An Interview With Breanden Beneschott : Co-founder of Toptal

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

Breanden: Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: That's inspirational, wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breanden: Awesome, thank you very much.

The future of your messaging apps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: It does sound like that, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Startups Raise Funding Through An App

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

Lex: Hey Paul, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: Alright, okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lex: He's nailed it.

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

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

Clammr : Instagram For Audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Netflix Style App For Kids Aged 9 - 11 Years Old

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

Estelle: Hello.

Douglas: Hi, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Estelle: We're big fans...

Douglas: Yes, they're great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas: It is a shame, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul: That's wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disruptive Entrepreneurs And Their Investors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I feel the same way.

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

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

We Have Helped Generate About 750 Million Dollars For Our Clients

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[commercial break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracy: Yes, absolutely.

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

Tracy: Me too.

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

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

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

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

Making Great Audio Accessible By Bridging It To Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parviz: I think there were a couple moments. One is we - maybe a little earlier than we should have - but we just went to a trade show not long into some of our development - this was last year, New Media Expo, which is part of the National Association of Broadcasters. New Media Expo was kind of the biggest podcaster conference in the US. It's now defunct, so I'm glad we got in that last year, but great gathering of podcasters, and we said "Let's go a bit native with the audio community and really just expose what we're doing and get feedback. That was one great breakout moment because we just got a lot of great feedback from the community and really got to know the community well. And we came in really just with our ears open, that was really primarily the reason we were there. And one big breakout there was just to learn that this problem of discovery was a really big deal. We actually even ended up doing a survey of podcasters afterwards, publishing an article about it, and that really helped in terms of building a core community. We had some podcasters even start a private Facebook group for Clammr power users, that we participate in. We got this kind of core group who started giving us feedback, and that helped really solidify our thinking to say "Look, this really needs to be something that's a social layer and a discovery layer, and not a destination-type move." Because we'd certainly had in our minds, in an ideal world, from where David and I had started from, if I could wave a magic wand I'd have an app, just turn it on and it has all the content in it for me already. But again, if you're in 2015, 2016, that's hard to make happen when people are already spending a lot of their time and energy as content creators on existing social platforms. So that really was one moment, getting that feedback from the community and really helping shape our direction. The other really came this past December, January, when a set of our partners started embedding this Clammr button into their players, and we saw a lot of increased creation and exposure from that. So folks like Blubrry with PowerPress player, Libsyn, Simple Podcast Press, Awesound, some of these other great folks.

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

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

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

Parviz: Well, one thing I'd actually... It's not a tip from having done this well, it's more looking back in retrospect and giving feedback to ourselves, is I'd say starting as early as possible would be incredibly helpful for building a community, and here's a part of what I mean by that: I think when we started really engaging with the community is when we had an early beta version of Clammr, and we had something that we could show people. And that's great, but I think we could have helped ourselves even more by simply participating as active members of the community and not being shy earlier, like six months earlier, and just establishing ourselves as thoughtful people on the topic of audio, on the topic of podcasting. Because then you can really kind of be more peer-like with people, where you're in the same boat with them, rather than "I have something, I want you to try it out." While I think the podcasting community is one that's just been incredibly open and collaborative, there's always an aspect of, you know, when you have yet another app, people are busy and there are a lot of apps, and they think "Oh, you just want me to download your app", right? There's a little bit of a fence that goes up, at least with some people. So I think just participating in the community without even having anything is a great way to just build a bunch of friendships in a peer network, before doing anything else. So even things like publishing articles, running a newsletter - those can be incredibly helpful. After we went live, we published a [unintelligible 00:16:29] in TechCrunch over the summer, and then another one over the winter. Those were great, those were actually great relationship-building tools. People would write to us and they would share their thoughts with us, and we'd have these back-and-forths, and we'd actually build a set of very good relationships. There's no reason why we couldn't have done that before having an app out there. So that would be my biggest tip: engage early, not just when you have something that you want people to try out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation Is The Wild Card That Drives Positive Change In Our Society, Economy, And Day-To-Day Lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: I feel the same way.

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

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

From Impossible To Inevitable (e.g. $1m to $100m)

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is a show where we get experts who help us with our businesses - it could be app businesses, mobile businesses, whatever it is, but it's a wonderful world and we learn from the guests who we get on because they help us with our own revenue, with our own startups. I've got a great guest here; he is basically the author of Predictable Revenue, which is a book that took an outbound process from Salesforce - you know Salesforce, you would have heard of them - and this process that they helped achieve added another hundred million dollars to the revenue, so it's definitely a book worth reading. Also, there's a new book from this author, Aaron Ross, and the book is called From Impossible to Inevitable, which we're going to touch on today. So Aaron Ross, welcome to The App Guy Podcast!

Aaron: Hi Paul, happy to be here.

Paul: First of all, let's talk about your new book that's coming out, because you are going to help a lot of app entrepreneurs, people that are running their own businesses. What is From Impossible to Inevitable all about?

Aaron: Right, and I think it's out in the United States, but I heard March 9th is when it's more publicly available in the UK.

Paul: Actually, Aaron, this is probably going to go live after or around about that date, so that could be really good timing

Aaron: Perfect. Well, the new book is called From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. It's really a book that, between myself and my co-author, Jason Lemkin - he is a guy who started a company called EchoSign, and he grew  it from zero to more than a hundred million dollars, as well as selling it to Adobe - so all these lessons learned around what does it take for companies to speed up how fast they grow, but even more importantly, what are all those mistakes that everybody makes time and time and time again, and how to avoid those.

Paul: So your co-author then actually created a company called EchoSign and sold that to Adobe for one hundred million dollars did you say?

Aaron: Yeah, well he grew it to more than a hundred million in revenue and he sold it to Adobe for more than nine figures; it's not a public amount, but it's...

Paul: So what is he doing? Why is he not on a beach?

Aaron: He is a machine. He's created something called SaaStr, it's basically the world's biggest community of SaaS (Software as a Service) companies on the planet, it's really growing fast. So now he does these huge conferences in the Bay Area called SaaStr Annuals, where thousands of the top B2B SaaS entrepreneurs come. They actually just finished, it's usually like every February. It's amazing, it's like the single biggest concentration of tech entrepreneurs that are I guess on the leading edge of [unintelligible 00:04:03] how to grow things.

Paul: You know Aaron, this is what I love about this show, is that you start to unravel what drives people, and a lot of people when coming into entrepreneurship feel it's about the money, but clearly sometimes it's not; it's about your legacy, it's about making a change in the world. Do you have any thoughts on why it is that people run businesses, try to sell them on - is it about the money or is it about something bigger?

Aaron: Well, it's both. It's partly about the money, and then if you don't need money then it's probably about status; it's also probably about having something to do. If you're a natural entrepreneur, usually sitting on a beach for more than... You can do that for a little bit, but you're just getting antsy and you want to be doing something. Part of it is giving back, and a lot of what drives Jason, for example, and probably myself, you see the same mistakes, whether it's the app world or the B2B world - people make the same mistakes, over and over and over. And we're both - I don't know exactly how old he is, let's call it 40-45, and we've been around long enough to see again the new generation of younger entrepreneurs who are in their twenties or in their thirties making the same mistakes we'd made once or twice. Part of it actually for me is that we get the same questions over and over again, and we're like "Why don't we put these into a book?" so people can just read the book, avoid these landmines. I guarantee this will be a million-dollar book for many people, because it will save them so much money, time and heartache.

Paul: What are the common mistakes? One of the things that we try to help on this show is we try to prevent entrepreneurs from losing a lot of money, in fact, losing everything. Because you know, in the app business people get very excited, they start to think of...

Aaron: Oh yeah, dreaming of what if a million people bought this and...

Paul: Exactly, yes.

Aaron: Yes, so there's seven parts to the new book. The new book is really for anyone if you already have something - you may not be making money with it, but if you've got something and you're trying to figure how to make money, or how to make more money, it's a good fit. A bit different than my prior book, Predictable Revenue, which is really more of a sales book. This book is a growth book, and there are seven parts. The first part is really going to be the most important part for almost everybody listening, and anyone who does apps. The first part - and each part - has a painful truth, and the first one is "You're not ready to grow." You might be struggling to grow [unintelligible 00:06:18] because you're not ready, and you're not going to be able to grow faster until you nail a niche. That's where you start. I think this is the most common problem we see across so many companies, especially early, but also big companies like SAP and Oracle. It's about nailing a niche, it's focusing on the specific kind of customer who most needs what you've got, avoiding the nice-to-haves, like where are your need-to-have, what do they care about and how much is it worth to them, why would they pay money to you. And that's trickier than people realize.

Paul: You see, on this show we've had a lot of entrepreneurs come on, and we've had examples of something blowing up really quickly. For example, there was a BuzzFeed article last year that suddenly got 60 million posts, we've had apps that have gone and got a hundred million downloads within the space of a few months, and clearly the whole business has blown up, but what do you mean by "You are not ready to grow"? I mean, if anyone is in that situation where they are getting rapid expansion, lots of interest in their app business for example, what sort of lessons should we be learning from that kind of thing where you're not ready for this?

