie folks. If you come to our website, Neumob.com, there's actually a startup package, and you can use our service, you download the SDK, you put it into your app, you get a hundred gigabytes - which is a significant amount for a startup. We're happy to serve the startup community that way. Our core business is actually selling to enterprise apps; these are the big names like LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Groupon; all of those app-centric companies who want to make sure that their apps are lightning fast for their end users around the globe.

Paul: How much faster would you predict the apps get when they are using Neumob?

Jeff: Right now, what we're seeing is within 4G LTE cities like San Francisco and New York, is a 40% speed boost for their apps, based on the current benchmarks. When you start going into 3G areas or even 4G not LTE, or even just faraway places for us like Australia or Germany, India - you start seeing 400% speed improvements, which is obviously significant for a business.

Paul: And I was just wondering, what do developers need to do to put Neumob on their app? You talked about an SDK - is there a lot of stuff to learn to put this in, or is it pretty easy?

Jeff: It's very easy. We know that app developers out there are facing 'SDK-fatigue'. there's an SDK for everything these days, with ads and analytics and all of that. Our differentiator is that our SDK actually has a very unique value proposition, in the fact that it will capture all of your wireless traffic and speed it up. For most customers, it’s two lines of code, and it just redirects all of your traffic to our SDK layer and starts working our magic to make everything faster.

Paul: And do you support third-party software as well? I'm thinking some of the app building tools out there, like Titanium, for example, or is it more for the core development?

Jeff: We want to support all of them. Obviously for native iOS and Android - that's functioning; we've just announced support for Unity about two weeks ago. We'll be launching our Web Bean support, Cordova, and the list goes on. We want to make this accessible for every app developer out there.

Paul: Also, Jeff, have you done any research on the difference it makes to retaining users by having a faster app? Is there something you've done to help us understand the benefits of actually giving users a faster app?

Jeff: That's a great question. I will say that's one of the more exciting pieces in the industry right now, that we're collecting that information with our customers for their business KPIs right now. A lot of the learning that we've come to along this way are from the website world, and in the website world, big companies like Wal-Mart and Google have published studies that even a one-second difference converts into 25% more revenue, and there are similar metrics/stats there. What our friends over in the mobile app side have figured out is that those same metrics and those same revenue increases are translating over into mobile. One of the things that our marketing team is planning to do over the next year is to start collecting those metrics with our customers, leading the charge on producing those benchmarks. In the same way that on your desktop you expect things to load in under two seconds, mobile apps are going to be the same way with regard to expectations from users.

Paul: Jeff, we've covered a lot about Neumob, I'd love to know about you as well personally, because this show is also about the inspiration that we get from the CEO and the founders that we talk to. How much fun is it - I guess it's a strange question, but what's it like running your own company, and would you recommend that for other potential entrepreneurs that are listening?

Jeff: Wow, that's a big question. I would say this has been a blast. It's incredibly fun, but I'll tell you - you've heard this adage before - some days are sheer terror and the other days are sheer ecstasy, that's the kind of spectrum that you run. I will say especially in this mobile app market, because the ecosystem and the market is just opening up, we're learning so much every day. I mentioned before that I worked in a corporate IT, CDN, core operations in IT, but the mobile app world is brand spanking new, and it's just so much fun learning stuff every day, as the market develops.

Paul: And Jeff, I've had a lot of people who have actually listened to this show and made a change in their life, in their career, they've moved over to startups, moved over to the entrepreneurial world - is there anything you can give us to help us overcome the fear of leaving a corporate role and starting our own thing? Because that's one of the biggest hurdles we get. Sometimes it's just too big a jump to take. How can you help us understand what you went through to make that jump?

Jeff: Well, I'm probably gonna give you a little different perspective on that. I'm not a B2C person, I've always been a B2B person, and on that front - it's kind of what we've alluded to earlier in the conversation - you really want to see that there is actual customer demand and market demand before you start developing this kind of stuff on the B2B side. Whereas on the B2C side, obviously it's massively more exciting; you know, you get a WhatsApp, or you get an Instagram and all of that. Personally, I don't know how that market works all that well, so I won't be an expert on that, but on the B2B side, if you have customers and you see a need and you can fill it, you should jump and take a look. But it does come with experience and knowing your market very well.