Aaron: Well look, most of the people, 99.9% of the people who listen won't have that problem, of "How do we keep up with this huge growth?" So let's start there. This is part one. Part two would be for the people who get a ton of growth and they're either like "How do we keep it up?" or "How do we make money?" But again, for the 999 people out of a thousand who don't have this problem of "Oh, I have so many people banging down my servers are crashing", people struggle with like "I got this app. I've got it." They launch it and there's crickets. They get ten downloads, or a hundred downloads, or a thousand downloads, rather than the 50,000 or a million that they need to have some kind of viable model. You know, a lot of the challenge around entrepreneurs and getting a new thing off the ground - and this is true whether it's a new app, whether it's a new market, because in UK it could be different than US, or whether it's a new kind of lead generation program - we find entrepreneurs vastly underestimate the time and effort and iteration it takes to get it right, to get it to the point where the customers not only are interested in it, but they download it, they use it and they love it. In the software world, it usually takes two or three years - in B2B software - to go from starting a company, to getting it up and running, to getting customers and to get the product to the point where you're like "Yes, there's a viable business here, and we can see a path to growing in a way where it's not a flash in the pan." It takes way longer, and it's way harder than people expect.

Paul: In this show we really do try to take an onion and unravel it, so that we get to the genuine truth, because there's so much misinformation out there for people listening, entrepreneurs. We've had people on this show who have quit corporate jobs to go and follow a dream, and it's just so nice to hear you talk about a two to three-year time period at the very minimum for something to perhaps work.

Aaron: Yes, and especially if you're a first-time app person, you're selling something in the consumer space, which is a little bit more possible big hit, but also... It's like you either get a zero or something, it's more risk/reward, whereas in the business-to-business space you can follow more of a playbook or a template. You might not have the hundred million download, but you're not going to have the zero either. So there's these different things to consider. But with first-time entrepreneurs, they have the dream like "Wow, I've built this app, people are gonna love it" and a year later they quit, because "Oh my god, I didn't have enough savings." They've lost faith in themselves because they've gone through so many iterations and it's still not clicking the way they think it should, or people still aren't paying more than a dollar, or paying anything. They don't realize if they just keep going for another year or two - I'm not saying it's easy... Sometimes you just have to do the time. Actually that's a whole other chapter, how it takes years longer than you want, it's the painful truth number five.

Paul: Aaron, I just wanted to switch gears slightly and talk about you, because on this show we have so many inspirational guests, and people listening to the guests have changed their own life because of what they hear, and you're someone who's become an author, you've got a successful career. First of all, is it worth being an entrepreneur, in your mind? Is it a lifestyle that is for everyone?

Aaron: It's for sure not for everybody, just like being a parent is not for everybody. I associate these two a lot, because over the last few years I grew my business and my income by 10-11 times, but I also grew my family. I was single without kids five years ago and now we have 12 kids, but in both cases... Having a business - it's worth the work, but it's hard to deal with the uncertainty, it's hard to deal sometimes with the financial uncertainty, or it might be the self-confidence, you're putting your heart out there in a product or in a post or in an idea, and having people reject it time and time again. But if you can get through that and you can get to the other side, when it starts to click and starts to work the rewards can be way worth it. So it's not for everybody, not everyone should be an entrepreneur; some people should work for entrepreneurs. Not everyone should be a parent, some people should have friends who are parents, they can visit, but for me both having lots of kids and a growing business have been the best parts of my life, really.

Paul: Let me just make sure I understood right - you've got 12 kids, you said?

Aaron: Yes, not all... Through mixed, you know...

Paul: Alright, I was just trying to do the math, I didn't think it was... Within five years. Unless you're one of these sheiks that can marry multiple times.

Aaron: Not a bad idea. I do have one wife, and I really do believe she is... You can call it cheesy or not, but she's the kind of person you're excited to grow old with, and we've adopted eight. So eight out of twelve are adopted, and a couple from a prior marriage, a little bit of everything. We're a very diverse family.

Paul: Wonderful. We're kind of getting on the family theme, but is it important - because sometimes we do this for our families, a lot of entrepreneurs. In fact, only just recently I was speaking to someone who's quit to start a company and he's got a family, he's just had a newborn, but it does change you, doesn't it? Because you want to leave a legacy for your kids, you want to make sure they're okay and they have something, is that right?

Aaron: Not yet a legacy, that doesn't drive me personally, but I will say - and I write about this in the book - in order to create a successful business, in order to make a lot more money that you're making now, and to go through the ups and downs... In fact, the year or years of hell sometimes, to do the time, you have to find a source of motivation that will keep you going. Because when the going gets tough, and if you quit... It's okay to take a break, but at some point you just have to push through, and for me having a big family and adding to it has been sort of this irreversible motivation where I can't afford... Like I have to be successful. That has been the motivation which has driven to not just... It's like the family came first - by having a growing family, that forced me to make more money. I didn't have any other option.

Paul: Right, okay. So what I'm learning from you is like having a motivation, something that really drives you to push through those times where you feel like you want to quit.

Aaron: Yeah, and you're tired. One thing I've learned is that energy and passion and luxuries. And time. Energy, passion, and time are luxuries. Especially the first year, I've had two baby babies, and we'll have a third, and then we're adopting a baby, and my wife's not here - she's in Florida with a newborn baby and she's been there for like three weeks, I guarantee that if you have to do something, and I talk on it in the book and I share some tips on how this works, but I rarely have time for extra things like writing a book, going from zero to twelve... I've written like three books in the last few years, grew a business 10-11 times... I don't have a lot of time, I rarely have energy. Frankly, I used to have a passion for writing, but because I'm always tired - emotionally, physically, mentally - I only write by deadline. So I think that what we think of, like you have to find your passion - that's all true, but you also can't wait. Sometimes you find your passion by doing something that you know is important even when you don't want to do it.

Paul: I sort of remember the time when I quit my successful career and started a new... You do have this boundless energy and boundless passion.

Aaron: Yes, it lasts for a few weeks, or months.

Paul: For me it was quite a long time, but then it starts to fade, because it's almost like you're getting over the honeymoon period of your switch.

Aaron: It is, it's exactly like that.

Paul: This is great, I'm learning so much.

Aaron: You're confronted with the reality of... Look, you've done almost 500 episodes here, with your podcast?

Paul: Yes, that's right.

Aaron: I would be shocked if the podcasts now are... I'm sure they can be super interesting, but I'd be shocked if there's the same level of excitement like the first 5, 10 or 20. Again, this is sort related to what a lot of - if any listeners, if they have employees, which is a whole different story; a lot of you don't, but for those that do, and you have these new, especially younger employees that come in, they're super-excited, and then after three months they're bored and they want a promotion. Something in the book I talk about - this might be you, too - a company or your job, whether it's your job or yourself, or whether you have an employee - the company is not your mom or your daddy. Half of the responsibility is for the company to provide a great environment and some opportunities for employees, but a lot of employees - and this is a lot of people - start saying "Oh, I'm getting bored and frustrated, it's all my job's fault, it's my company's fault." They don't realize that they have to take half the responsibility of figuring out what keeps them motivated, what keeps them interested. It's not the job. It's half the job, and it's half them. They're like "I'm bored, I'm not learning. It's my company's fault." No, it's not! Look at yourself!

Paul: But isn't that the case where sometimes it's hard to try to inspire entrepreneurialism in employees. I know that when I first quit my career and set up my first company I had to close it after a year, which was quite painful, but I just couldn't believe that these people that I was employing were not acting like they were owners of the company.

Aaron: Well, that's because they weren't owners. It's that simple. Part six of the new book - your employees don't act like owners because they're renting, not owning their jobs. Think about it this way: when you rent a car versus you own your own car, how do you treat it? Or you rent an apartment versus buy a house. Or if you're babysitting someone else's kids versus if they're your own kids, what's the difference? The experience for employees almost generally is that they rent their jobs, they're sort of like biding their time; they don't have that emotional ownership that an owner or an executive does. It is hard, there's ways you can work with that, but that's the reality.

Paul: It is. Now, you're famous for building this process and the sales team for Salesforce that added so much revenue, over a hundred million dollars. What could we learn from you from that episode? I mean, I guess it's a whole book we need to read to predict  revenue, but are there are any big takeaways from what you've learned from doing that?

Aaron: Yes, I can summarize it. And if you're wondering which book to start with, for sure it's From Impossible to Inevitable, because I sort of summarize updates and key things from Predictable Revenue, but some of the lessons from the hundred million (now it's way more than a hundred million) at Salesforce, it's the idea that your product and your sales people or sales process aren't what determines your growth. The growth is determined by your lead generation. Having a great product might be related to generating some leads, but it's only related. Marketing can be related, prospecting, word of mouth... And there's three types of ways to generate leads for your business: word of mouth, marketing and prospecting. Those can be either for finding customers directly or for channel partners. So it's not your product or people that generate growth, it's lead generation - that's one. Also, if you have a sales team, or people who sell - really any kind of team that interacts with customers - you need to specialize them. So in sales, it would be prospectors who prospect. Again, this is true if you have to sell apps, or it's just related to probably some kind of enterprise program. Prospectors who prospect, closers who close, other junior reps who respond to inbound leads and different kinds of post-sales roles. So anytime you have a team of people who are juggling too many things - it could be customer support, customer success, sales - look at how can you divide and conquer better to create more types of jobs, so people can do fewer thing better. That's a core, core idea. In fact, if you do have a team of people who sell, that's the number one thing that will transform everything, specializing. And the third, a lot of the book was around just the techniques of creating an outbound prospecting system and systematizing it, so it's more like a manufacturing assembly line and it doesn't need cold calls, like someone who's just sitting there and calling all day. Those are some of the highlights from Predictable Revenue. But ultimately, doing outbound prospecting, growing a business, that's just not gonna work, or work very well, unless you first nail the niche. So that's where you begin - nail the niche. Usually, you have to get to like a million or two in revenue before you feel like "Okay, we've got this. It's not just an app that people like, but we're actually making money from it. Now how do we grow?"

Paul: I love this, Aaron, because what you're doing is reminding me of actually the things I learned when I did have a career in finance, and we raised about 20 billion in under-management funds in the UK. Really the selling point for what we were doing was the specialization with the fund managers and the analysts. They were all specializing into different industries, and in fact many of them would spend 20-30 years getting to know an industry. That's kind of what I am learning from you, based on my own experience as well. That's really useful. Aaron, there's one more question here from a listener: what is the single biggest thing we could be doing as a startup? I know that's a very broad question, but what is the single biggest thing we could do to succeed as a startup?

Aaron: Probably make sure you're talking to your customers enough. Get off of e-mail, get off of chat, especially go visit them in person. If it's like a business type, or a consumer type, go to where they are and watch them and talk to them while they do whatever they do. If you have to go get on a plane, get on a plane. If you have to get in a car, or in an uber, or on a bike... Get out of the office, get out from behind your computer and go watch them. People love to sit and whiteboard, strategize on PowerPoint or some brainstorming app... Go interact in person with your targets, your customers or your prospects. Even the CEO, or the executives - get out of the damn office. Or at least bring them to your office, whatever, but in-person. Turn off Instagram, put down your Snapchat, whatever, and go look at them in the eye and talk to them, get coffee together.

[Commercial break]

Paul: Aaron, there's one more thing we need to do before we say goodbye to you. This is a show about apps; now, you're a successful author, you've done a lot of things, we'd love to know what's on your phone. If you have one or two apps, and feel free to pick up your phone now and have a look at it, are there any apps that you could recommend to us that would be good finds?

Aaron: You know, I'm probably like the least... I'm a little bit of a chromogen; when I was younger I loved technology and now I feel like all these apps are distracting from [unintelligible 00:24:27] But if I had a favorite... It's funny, I have three apps for e-mail, that I use in different ways. I have a bunch of kid apps, but I think for me, if I had to pick an app that I would recommend... Funny enough, the one... I've got one for watching my baby. There's this cool game - I actually haven't found a really good game for a long time, I'm sort of jaded that way, but it's called Letter. You have to spot a letter in a bunch of other letters. My daughter showed it to me, I was like "Wow, that's cool."

Paul: What's the one with watching your baby? That sounds interesting.

Aaron: I just got a Nest Cam. So they set up a cam and then put an app on my phone, in case she's asleep and I need to - especially with mom gone... If I can even get her to sleep. So we have a one and a half year old that I'm talking about. We actually have three babies here. We use a Nest Cam. Funny enough, I've got Gmail Inbox for one sole purpose and Gmail the app for another, and Apple Mail, I use it in different ways. Sorry, I'm not that interesting that way.

Paul: Well, you're reminding me of an app creator who was creating an app for babies, I think it was BabySleep, and I did one several years ago now called Newborn Baby Sleep, which plays the sounds of the womb on your phone.

Aaron: Actually with kids I got Circle, MyCircle might be the site, but it's a neat way to integrate with your Wi-Fi to give you a little bit more control over kids with what time their Wi-Fi can turn on and off, what they can see, and try to put some boundaries around electronics use at home. That was neat.

Paul: That is very cool. I was driving to school the other day with my kids and they're constantly like "Dad, we can't connect to the Wi-Fi, we can't connect to your phone", it was a personal hot-spot. It seems to be their big challenge and they're only six.

Aaron: Yes, now I try to rein them in. I am talking to audience, I've never focused on it, but a great app for From Impossible to Predictable Revenue, but if there's someone there who has a great idea for something they can build for predictable revenue, or from impossible, I'm totally open to ideas.

Paul: Let me mention this finally, one of the big things I've learned from this show is to actually launch an app with a great audience, and authors always have terrific audiences, but many authors don't have an app, and I was only speaking to a best-selling author last week and she wanted to sell this app, and I think she's been doing quite well. So if anyone can build an app for you, and could do some kind of deal with you, then it's much better doing it like that rather than trying to do something on their own.

Aaron: Yes, I try to leverage people with audiences, because it's hard to build your own audience.

Paul: But it's also hard to build your own app if you're an author, and you've obviously been used to...

Aaron: Yes, I'm focused on other... I'm a content person. We have a software company and I do consulting, but the idea of apps... You know, I have enough to focus on. One of the ways I've done, I've written multiple books, and lots of kids and businesses, is just do a few things really, really well at a time, and not to scatter myself over too many projects. There probably could be a great app for me at some point, with the right partner who comes along who I can really rely on and they can do that. Partnerships work really well for me.

Paul: Wow, let's wrap on that, that sounds great. Actually just on that, how can people best reach out to you and connect?

Aaron: fromimpossible.com is the best, it's about the new book with a free sample. You go there, or predictablerevenue.com. I'm easy to find, but fromimpossible.com is where I would start. I think that book is going to be life-changing for many of you, and predictablerevenue.com is for my day-to-day business stuff.

Paul: Terrific. Aaron, thanks very much. Just to remind everyone as well, you can go to theappguy.co - it's episode 434 - where there will be links to Aaron and those books. Terrific. Aaron, thanks for coming on this show and making it such a great show. We've got more energy on this one than we have the last 433, I can assure you.

Aaron: Fantastic.

Paul: You're such an inspiration personally, from like a family perspective, and an author, and all the great content you're putting out, so thanks very much for being a guest on the show.

Aaron: Well, I would say, a lot of people will [unintelligible 00:28:41] adoption, as a lot of people and I too used to be afraid of adoption. A lot of people wanted to, but they're like "You know, I talked to my spouse, I don't know..." You know, having kids, and adopting kids - and we haven't adopted many babies, but teenagers - it's been an amazing way to expand the family, it's been fantastic for the kids we already had. That's where a lot of the joy has been, all our kids and family time. And I really enjoy what I do, but joy-joy, the love-love, comes from the family. So [unintelligible 00:29:13] but there's a lot of kids out there who don't have parents, and that's just a crime.

Paul: Well, I do a hobby podcast called theentrepreneur.podcast Aaron, and it is for those reasons - what we do - because it gives us the time to have a family and spend it with our kids, so I'm all on board with what you're saying.

Aaron: Yes. Actually, one thing I struggled with is at work, the more I worked to support the family, feeling guilty about not being with the family, but I think what really helped me was accepting the fact that when I'm working to make money for the family, that is family time. It's something that's important, that has to happen to support the family.

Paul: Yes, that's a good way of thinking about it. Aaron, great, thanks for coming on!

Aaron: Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everyone.

I’ve Automated My Intro’s And Saved Hours

The App Guy Podcast is the show where we interview entrepreneurs that inspire us. On another episode of The App Guy Podcast, Paul Kemp talks with Seth Gold, the founder & CEO of Entro -someone whose company solves a genuine problem that Paul himself had with his business and network.

The interview begins with the essentials of what Entro is and what problem it solves.
Seth, the founder and CEO of Entro, starts the interview with a backstory of how he came up with the idea of Entro. He used to be in a business development/sales role and had to do a fair bit of cold-calling, which we all know is one the hardest things on the planet. It started with a realization that he could make a pretty good introduction for his friend, Adam. But after the introduction, not only does Adam thank him he sends three introductions back. These three introductions lead Seth directly to the decision makers and give him a more trusted image.
“It was a complete 180.”
After this turning moment he decides that he needs to start getting and giving as MANY introductions as possible in order to create value for his network. A similar scenario happens again where he made a perfect introduction for a friend. The thank yous kept pouring in!
“I just had the dopamine drop.”

He vowed he would no longer be doing cold calls.
The main goal for this entrepreneur was to figure out who the best people were in his network to keep connecting and who to stop connecting. That’s when Entro was born. Entro sits right in your Gmail or Chrome browser.
“We found out that the two biggest pain points people had were the double opt-in introduction, so the time waste of going back and forth,
“Hey Jim, would you like to meet Lia?”
“Hey Lia, would you like to meet Jim?”
and then sending the introduction. It’s a three-step process, asking everyone if they’d like to meet. Someone could be on vacation, someone could just be super-busy, etc., so trying to minimize the back and forth there, and then what happens after you connect two people.”