Paul: Yes, actually a lot of people do talk about B2C (Business to Consumer), but you're doing B2B. Would you say that it actually may be a little bit more profitable to be in B2B? I think a lot of people overlook it, but do you think it's wise for anyone listening to actually consider that kind of market, or do you need a special network to enter B2B?

Jeff: No, I think B2B is always more pragmatic, because you're selling to other businesses and enterprises, and they come with budgets, so it should be considered. I think one way to get into this, and I've seen a lot of my Silicon Valley brothers and sisters do this, is to go with development tools. So there are deep linking companies, a lot of analytics companies. One way to do that, which is kind of B2C-ish, is to serve the developer community, and kind of learn the ropes that way, and eventually get into the enterprise, once you have more market requirements.

Paul: Yes, and from your perspective then, what are you seeing the big challenge is for small startups that are mobile-first and only mobile? What are in your perspective the big hurdles and challenges that we face in our businesses?

Jeff: As of late, as everyone has seen, the market definitely has cooled down. Here in the epicenter of venture capital, I think you're definitely seeing a cooling-down season. So just like anything else, there's summer and there's winter, and right now we're kind of entering into winter, so even more caution has to be played in having a sound proposition for adding actual customers, and then have a plan for revenue and profit.

Paul: Yes, because Jeff, one of the big things that we've done over the 427 odd episodes before you on this show is to try to get to the raw truth, unravel the onion, overcome the hype and get to the real situation. So you mentioned that we're all going through a cooling down period - what sort of indicators are you seeing to suggest that we're cooling down?

Jeff: I guess I have a good vantage point, the fact that we're pretty much like six miles away from Sand Hill Road, where all the VCs are. I also have the benefit that during our fundraising, we actually had 14 different investors in Neumob, so being able to survey them, talk to them, ask them "What are the market conditions? What are your recommendations and advice?". They were very good with giving me that feedback. My conclusion on this is pretty much an aggregation of data that our investors here in the Valley are telling me.

Paul: Right. And actually, you mentioned fundraising as well, so another big question I often get is how to actually go through fundraising - any tips that we can have? You've just gone through that - is there anything you could help us with to understand how we can improve our ability to fundraise.

Jeff: The honest truth is there is no one way. It's hard. By the conclusion of our Series A, I had talked to 66 investors, up and down Sand Hill Road and in San Francisco. The first 20 had rejected me, so I guess one thing is persistence and courage to keep going if you truly believe in your business. You will get rejected. On the flip side of that, you've got to listen to the rejections, and listen to why they are passing on you and what's going on. That helps you work out your business model. The final piece obviously now is you've got to get in their network; you can't throw in a business plan onto a website or put up an e-mail address. It's who you know, or who that person introduces you to. That's the way it's done.

Paul: Yes, and I'm guessing actually your location is pretty handy as well, the fact that it's on your doorstep. Do you think that's critical to actually running a successful app business, to be based in Silicon Valley?

Jeff: I don't think it's necessary to run an app business, but I will say that it definitely helps raise funding, because people are people, and the VCs are people as well. They want to see you, and they want to shake your hand. You know, if you're anywhere remote, it's going to be difficult for that personal interaction. Because, at the end of the day, they're writing you a check and trusting you with this money, so that old physical, personal thing needs to be there.

Paul: So Jeff, there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that I go out to the audience just before we're about to have a chat, just to see if there are any question, and Quentin Smith wants to know what it is you have to do with the SDK, and I guess he wants to know does it actually speed up performance? You've kind of addressed that, but how involved is the amount of code that you need to put in in the SDK?

Jeff: A very good question. It really is one line, it's “Initialize Neumob”, for both Android and iOS. That's pretty much it.

Paul: That's great. So really then, you don't actually need to be a coder to be able to use Neumob.

Jeff: That's correct.

Paul: The other one is from Morten F., who's a student and iOS developer. He wants to know... 70% to 90% of latency in mobile application occurs in the mobile mile, which is the distance between your outer edge and your user device. Is that where you're really tackling the speeding up of the apps, through the mobile mile?