After you connect two people it should be their responsibility to follow up and let you know what happened, but we all know that doesn’t happen. So now we send an automatic follow-up that says,
“Hey Jim, how was the introduction with Lia?”
“Hey Lia, how was the introduction with Jim?”
and we also send a reminder to let you know to follow up if you want to do it personally.
So we’re basically focused around removing the back and forth with the double opt-in, and helping people understand what happens after they connect their network.
It is at this moment that I realized that I don’t ever hear back from or even track my introductions. Our guest went on to explain the easy to use follow up option where one can be sent automatically or receive a reminder to send a personalized one.
This is when I realized that I had been followed up by Jonathan, who introduced Seth and myself via Entro’s automatic message.

He explained they found that follow ups are important to all entrepreneurs. After someone signs up, they sent them an email asking “what are your biggest frustrations from email introductions?”, and the most common response was not knowing what happened after they sent an introduction, because they wanted to know how to be better at introductions. His recommendation for all entrepreneurs still in the finding a product/market fit phase is asking consumers what their biggest frustrations are. Whatever the problem is you want to solve, it’s a great way to get the most powerful information from the earliest adopters.
What I found inspirational in this start up’s journey was that no matter how big the market players, for example LinkedIn, they still have not been able to tackle the whole process of introductions. Entro has cracked the code for introductions, showing us that we can find small gaps amongst huge companies that are out there dominating the space.
The founder stresses that entrepreneurs should be singularly focused on onething. He talks about how Entro wants to be the best solution in the world for connectors who want to introduce two people.
“If you can find that one thing, devote the time, really care and love it, it’s definitely possible.”
Our interview continued with deconstructing Entro’s success and their process on accumulating feedback, which I learned was not just physically sitting down with people, but a combination of quantitative and qualitative. In fact, the first iteration of the app was actually on LinkedIn, where they used LinkedIn’s API. It was beautiful and simple, pulling up your contacts, including their profile pictures, and simply sending the introduction. It would be sent to their LinkedIn inbox and people seemed to enjoy it. However, one morning Seth received an email stating that LinkedIn would be cutting off their API access to startups…

But that didn’t stop him. He knew that people primarily used email for introducing others. This is when they built the first version in Gmail. He’s a Yesware and Sidekick user and really enjoyed how seamlessly they fit. He knew he wanted Entro to be similar.
During the first version, the team at Entro knew they had to research to see what really bugged people about making introductions. People love complaining about things through blog posts and on Twitter, so, of course, that is where you could find the founder spending his time, listening to consumers. He connected this with the Gary Vaynerchuk approach of “just go to Twitter and listen.” By doing this qualitative feedback, they were able to collect enough data on what frustrated people and what solutions they were looking for. Cue Entro’s entrance…
In terms of quantitative, he’s using Mixpanel and Google Analytics. Mixpanel allowed him to see what was working on Entro and what was not. By knowing these two things he was able to find the core sweet spots of the product. It never gets old to have people emailing to say that the follow up really worked. When your consumers are letting you know of that magic moment and other people are complaining about that problem — that’s what you should be focused on.

My next question was about one of the challenges I face: Getting the short bio of the two people I’m introducing and their social media profiles.
Seth: At the moment we have two different ways of sending entros. One way of sending allows you to do a single, double or no opt-in. When you type someone’s name, we’ll pull it from Gmail, from your contact list, and then show you a photo including their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. This way when you’re connecting two people, you can have as much context behind who the person is, what they like, etc.

Paul: How important is networking in adding value to your business?
Seth: There are too many quotes on this topic. “Your network is your net worth.”
The biggest thing is if you want to help, if you want people to help you out, you need to be consistently giving value to them, creating value.
You need to think about others, create value, and invoke the power of reciprocity. People want to help, and that’s how we’re talking now, it’s through networking.
In fact, this is demonstrably true. Seth and I were introduced via a mutual connection.
Everyone enters the start up world in a different way. My next question was how he became involved in this world and became a founder of his own company.
“I grew up in a business household — my dad was a CPA and my mom knew a lot about investment. We were always discussing successful businesses and why they were successful. I actually started a start up previously, but it had so many moving parts to it that it took three years to get the tech off the ground. This is where I learned that you don’t want to try for something super big — you want to focus on nailing one product and being the best in the world at that product. People will then give you more ideas and more problems that they want solved.”
There are a lot of problems out there, so just focus at being the best at one thing and take it from there.

Paul: We have a lot of listeners who have quit corporate jobs and gone on to start their own thing. What is your typical day like as an entrepreneur of your own company?
Seth: I wake up between 7 and 8 am, when my mornings usually begin with checking Mixpanel, figuring out how people are using our product. Since our launch on ProductHunt, our inbound has been very big, so right now there are a lot of emails coming in for customer support. My day continues with a meeting with our development team, where we discuss the features we want to implement next. I have been scheduling three to four calls a day. Face-to-face is still the most important thing, so if it’s someone you really want to build a relationship with and really value, it’s definitely worth doing.”
Paul: Do you have your own offices? Are you going for funding soon, or do you feel like that it’s too early?

“We’re bootstrapped, we’re a distributed team. We’re working out of my house, but we have people from all over, including San Francisco, Toronto and India.”
Through past experience, money doesn’t come to you when you go looking for it. Money comes to you when you don’t need it.
We have New York Times bestsellers using the product, local VC celebrities, a number one overall NCA college using the product. We’ve even had an escort service using the product…
It is one of those products with the tendency for viral word-of-mouth. It is definitely a cross multiply type of product, where a person might send five introductions and ten new people will see it. Malcolm Gladwell once said that the connector is someone who helps ideas spread, so we’re seeing a lot of word-of-mouth and pretty good viral growth.

Maximise The Potential Of Your Available Time And Grow Your Network

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we go and deconstruct the journeys of very successful app entrepreneurs, anyone who is building apps, promoting apps, or getting apps into the App Store; we learn from them so we cannot make their mistakes, but we can learn from their successes, and it's helped thousands of people in their app journeys. So if this is you listening to the show for the first time, do go back and listen to my archives. I've got 300 episodes and different versions of the archives in the podcasting apps. But let me get to today's episode. Today's episode is with the founder of an app called Scheduit, Dr Abdalla Kablan. Abdalla, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Abdalla: Hi, Paul. It's a great pleasure to be talking to you.

Paul: It's a great pleasure to have you on. So let's talk about Scheduit, what problem are you trying to solve?

Abdalla: With Scheduit we are trying to help people to maximize the potential of their available time by linking them with like-minded professionals, to help them grow their business network. So it's a business networking and compatibility app that helps professionals to connect with the right business contacts in the vicinity.

Paul: How did you get the idea for this?

Abdalla: The eureka moment came during actually one of my trips because of my line of work. I do a lot of consultancy, mainly in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence and computational finance, so I travel a lot. Once I was on one of my business trips. The way the bookings happen, I could only fly on Monday, had only one meeting on Tuesday and then I could only fly back on Wednesday. I had the meeting in the morning on Tuesday; after the meeting, I literally had nothing to do but to sit in my hotel room and do some coding, or watch some of the news, and then it hit me. I said, what if there was a platform where I could find like-minded business professionals in my vicinity to be able to network with them, discuss with them different ideas, and you never know what business opportunities may arise with that. So instead of having flown just for that one meeting, I would have had two, three or four other meetings, and the business opportunity may have come from a meeting that was not planned. So it all started with the premise that a meeting can transform one's life. A person can meet a future co-founder, an investor, a collaborator, a huge client. Business networking is usually the best way to find all of these. However, the most significant networking opportunities lie with those doors that are usually still closed. They lie with the relevant contacts that we have not met with yet. The problem with business networking is it's very time-consuming, and it's often left to chance, so Scheduit was born from the fact that this is a major problem in networking, which is time and relevance, and we try to solve that by introducing machine-learning and artificial intelligence in a very unique way, to facilitate that process.

Paul: This is wonderful, and, in fact I have to ask you: is there a meeting in particular that has changed your life?

Abdalla: Definitely, I've had many meetings that changed my life. I met with clients sometimes through random coincidences, sometimes I would be in a business meeting that nothing comes out of, but someone suddenly says "You know who you should meet? You should meet so-and-so." They are going to make one phone call, I meet with someone, and then a good opportunity comes. I found my company's investors through that type of meeting. So I truly believe that meetings do change lives. The most important thing and the reason why we're calling Scheduit a reverse social network and not a social network, is that in traditional social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn you usually add people that you already know, or you already met with, or you have already interacted with or met at a conference and you exchanged cards, in the case of LinkedIn. These social networks were not designed to meet people that you didn't even know about. Scheduit is the reverse - it links you with compatible and relevant business matches in your vicinity, that are ready and willing to meet with you, and you didn't even know that they existed. Usually, the most powerful contacts are within your second or third degree of separation. Those people that you already know, you've already exhausted that relationship, so there isn't much usually you can get out of, but it's in these new contacts that you have most of the potential.

Paul: Actually, I was thinking, with 419 episodes, not one of these founders did I know before the podcast, and yet these have become very good friends of mine, so I love the idea of reverse social networking. Let's talk about machine learning. How are you tackling that? What does machine learning mean to you?

Abdalla: Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. I mean, artificial intelligence is an area in computing where we're trying to design machines that mimic human intelligent behavior. But then the question that comes is "What do we mean by intelligence, and what do we mean by conscious behavior in the first place?" Jean Piaget, in the early 20th century, defined intelligent as what you use when you don't know what to do, when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for a particular situation. So in simpler terms, intelligence can be defined as 'doing the right thing, at the right time, in a flexible manner that helps you survive proactively and prove productivity in various facets in life.' Machine learning is utilizing artificial intelligence to actually learn from all that data that we are getting, and to produce a valuable output by recognizing patterns and understanding them, understanding the behavioral side of the data and being able to extract valuable insight from that data and output them in a manner that is easy to comprehend and easy to understand by humans. There are many types of intelligence: intellectual intelligence, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, but as humans we generally experience all of these as a whole. However, when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence, we actually have to design these different types of intelligence separately. I mean, a system that is very good at playing chess is not necessarily a system that can understand social interactions between people; it's two different types of machine intelligence or machine learning. In the case of Scheduit, we are trying to use different machine learning architectures and methodologies to actually look at the digital footprint that people are leaving behind them on their public interactions, in their different social media profiles. At the moment, we are focusing on LinkedIn because it's a professional network, but we are planning to expand into other networks. We try to learn from all that data that we are gathering. Things such as your public posts reflect a lot about what you are thinking. People that you add to your professional social networks reflect a lot about who you are: "Tell me who are your friends and I'll tell you who you are." So if you're most likely to interact with people from media and tech, then you're less likely to get along well with people from agriculture. For example, your seniority level, your employment history, all that information says a lot about you, and that's what the system needs to intelligently learn, but also provide an intelligent output, and in the case of Scheduit it's how compatible are you with that person, and how relevant is that person to you now. However, learning doesn't stop there.

Paul: Can I just pick up actually on the artificial intelligence? It's a very hot topic at the moment, because we're talking around about the time when in the UK Microsoft just bought out SwiftKey, which claim that it's artificial intelligently learning your typing and the words that you use. And also, I'm not going to mention the name, but I have been using something that would sort of give you the profiles of the network, or people in your network, and tell you how to approach those people: do they like emojis, or do they like to be professional? I was going to ask you, how important is the artificial intelligence part of Scheduit to your goals?

Abdalla: It's extremely important. They key predicament with artificial intelligence since its early stage is that scholars have always attempted to begin with problems that are hard for us humans to solve, and that require a lot of logical thinking, as I said. For example with playing chess, the assumption was always premised on the fact that problems we need to think hard about are easier to solve. We are just now realizing that it's not these problems that are difficult, because a machine has beat Garry Kasparov's chess from 1997. That did not mean that AI actually took over the world almost 20 years ago. We're realizing that it's these other problems of relevance that AI needs to solve. Like you said, how to approach someone before sending them an e-mail. In the case of Scheduit, how are you compatible with that person, and how can we understand from your preferences, in the sense that, for example, if you announce your presence on Scheduit, you got three people that requested to meet you, Scheduit has already, through its AI algorithm, told you the compatibility rates between you and every other person. So if one is a perfect match, the other one is a medium match and the other one is a mediocre match, but you as a human, you still chose to meet with the person that Scheduit thinks is a medium match - that's when machine learning kicks in and starts understanding that this is the type of profiles that you are interested in. So it will recalibrate its internal metrics to actually start giving higher preferences to that type of person. In a way, it's like hiring a personal assistant. In the first week or two, he or she may not know much about your character and your preferences and what you're interested in. The more they work for you, the more they know how to organize your schedules and how to get you to meet with them. This is exactly what we are trying to use AI and machine learning for - to add relevance to the problem of efficient business networking.

Paul: I'm getting it, I think it's a genius idea, I have to say. So let me just summarize what I've learned from you: the problem - and I experienced this, and I'm sure many people listening experienced this - is that you sometimes meet with people who are not able to add value to your business or to whatever you're trying to achieve. It's almost like a waste of time, so you have to try to wade through all the wasted cause, the wasted coffees to get to that one important meeting where you can really see massive value in what you're both doing, loads of synergies. That's what I actually try to do with the introductions I make, but you're doing this with artificial intelligence and with an app. Do you have any examples of anyone who's met within Scheduit?

Abdalla: I'll tell you what - Scheduit is becoming extremely popular at conferences, and with conference organizers, because they're realizing that there is a confined scenario of many people in a small space, that are all interested in networking. But the problem with networking during conferences usually is that people either network with those people that they already know - and this is very counter-intuitive. It's not networking, because they're not meeting anyone new. Or we have a lot of people who are introverts, and they find it difficult to say hello to someone they don't know, so they'll be in the corner, just drinking coffee and hoping that someone will come and say hello. But everyone is a warrior behind the screen, so if on the screen you can see everyone in your vicinity, your compatibility rate with them, then all you have to do is just to request a meeting. Then it becomes a completely different proposition, because only if they accept that meeting request, that's when the conversation begins. And to give you an example, I was a keynote speaker at a conference, Digital DNA, in Belfast, a couple of months ago. My speech was in the afternoon, so in the morning I was sitting and listening to some speeches, and I just look at the guy sitting next to me. By the way, Scheduit was the official networking app for that particular conference. So I look at the guy sitting next to me, and he was on his phone on Scheduit, messaging someone, so I decided to just nudge him and say, "Hey, how are you finding this app?" He said, "Oh my god, mate, I've been trying to track down this guy for the past three months, and I just found him here. We are just agreeing to have lunch together." Then he looked at me, and because my photo was on the conference program as a speaker, he was like "Wait a second, you are the guy who created this thing." And I said, "Yes, I'm just trying to get live user feedback." Anyway, after the conference, he wrote a very lovely blog post saying that he met three people during the conference, that are some fantastic matches, and he is actually following up already with them, and it all happened through Scheduit. That was a fantastic confidence boost, because we were just testing out the idea, and we had live user feedback. Since then, whenever we use Scheduit during conferences, we had overwhelming response from users, from conference organizers. They said that it has increased engagement during conference, hence we're adding new functionalities now to our app, that are geared towards conference organizers and conferences, such as taking notes, such as exchanging messages, such as posting your notes about the speeches, looking at the conference program, being able to look more information up about people that are at the conference or that are speakers. Also, for the conference organizers, the proposition has become fantastic, because whenever they used custom-made conference apps, number one - there was no compatibility matching in these conference apps; number two - the custom conference app usually dies the day the conference finished. Scheduit was not designed for conferences, which means that people that use Scheduit during the conference will still use it after the conference, because the purpose is to network. So for the conference organizer, if they had a thousand attendants attending this year, next year when they are organizing the conference again not only will they have a list of their thousand attendants from the previous years, but we will have a list of everyone else they have met with throughout the year, which is a very relevant audience to their conference by definition, because they're compatible with people that have attended that conference in the previous year. So the reach of the conference organizer goes up exponentially. If every person only meets with five people on Scheduit throughout the year, then instead of inviting a thousand, they're inviting five thousand people. So the proposition has exploded since. As I said, we are getting fantastic feedback from people who are trying to network on Scheduit, or people who are using it during conferences.

Paul: There are two things that came to my mind. One is that I'll have to remember in our post-chat to introduce you to a founder who actually has been on this show, that does a lot of conference-based apps, and has a template for conference apps. The other thing that comes to mind is that your example of when you actually meet someone using your app in the wild is one of the founder's best moments, and I've had several founders now that have told me that when they someone in the wild using their app it's just fantastic.

Abdalla: Yes, absolutely.

Paul: There's two more things we need to do before we say goodbye to you then, Abdalla. One is that we do love to try to understand your journey as an app entrepreneur. Are you able to perhaps take all your experiences - it's going to be very challenging, but can you think of one thing that a founder or a startup founder, or an entrepreneur should be doing with their app business to help them with their success? One thing they should be doing to help the startup get noticed.

Abdalla: I think what should be done is to always be dynamic and willing to revise your idea and willing to revise your model, depending on demand. The biggest challenge and the biggest problem is when someone keeps on trying to go down a path that has proven time and time again that it's not the easiest or the most straightforward path to take. One has to adapt to the different challenges and different terrains that they have to work through. In simple terms, not to be too stubborn about the idea and to be willing to accept external feedback, and whenever you walk into your office and speak with your team, the ego has to be left outside of the door, because everyone's opinion is as valuable as the founder's opinion, and the founder should be the one with the biggest ears and listen to as much feedback as possible. The biggest problem with founders is when they think that their idea is the best idea out there, and are not willing to... I'm not saying change, or discard the idea, but optimize it and to adapt it according to the feedback that they're getting. At the same time, one should also be persistent, never give up on the dream, never give up on their ability and their ideas, but be dynamic and be willing to change depending on the changes in the market, as well.