Jeff: Yes, great question. Absolutely. Our real differentiator is the fact that we're increasing throughput over wireless networks, be it O2, or Vodafone, or Verizon here in the states. We didn't too much about the technology, but what we actually do is once you invoke that SDK, it captures all of your wireless traffic, we convert it from standard TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the internet, into our proprietary UDP protocol, where we can do special things to maximize throughput. So there's some hardcore technology underneath that bundle line of “Initialize Neumob”, where we change the protocol. We enable our own special routing so that we can maximize how much data goes up and down the wireless signals.

Paul: Yes, because I can imagine that... I mean, how much of a percentage of traffic do you think are actually using their apps and smartphones through wireless and mobile, rather than broadband?

Jeff: There's plenty of market research out there, yet one of the things I've said in the past is everyone talks about mobile-first. Well, you have to be thinking global-first.. If you’re going to serve the next billion users, well those next billion users are not in the UK, and they're not in the US. They're in places like India, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America - and they have jumped past the desktop stage and they're going straight to mobile, and all of those mobile users run 3G networks.

Paul: And the final thing, Jeff, is we love to get tips from our guests. Without touching your phone, do you have an app or an online tool, or a tip for us to help us with our own app entrepreneur journeys?

Jeff: Sure. One of the tools that we use a lot is a tool called Aro. It's freely available, and it's produced by AT&T. What it actually does is it analyze all of your network traffic. So you plug your Android device or whatnot into your laptop, and you run it through Aro and it shows you all the different network calls that your app is calling. I encourage our customers to actually do this, to see, "Wow, my app is making all these different calls". It helps you to figure out why things are slow, and why there are so many dependencies to make your app work better.

Paul: That's a great tip. On episode 428 there will be a link to Aro. Jeff, it's been a great chat. I want to make sure that everyone listening does have the opportunity - they can go to Neumob.com obviously, then there's full show notes at Episode 428 on theappguy.co, just search for Episode 428 with Jeff Kim. Jeff, how best can people try this, try Neumob, reach out to you and connect? What's the best way of getting in touch with you guys?

Jeff: If you're a startup, just come to Neumob.com, download the SDK and give it a try. If not, again, just come to Neumob.com and contact us and we'll reach out to you.

The Hottest Startup Vying For Most Hype At SXSW16

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. This is a special and great episode - episode 432. I get to speak with co-founders, founders from around the world, and today I've got a co-founder of a really cool app. It's an app that I've been playing with for over a year in beta, it's an app that has absolutely crushed it on ProductHunt, had a massive launch recently, a long time waiting. We're all going to learn a ton, so if you're an app entrepreneur, an app founder, a startup founder, just interested in apps and do side projects, this is the podcast for you. Let me introduce to you the co-founder of Anchor - this is a great app that I've been playing with - his name is Mike Mignano. Mike, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Mike: Thank you, Paul. I'm excited to finally talk to you as well. As you said, it's been a while.

Paul: Yes, so for everyone listening, we connected over a year ago now, and you had Anchor and then you basically took the decision to go into beta and have a really long timeline for iterating the app and doing a beta, and you have now had a massive launch. So tell us what that year was like for you.

Mike: Sure, so I think around the time when we reached out to you, we had only just created the beta shortly beforehand; it was probably around a year ago at this point, maybe in February or March 2015. And when you have a beta, you naturally want to get feedback from people who you think will understand and appreciate the product, so I think the way we found you is we were looking around for people who had podcasts, people who were used to recording their voice and comfortable recording their voice, we discovered your podcast and loved it, so I think we just sort of cold reached out to you, and that's how we got talking. But I think shortly after that we realized that the product maybe wasn't quite ready for as many people as we initially thought, so we got back to working on the product and iterating on the product. We worked on it for a really long time, almost a year since we initially kicked off the beta.

Paul: Let's talk about the product, Mike. I look at it as recording bite-sized podcasts that anyone can join, but tell us in your words what is Anchor.