Paul: That is fantastic. Okay, so one other thing is that in your journey with Scheduit, has there been a moment where you've had like a breakout success, and you can then tell us what the result was? Maybe it's like a spike in downloads, or some kind of growth hack strategy that you followed that's been really good for you. Are you are able to give us any tips?

Abdalla: Definitely. As I said, initially we've developed Scheduit as a proof of concept. We focused mainly on the development of the app, and one of the biggest mistakes I've made is that I didn't focus on marketing from the first instances. It wasn't until suddenly we found ourselves on Yahoo! Finance and on Bloomberg, and on some big news or media outlets, and suddenly we had that huge spike in numbers of people.

Paul: Could you talk about the Bloomberg? I've been on Bloomberg before, with a project. Do you remember what that was in terms of the number of downloads?

Abdalla: It was at the time when LinkedIn, on the 12th May 2015 decided to restrict their API to third party providers, and we were using the LinkedIn API. Most of the companies out there that were making use of that API were complaining and didn't know what to do, but I personally looked at it as a blessing in disguise, because the first decision that I made was to go to my team, tell them "Guys, we have a big problem, but that big problem can become a blessing if we act quickly." So we decided to redesign our entire sign-up process. We managed to make a very nice, quick and dynamic sign-up process that doesn't take more than 60 seconds, and in that sign-up process we actually capture most of the information that we needed from the LinkedIn API anyway. So I just went out there and I blogged about it and said that this LinkedIn API restriction for us turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because now we are getting all the data that we're needing, without having to rely fully on LinkedIn's full API. That's when the external media outlets picked up on it, saying these are the first companies that have reacted to restrictions of the API, and we had a spike in the number of downloads. That's when the conference idea kicked in, because we got a lot of conference organizers asking us to use Scheduit during their conferences. That's when I realized we need to focus on our marketing, so I hired a brilliant community and PR manager, Jeffrey, and since then we have been doing proper outreach to our community, or managing the community more efficiently. Also, we have, in order to integrate a growth-hacking with our strategy, marketing has become a part of the development life cycle, so the marketing team and the developers are in continuous discussions with each other. We have implemented Agile, meaning that we do a daily scrum that happens between marketing and the developers. We do sprint, and in that sprint we have backlogged, we have predefined the tasks that have to be done, both from our marketing perspective and from a development perspective, and we have started integrating other social media sharing functionalities, such as when you announce your presence on Scheduit, it also goes to your Twitter and to your LinkedIn in order to actually get people on those other social networks that are not on Scheduit yet to see that type of announcement on their preferred social network, and then after clicking on the links, they will become Scheduit users if they sign up. So the entire model was revisited since then, and we've been having a massive success. Another massive success was during the Web Summit in November 2015, where we were featured as one of the most promising startups in 2015. We were shortlisted for the Pitch competition, where only a hundred startups from all over the world were shortlisted. We had some media outlets short listing us as one of the top 10 startups during the Web Summit 2015. So it's been fantastic, and the outlook for 2016 looks even better with our implementation of our event functionalities and continuing our growth-hacking strategies and investing more on the marketing and the community side. I genuinely believe that the real value or the true value of Scheduit is in the community, and we have to do our best in order to increase and grow that community as fast as possible.

Paul: Yeah, and just a quick shout out to Jeffrey Romano, who I think introduced us, so he's a great networker.

Abdalla: Yes, yes. Hi, Jeffrey.

Paul: Terrific.

Abdalla: That's why we brought him on board, he's a natural networker.

Paul: Yes, it's wonderful. So what I was learning from you whilst you were going through the successes, and what others could be doing as well is when there's some controversial piece of news about one of the big sites, you took a positive angle on it, rather than a negative, and you went against the stream, in a way, with your advice, and that's why the news sources picked up on it. Anyone could be doing that, as well - taking something that's naturally going to cause outrage and putting a positive spin on it, and talking through the positives. I think that could actually help get publicity and PR.

Abdalla: If we learned one thing from Monty Python, always look at the bright side of things.

Paul: Yes, well let's leave it there, on the high, with Monty Python. For everyone listening, you can get the show notes, it's episode 419. Just go to theappguy.co and search for Abdalla Kablan. Abdalla, how best can people reach out and connect with you? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Abdalla: On Twitter, my handle is @drkablan, that's the easiest way to get in touch with me, or via e-mail, ak@scheduit.com

Paul: Wonderful. Well, thanks very much for coming on our show, and all the best with the growth of Scheduit.

Abdalla: Thank you so much, Paul. It's been a great pleasure to speak to you. Thank you.

A Great Idea About Ideas From A Serial Entrepreneur

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp, and I'm here to bring you some of the best founders that we can find from around the world, and deconstruct their journeys so that we can learn in our own entrepreneurial journey. So if you're an entrepreneur, startup founder, or perhaps you're just interested in the journeys of entrepreneurs, this is the show for you. Let me introduce to you today's guest. He is a legend, I actually feel that we're going to learn a huge amount from our guest. His name is Carter Wigell and he was previously the co-founder and CEO of a company that was recently sold to Accenture, called Cloud Sherpas. He's also launched a new company called Ideator, and there is a past episode that you can go and search for on theappguy.co about launching Ideator on Product Hunt. Let's talk to Carter, so Carter - welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Carter: Thank you Paul great to be here.

Paul: Let's talk about your transition then. I guess you moved after selling Cloud Sherpas, and you are now fully involved in Ideator. How is that transition going?

Carter: It's been great. Just for quick clarification, I was actually the CEO of a company called Cloud Trigger, and we sold Cloud Trigger to Cloud Sherpas; that was then acquired by Accenture. But it's been an amazing journey, and I couldn't be more excited. The transition actually has been somewhat easy for me since I had a team that was actually working on Ideator for about the last year, so I've been advising Ideator and officially stepped over on January 1st of this year.

Paul: I want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to learn about Ideator. I think anybody listening to this should pause and perhaps go back and listen to the full episode on Ideator. But if you were to do an elevator pitch to us for, can you do an elevator pitch for Ideator?

Carter: Sure, absolutely. We are basically trying to help entrepreneurs of all different races, genders and ages with their ideas. So we are helping them by providing the tools, resources, and connections that they need to be successful.

Paul: Now, Carter, I would love to know, now you're fully involved in this, what your plans are, how you're actually going to help grow Ideator from I guess a starting point to become a massive success. What are your plans to get involved now with the team?

Carter: Yes, great question. So we have some big plans for 2016. Really for us in 2015 it was about making sure that we really understood the needs of the entrepreneur, so we really built Ideator with that in mind, and that was really the first phase. As we move into 2016, there's a lot of focus on how do we connect the advisors and investors, and really create some of those algorithms for people to get access to the tools and resources that they need. So a little bit more on the frontend, really think about that [unintelligible 00:06:10] capability to connect you to the right skill sets, and then from the resource perspective, we're working on partnerships with companies like GoDaddy, LegalZoom, SalesForce.com, and Google. So my focus is not only around the product and making sure that the product can scale and provide value, but also developing strategic partnerships in the market, so we've got a great opportunity to help student entrepreneurs. We're working with a number of different schools and universities, and I'm working with some big corporations and organizations, as we both have a similar ambition to help these student entrepreneurs.

Paul: So Carter, for all those entrepreneurs listening now, what do you find are the most common problems facing entrepreneurs when trying to run a successful startup?

Carter: Yes, it's a great question, and it can really be different based on the entrepreneur. A lot of the people on our platform, I thought we would have just the ideation stage. So I have an idea, and what do I do next? But the reality is we have a lot of startups and entrepreneurs that already have a product or a service in the market. Typically on the ideation side, where I see people really struggling as they don't actually have a plan, and as fundamental as that sounds, it really helps to understand from a prioritization standpoint what needs to happen, who are the team members you need, what are the resources you need, funding, etc. So I'm not necessarily a big advocate that you need a 40-50-page business plan, but you need a plan, and then ongoing, a lot of the challenges that we see with entrepreneurs and startups is execution and finding the right team members. Funding is definitely one, but it's not typically one of the main early reasons that we see people fail.

Paul: Yes. In fact, I was actually wondering about the points of transparency, and with Ideator, you are encouraged to be quite transparent with your idea. How important do you feel it is in success by being very open about your idea, and very transparent?

Carter: Yes, it's a good question. I mean, there's definitely a philosophy out there to fail fast, fail early, so people aren't spending a lot of time, money and energy on something that actually might not have a good market opportunity. But really, we actually allow people on Ideator to have a private space, or a public space, and the vision behind that was we wanted to encourage serial entrepreneurs to have a space that they could collaborate on, but certainly the more that you can share publicly it means that you can get better connected to the right advisors and mentors, which certainly is not a new concept. So we understand that there are certain parts and certain information of your data, or a plan, or otherwise that you want to keep private, and you can.

Paul: I was actually thinking, with Ideator you're almost taking the role of what 10-20 years ago would have been the bank because you're helping entrepreneurs connect with investors and get a business plan. Do you feel like this is becoming the role of what the bank used to be 10 years ago?

Carter: We definitely want Ideator to be a place that people can start foundationally with their ideas, and I guess the analogy you're making around the bank is we grow over time, we will be providing more capabilities for people to fundraise, either on the platform or create integrations to other platforms or institutions that people can actually raise money, because certainly that is the key aspect of every startup - they need money. So if I'm following you right, Paul, I think in general today what we do well is we help incubate these ideas and these startups, and I think there's an analogy there to the bank, that you're making.

Paul: You know, when we first started talking you were in some exotic location, I think. I would like to know what a typical day is for you, to inspire anybody listening to this, who may be quite amazed at how much travel perhaps you have and how much you get involved in meeting lots of different people around the world. So what's a typical day like for you, Carter?

Carter: Yes, I appreciate it. It's been an adjustment because I also have a new baby. My wife and I have a six-month-old daughter, and I think that in itself is... Those people who have children or babies out there understand. A lot of it does come down to... You know, I believe the early bird gets the worm. I wake up at 5 A.M., so it's actually 6:45 here in San Francisco this morning, and I think it's really important that you have a scheduled day, you have certain things that you need to accomplish. Without time management, it's really, really hard in a position like mine because prioritization is everything. It's hard to balance that because you want to be out networking with a lot of different people, organizations, but if you don't have a real focus on the KPIs and metrics that you're trying to achieve for a given month, given quarter. For a startup, time is really gold, so I think it's really having that focus, having a plan, so my team, we actually on January 1st hit the ground running with a great 2016 vision and executional plan that everybody understands on my team where their focus is. We'll certainly pivot and change as we move forward, but again, for me personally, success is really making sure that I'm up early and that I can accomplish the things that I want to in a given day, because there's so much to do from my seat, from fundraising, to PR, to day-to-day product sales, marketing, strategic relationships... And again, I think it's having that focus and prioritization.

Paul: So Carter, I'm someone who previously had a corporate job and left to pursue the life as an entrepreneur, and I'm sure there's lots of people listening to this now who are in corporate jobs. You've been very successful, and you had, I guess, an opportunity to stay in corporate, but you really wanted to carry on and start something new, and go in a different direction as a startup founder. What would you advise to anyone sitting in a corporate job - is it worth becoming a startup founder, in your experience?

Carter: Yes, a great question. I think I've been called crazy twice, at this point. I was at SalesForce.com for 10 years, and anybody who's followed SalesForce.com, I mean, what an incredible company, and I feel so fortunate to have worked there. When I started, there were about 100 employees, and it was great. This was the early days when Mark Benioff would come by my desk and ask what's in the pipeline. I just had a tremendous opportunity to grow at that company up with a lot of amazing mentors, and when I got this entrepreneurial spirit, it was a hard decision to leave SalesForce, and I probably had about eight or ten different managers and executives at SalesForce tell me crazy, and how great my W2 was, and all that was very real, but I was so determined and excited to have the opportunity to start Cloud Trigger. And certainly I knew that there was high risk, but I was mentally prepared for that. So I think one of the most important lessons that I took from leaving the corporate world is certainly there's more security in a larger corporation for employees, but the best advice I got was from a leadership coach... I was ready to go put in my two weeks notice at SalesForce.com and she said, "There's no way you can do that. You've been there for 9-10 years and no matter all the great things that you did at that company, everyone's going to remember how you left that company." And it was probably one of the best pieces of advice that I got leaving the corporate world, because it took me a month and a half to get out of the company, and I had just about everybody in the company kind of turn around and say "Thank you for everything that you've done here." Mark Benioff actually ended up investing in my first company, the CEO of SalesForce.com. So again, I think there's just great value in making sure that if and when you make that jump, to understand that those relationships that you've made in the corporate world are important or critical. So for me, I've done it twice. After we sold to Accenture I also had an amazing job opportunity, but I think entrepreneurs, they have the DNA within them, and a desire to go start something new. I'm personally really passionate about entrepreneurs that want to go start a great company that might get to a couple million in revenue, certainly to entrepreneurs that want to highly disrupt. I don't think that there's one personally that's better than the other.

Paul: So there's two more things we need to do then, Carter, before we say goodbye to you. The first one is that we love to try and identify what's happening in technology and the market, and you have such a rich source of information, in a way, from ideas coming on, and you're seeing what's happening. Would you be able to pick up on one trend that is going to help us in what we're doing? So a trend in the market, from technology.

Carter: Oh, that's a good question. With regard to Ideator, I think what's most exciting to me is a lot of ideas that we're getting on the platform are different education ideas and social good ideas, and I think at the end of the day right now those are the ones that I'm most passionate about, and it's really people that are trying to solve different ideas, or problems around the water problem in California, ideas around poverty, or human trafficking. So I definitely think above and beyond some of the social challenges that we're having just in California, certainly globally issues that we're having. So for me, technology in these areas of education and social good, social causes I think are the most impactful. We had a team of students from MIT on our platforms that are trying to solve lung cancer, so there's just kind of a widespread number of different technology ideas that are happening on our platform, but the ones that I'm most excited about, that I feel will make the greatest impact are around education and social good.

Paul: So finally, here's a new one, Carter. I'd love to ask you this, because as entrepreneurs, what we've learned in this show is that it's sometimes very hard to focus, and as someone who has a platform of new ideas hitting them everyday, how hard is it for you to focus? You must be very tempted to invest in many of the ideas coming on the platform because they just sound so compelling. Give us some advice on your ability to focus on one thing.

Carter: Yes, it's a great question. I am not in a place right now that I can certainly see every single idea come through the platform; one, again, because there's a lot of private ideas on our platform, but number two, really for us it's about growing the community that can help these entrepreneurs and startups, so it was important to me early that we were able to get engaged with all the entrepreneurs and startups, as they're coming through the platforms. So we have an amazing community manager on the platform - if you signed up, you'll see Jessica on there. So she's been able to engage with a lot of entrepreneurs and startups. We also do have an advisory program where people are submitting to be accepted into the advisory program and some of those startups I'm actually helping to consult. But we are getting hundreds of signups a day, we have users in a hundred different countries, and so I certainly can't keep up with all ideas, but we've got a great community and we have a lot of people that are engaged, and when people are creating public goals we're looking for certain skill sets for getting involved in our discussions forum. They're getting help quickly, so I feel like the platform is providing a lot of value.

Paul: Just to pick up on that last thing you said about being an advisor... I mean, that sounds really interesting. How important is it to have some kind of external advisor on either your board or as part of the decision-making executive team? Because it sounds to me like that would actually be very powerful and helping the success for a company. Do you think it's important?

Carter: I think it's really important, almost critical, because most entrepreneurs, it's their first time, they're not serial entrepreneurs, and there's plenty of great stories out there in the market, but the reality is that a lot of successful people have the right connections, whether it's through investment channels or distribution. Everybody has seen the show The Shark Tank, so while people are going on The Shark Tank because they need money, they're also hoping that Mark Cuban or Mr. Wonderful has the right connections to actually scale their business. So a lot of early companies are able to bring on a seasoned executive or individual who's scaled an organization at the level that they're hoping for, so I think it's really important. I also think it's critical that the advisors really understand when they're being approached by the entrepreneur, what are the key areas that you need help with, and I think there's a challenge there, in a lot of entrepreneurs not knowing what to ask for. So as we grow over time, we're providing different tools and assets to, again, create those connections, but also be able to provide things like advisor agreements and give them some better education on how to interact with those advisors.

Paul: So to everyone listening, I do remember having quite a few chats of different candidates that have gone through Shark Tank, and those were fascinating past episodes, so they can go and listen to that by going to theappguy.co. This has been just a terrific, inspired chat, Carter, and I know that you're such a great speaker and also have a huge amount of patience, because we've had some technical issues with the first recording, so thanks so much for trying again. What I would like to do is just ask how people reach out to connect with you or the community at Ideator.

Carter: Sure, I'm definitely very open. You can reach me at Carter@Ideator.com, and certainly if you sign up for Ideator, the platform is free, so if you have an idea, or you just want to collaborate you can find me on the platform. You can also find Jessica on there. Many, many people from Ideator are accessible and lots of people from the community. So we're very excited, and thank you, Paul, you've been a big help to Ideator and you got us out there on Product Hunt, which was really successful for Ideator, so I really thank you, you've been great.

Blockchain Will Change Our World As Much As HTML Changed The Web

Paul: Welcome to another episode of the App Guy Podcast. I'm your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show that helps you as an app entrepreneur. If you're a startup fanatic, if you are even doing side gigs but you want to know what this world is about, then I go around and interview some of the best people that we can find to help us with these journeys of app entrepreneurship. I've got literally the most amazing guest for you today. His name is Jon Bradford, and until recently he was the MD at TechStars, he's going to tell us a little bit about that, but he really does go around helping companies, helping startups. I really recommend going to the show notes and clicking on all the links to tell you about Jon. His portfolio is too long to mention here, so we're going to find out more. Jon, welcome to the App Guy Podcast.