Mike: Sure, so we like to think of Anchor as radio by the people. There's this concept of radio that's been around for about a hundred years; we all know what it is, we've all been hearing it our entire lives, but radio has always been something that only certain people can realistically contribute to. It's always been something that you can only really break into if you are a professional broadcaster, or if you had some really expensive equipment, or you understood the tricks of the trade. Then podcasts came along, and podcasts were great because they helped break down some of the barriers, but they're still just not something that every person can do easily. I can tell you this from my own personal experience; I wanted to create a podcast, and I found it to be pretty difficult. So I think that was the initial idea for Anchor - we realized that this was a process that more and more people were interested in, yet there still wasn't an easy way to do it, and that gave us the idea for Anchor. We said, "Hey, let's democratize the voice-recording and sharing process. Let's make tools that are extremely simple, and let's make a medium that is more closely similar to how we all communicate in real-life, in person: we talk, we listen, we have a conversation, and let's make Anchor conversational. So let's take radio, let's take podcast, let's make them easy to contribute to, easy to consume, and let's make them conversational, just like having a normal human conversation."

Paul: So Mike, when you were starting working on the beta, what were the big changes that you made as a result of the feedback that you got? Because you guys were changing so much stuff, it was wonderful watching you. What were the big takeaways over the year that you worked on it?

Mike: I'd say one of the biggest, and probably the one that's most obvious in the product and the one that people probably the most exposure to is the time limit for waves - in Anchor, we call recordings waves. We initially launched the beta, the very first v1 of the beta and we didn't have a time limit for waves, we just left if completely open-ended. We figured, you know, these people aren't professional podcast creators, so naturally the audio that they record will be short, and bite-sized and easily consumable. We actually found that that wasn't the case. When people didn't have a time-limit, they just talked forever. We found that to be a bit problematic, because given that these people don't have broadcasting training, given that they're not professionals, giving them a completely open space and open canvas to work with would ultimately lead to content that wasn't super-interesting. So we took a look at all the waves that we had in the early beta and we identified the best ones, the ones that we believe to be the best ones, and we saw that the duration of these waves was on average around a minute and a half. So we said, "Okay, let's try two minutes", and that's where the two minutes came from, and it seemed to work. It seemed like that would be enough time for people to say what they want to say, but it was also short enough that it encouraged them to be concise, speak quickly and get their thoughts out there, so that's where that came from.

Paul: Mike, it's great because I'm seeing a lot of people connecting with me now on Anchor, a lot of people that I follow and recognize. You had just a terrific launch, particularly on ProductHunt, which has, if I remember, over a thousand upvotes. I just wondered if you could talk through the launch, it's one of the big challenges we all face when creating apps. How did you prepare for your launch, and then ultimately how did you actually go about launching?

Mike: Sure, so we've been active members of the ProductHunt community for a while now. I've been going to that site for a while now, and upvoting products that I liked, and commenting; I even had submitted a few of my own prior to Anchor, and I knew how important it was for an early product - especially one that's community-driven - to have a presence on ProductHunt on launch date. So we actually put a lot of preparation into our ProductHunt launch. We had a friend and actually also an investor at Anchor, Matt Hartman, we had him post Anchor to ProductHunt early that morning of launch - I think it was at 6 AM Eastern - and we immediately jumped on there with a comment. We had also prepared images and graphics that we'd add to the page to make the page look alive and enticing, and we just stayed engaged on there all throughout the day. I was pretty much glued to ProductHunt all day, answering questions through comments, making sure people felt like they could talk to me. I think it was a combination of a product that people really liked and the sort of openness that we put out there through the comments on ProductHunt that lead to such a successful ProductHunt launch.

Paul: Mike, I actually did have a previous app I worked on and we launched on ProductHunt and we managed to get to the number one in the music category for the app. I just wondered - what impact do you feel that that launch on ProductHunt had on your position within the AppStore? Are you able to tell where you ended up on the AppStore as a result of the successful launch?

Mike: It's really hard to say exactly where it put us or where it helped us get, but I'm definitely confident that it had something to do with it, absolutely. I think those early community members, especially those who were so passionate about products and trying things out, I think people like that are instrumental early on, in the early days of a product and especially on launch day. So I don't know where it put us in the charts, but I know that ProductHunt had a lot to do with us having such a big first day.

Paul: What I'm learning from you - because we love to try to dissect your success so that we can emulate it - is that I guess having a large or long beta, and having a lot of community already established, when you do have the app hit the AppStore, you're getting a lot of immediate downloads from that community, which then propels you up the charts. Is that fair?

Mike: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but what you're saying makes sense. I think we did have a large community of people - not an astronomically large amount of people, but we had our own, small, tight, little community that was excited for us. They were excited for us to launch, they had been waiting for a long time for us to launch, and so the day we did launch they were excited to help in any way they could, whether that be telling a friend, or telling multiple friends, or getting inside of Anchor on day one and helping create some content that some new users could interact with. So yes, I think you make a great point. I think not only is that early beta group totally pivotal in getting that early feedback and helping shape the product, but they're also really important for launch day, in helping make the most out of your launch.

Paul: Mike, one of the other things that we often experience ourselves as app entrepreneurs is we have the post-launch blues, where you've had a terrific launch, you've hit the charts, you've had a lot of downloads, and then momentum seems to tail off. Have you seen a dip now after the launch? Have you got any kinds of press release, PR strategy to keep the momentum going?

Mike: We're not doing any sort of publicity, or press strategy, or anything like that, and I can honestly say that the momentum has sustained up until this point, and maybe even increased. I think it's because of the type of content that's coming out of Anchor. People record this voice content, they put it out there on the internet, they put it on Twitter, maybe they share it on a medium blog post or something like that, and because the content of Anchor is interactive, I think that content is naturally sucking more people back in. So we haven't experienced the lull that you're talking about that. That said, I've worked on plenty of products before and I do know that that lull does come after a launch, and I'm sure we'll experience it just like everyone else does, maybe very soon. But for now, it's been about two weeks and we're still experiencing a lot of momentum. We're working constantly, around the clock almost, to keep the servers up and running, keep the website operating, listening to our users both in Anchor and on Twitter and through e-mail, and fixing bugs and building out new features that the community is asking us for.

Paul: I get a lot of questions about funding and how to go about it. Do you have any tips in regards to your experience, on how you raised funding?

Mike: The reason we decided to raise money, and not everyone chooses to take this path, and I think it's important that whatever it is you're doing, you take the path that's right for you. But we decided to raise money because there came a point in the early days of Anchor, probably shortly after you and I came in contact with each other, where Nir and I both realized we really wanted to make a run at this, we really wanted to go for it. And to go for it meant we had to be working on it full-time. In the early days of Anchor, we were not working on it full-time. We had other jobs, we were working on it at night, we were working on it very, very early in the morning, before having to go to our full-time jobs, and we realized that to got for it we couldn't sustain that schedule. We couldn't maintain working on it as a side project, we had to put a hundred percent of our effort into it. And neither of us were in a personal situation in which we could support that lifestyle financially, neither of us had those means to do that. So we realized if we want to make a go at Anchor full-time, we're gonna have to go and raise money to be able to support this endeavor, and that's ultimately how and why we decided to go and seek out fundraising.

Paul: That is wonderful, because you did actually quite a few interesting projects beforehand. Have you got a quick snapshot of what you did before Anchor?

Mike: Sure. I was originally a computer science major and came out of college working for a couple of consulting firms, but then realized that I really wanted to work in an industry that I was very passionate about, and I've always been passionate about music and audio, so I got a job as a freelance web engineer for Atlantic Records, the record label here in New York, and I ended up working with them for about five years before deciding to go off into the startup land, and I joined a company called Aviary. Aviary is a company that has a really great and really simple photo-editing app for iPhone and Android, as well as a photo-editing SDK. So I worked as a head of product there for a couple of years before the company was acquired by Adobe, and then I went on to work for Adobe for a little while before leaving and starting...

Paul: Yes, Aviary was massively successful, it was everywhere. In fact, I think I even use it within SquareSpace, so it must be adopted as a third-party solution for a lot of different options.

[00:16:22.21] commercial break [00:18:40.04]

Paul: Mike, there's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that we would love to know about you and whether... You know, you've just made the decision to go for Anchor full-time, a year ago or so. I wanted to know, because others are inspired by the guests we have on this show - is it worth it? Is it worth all the pain, all the agony? Would you recommend life and an app entrepreneur?

Mike: For me personally yes, without a doubt; I can say yes, it is worth it. I have always been someone that's wanted to pursue starting my own company, starting my own business, building my own product from scratch, I've always wanted to do that. Now that I've done it, I wonder why it took me so long. But I know that that's a hard decision to make; I even struggled with it, as confident as I was in Anchor, and the idea, and the mission, and what we believed about the product, even I struggled with making the decision, because I had never taken a risk like that before. And there are things that you always hear, that people worry about when they're going to take a risk like that, and I had all the same worries and fears that everyone else did, but I can honestly say that once I've taken the risk, once I've gone for it, there hasn't really been one time since doing it that I've looked back and questioned my decision, or questioned whether or not it was the right move. I can't say that that's going to work for everyone; everyone has their own, personal situation, their own set of responsibilities, and I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I was able to make this work in my life, taking this risk with it, but not everyone might be in that position. I absolutely would say it was worth it for me, and I think it's one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life, especially in terms of my career.

Paul: And what is it you love about what you do? If you had to think about one or two things that stand out as being a co-founder, what is it?

Mike: I've always been someone that likes to create things. I've been a musician my whole life and I've loved creating music. I've also been a photographer and I've dabbled in art and painting as well, and I've always loved creating things, and putting them out there into the world. With Anchor, and specifically building apps and creating apps, I love it so much because I get to create something that someone else can interact with and get value out of in their own life. And when it's something that for at least some people has a very positive impact on them, or their life, or their entertainment, or their enjoyment in some way, I think there's nothing better than that - just to know that you can make some tiny, small difference in someone else's life with something that you create. I think that's the best part of it.

Paul: I love it. So the final thing is I want to try to figure out how people should be using Anchor, in your mind. So if anyone's listening to this and wants to know whether they're suitable for using Anchor, what kind of user cases do you find get most value from Anchor?

Mike: I'm hesitant to say anything too specific because what we really want from Anchor is for people to just feel like they can be themselves, like they can just talk and say whatever they want to say to anyone, anywhere in the world. And in doing that, it opens up the door for anyone else to respond, and engage in a real, human conversation with that person. So initially, when we first started talking about Anchor, I would say the type of content that would be most successful on Anchor is the same type of content that would be successful on the radio, but I don't really say that anymore because I don't want anyone to have any sort of preconceived notion about what it is they should or shouldn't be saying on Anchor. I just want them to be themselves and say whatever comes natural to them.

Paul: Yes, because I guess the other thing which we didn't touch on, but is absolutely obvious, is it's a real platform. On Twitter, all the celebrities have departments running their Twitter accounts, but with Anchor there's a realism that you get when hearing someone's voice, and genuineness. Is that right?

Mike: Absolutely. I think it's a special medium; I think voice is a special medium that carries a different type of weight than the weight that text, or photo, or video carries. I think when you hear someone's voice, it comes with so much nuance and emotion, and I find that that's something that gets lost in other mediums. My friend Matt Hartman and Betaworks investor likes to say there's something very special about having someone's voice speaking directly into your ear. It makes you feel like you know that person, even if they're on the other side of the world, and I think Anchor can do that for people, and I think voice is special.

Paul: Well, it's been a wonderful chat. Everyone listening, they can go to episode 432 on theappguy.co and get full links to Anchor and Mike and Nir. In the meantime, Mike, how best can people reach out and connect with you? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Mike: I think the best way, naturally, is to go into Anchor and search for my full name, Michael Mignano in Anchor and we can talk on there. I've been talking to a lot of our users on Anchor every single day, and it's great to just have these real conversations with people. Of course, I can also be found on Twitter, @mignano, or you can reach out to Anchor on Twitter, @anchor.

Paul: Wonderful. Mike, it's so terrific chatting with you about Anchor, an app that I absolutely love and highly recommend. Everyone should be downloading it, playing with it. Thanks for coming on the show and talking about Anchor!

Mike: Thank you, Paul. I'm really glad we were able to talk.