Jon: Good morning, thank you for having me.

Paul: So let's talk about your background, because it is so impressive. You've been involved in TechStars, you're recently having a reflective stage, but tell us a little about yourself, Jon.

Jon: I see. The reason why I was missing so long is because I'm just really old.

Paul: Like me then...

Jon: Exactly. This could probably be the third part of my life, if that makes sense, not including my teenage years. So I started many, many years ago as a boring accountant; I wasn't good at it, but seemed to hang on and do it for a long time. I jumped ship in 2000 and I've been working around early stage startup type businesses since then. It didn't seem such a long time ago, but somebody pointed out it was 15 years ago. I spent ten years of that effectively working in and around startups, and about five years ago I've had the good fortune of bumping into a guy called David Cohen, who ran TechStars. At that point, nobody knew what TechStars was, and he helped me set up what was the first accelerator outside of the U.S., called the Difference Engine, that nobody has ever heard of and is completely insignificant, but essentially in the last five years I've worked on nine or ten programs personally, I think I've helped twelve other programs start up across Europe and beyond, I've been fortunate enough to bump into some really smart people and started a few businesses, and every so often I get some sleep as well.

Paul: Jon, we've had a lot of entrepreneurs in this show that are from the TechStars accelerator, and they are so inspirational. What's it like working around these entrepreneurs? It must be just really amazing and motivating to actually be part of it.

Jon: Yes, there's a sliding skill on any given day; it can be the most inspiring job in the world and on other occasions it can be a pain in the ass. [Unintelligible 00:04:09] I think entrepreneurs are very like five-year-olds. They're very addicted to work with, they screw up on a regular basis, and they always are coming back going, 'Do you know that thing you said I shouldn't have done? Well I did do it, and I screwed up. Can I have forgiveness and can you give me some more money please?' So yes, they are amazing, and I wouldn't have done what I've done for the last five years unless I'd felt that there was... It was fun and interesting, and one could make a little bit of money along the way.

Paul: Jon, I'm in danger of taking too many quotes from this show, I like to take quotes, and "entrepreneurs are like five-year-olds" is already standing out as a potential quote. So one of the big questions I often get is how do you approach investors? What's the best way of positioning yourself as an entrepreneur, someone who's leading maybe a small team? How would you respond to that? How would you suggest the best way is to get your attention?

Jon: I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of clichés that you all probably heard from other places, but there's a well-known line, which is "If you want money, ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money." So ordinarily, most entrepreneurs approach investors too late, so they need the money at the point they're asking for it. The problem with that is an entrepreneur doesn't know you if you met him at that point in time, and so therefore he wants to build some sort of relationship to understand you better. I strongly believe that probably the most interesting thing to really screw up an investor's brain is to actually approach them and say, "I've just started something, I'd love to get some feedback on it. Come and see it and grab me a coffee." [Inaudible 00:06:17] talk to the investor, but never ask for money because that really screws with their head. But what it does do, and I then say to them is take good notes, listen to the advice, think about what the feedback was and then either e-mail them or ask for a coffee 90 days later and go back to them in 90 days time and say, "Do you know all that stuff you told me? Well I did this with this stuff, because it was really valuable. I thought about what you said here, I wasn't sure that was correct, so I did something else." So what you're trying to do is essentially build a relationship between yourself and a potential investor way before. But also don't forget, investors - and some are better than others, but at the end of the day they listen to a lot of pitches and they get a lot of advice from a lot of different people. They can be inherently valuable as a resource for you to understand your business better and to basically... It's a bit like getting a job. The first interview you go to is not necessarily the one you want, so do a few mock interviews, or work with a whole bunch of people before you actually get to the point where you actually really need the money. So kiss the frogs a little bit earlier than you would do, and talk to as many smart people as you can, and that includes investors.

Paul: It sounds to me like it's worth actually applying for accelerator programs almost just to go through the process of seeing what the questions are and what they're trying to understand. Is that what you're saying?

Jon: The statement was more about investors than accelerators, but you're absolutely right, with accelerators it's exactly the same thing. I say to people apply early, way before you would expect to, get on my radar, so when you apply six months later I can see the progress that you've made from the original application. There's a great article written by a guy called Mark Schuster called "Lines, not dots" and it's about how investors make investment decisions. The idea behind it is understanding people and seeing how progress is made between the two points that you see them, or the three points or the four points. Investors just can't make decisions on the spot, based upon a given point in time.

Paul: You've mentioned at the start you've had a few career changes in a way, and you started off as an accountant, and I'm sure there's people listening to this right now who are tempted to quit their job, or start a startup, or go for it. What would you say to those who are thinking about that? Can you actually do it without a track record, or are you just likely to fail the first several times and you need to kind of just accept that and really build up your experience and relationships? So what would you say to anyone who's thinking about quitting their job to do a startup?

Jon: Well I tend to take the view which is slightly contrary to most other people, which is there are seven days in a week; you typically work for five of them, so you've got two spare, which is almost half a week. There's a lot you can do in your spare time, and it's also a good way of you really understanding whether you want to do it or not. And there will be an actual point where you get to a certain critical mass, or you have enough data, or there's something inherently interesting in what you're doing that actually says, 'Well maybe I should step out and I should do this on a full time basis.' So I think of it more as an analogue or shades of gray, rather than a black and white statement of 'One day I want to stop my job and the next day I'm going to start a startup. I think there's a lot more that can be done in the intervening period. I was fortunate enough that I've never felt that I've actually ever done that in my career. I've managed to transition from one role to the next, and it really is playing around with this idea that there are seven days in a week, and if you can... In my instance I was fortunate enough to be able to have a job which was only four days instead of five days a week. So I had a day job that paid me four days a week and I had three days to spare, to actually plan what I was going to do next.

Paul: So you're actually going through a transitionary period as well yourself, so it's probably timely to talk about how you approach that, and what you go through in terms of a decision-making process to figure out what you actually want to do next.

Jon: Yes, I describe to people I'm going through a decelerator at the moment, so I'm learning to do everything a little bit slower than I would have ordinarily. No, I think I'm the wrong side authority, so the way I make decisions will be slightly different from somebody slightly earlier in their career. I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of different opportunities in front of me, and I can do many different things, but what I've come back with is I've got a set of criteria to think about why and what I would do next, and if I can remember well there's four of them. They are essentially have fun, make money, work with smart people, and make an impact. And none of those are functional; so that could be as an investor, that could be as an entrepreneur, that could be as something totally different. But if they don't have those four criteria, this is something I'm just not interested in. So I'm making my decisions in a slightly different approach.

Paul: I love that, I love the fact that you're reminding us it's best to have a belief system and then follow that, because it makes it easier to have decisions.

Jon: I would say that's something which is very true to where TechStars is; we have some very strong underlying beliefs. So on one side I have TechStars, which has a very strong mantra which is "Entrepreneur first" or "Give first" and on the other side I've started a business for a good friend of mine, called F Success, and basically we have a similar cornerstone, which is we wil always put the entrepreneur first, ahead of everybody else, and all of our decisions are made around that. And I find those things to be the easiest and simplest ways to make decisions.

Paul: Well Jon, we've got two more things to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that we love to try and figure out new ideas ourselves, and it's always helpful to find out from the entrepreneurs what you're seeing, what trends you're seeing in the marketplace, because you do have a wonderful bird's-eye view of the startup scene. What do you think is really an interesting area for the listeners to focus on?

Jon: I would argue that there's a lot of noise in the market, and so therefore the quantum of the noise is not necessarily indicative of the interest level. I spend my life thinking about stuff before it gets trendy, so I'm not into dating apps and I'm not into bill-sharing apps, even though there are other people smart at doing that. The thing I'm super fascinated by is Blockchain and its potential implementation, either inside the financial services or beyond. I think people need to spend more time looking at the potential of Blockchain, because I think it has the potential of doing what http did in web, for a lot of different services in a lot of different areas.

Paul: Okay, you're going to have to expand on that... You're saying Blockchain?

Jon: Yes.

Paul: Okay. Maybe for the benefit of actually me and a few people listening, what is Blockchain?

Jon: So Blockchain is a really interesting piece of technology that makes Bitcoin work. Interestingly, everybody runs around and talks about Bitcoin but the reality is, it's the underlying protocol that makes Bitcoin work, which is called Blockchain. Essentially what it does is it allows you to have a completely decentralized system which has trust built into it, and it's almost impossible to describe in two minutes... What I would probably say is if you do a quick Google search, and typically a really good source of information I think is Fred Wilson, who's website is avc.com. He talks about Blockchain as a protocol - definitely worth looking up and having it checked out.

Paul: And also you're reminding me of my chat episode 338 with Justin Drake, who talked about that very thing as well, so that's definitely another resource. Obviously it had an impact on finance, but it could be everywhere, not just money.

Jon: Yes, money is a statement of "I have money, I'm passing it to you. You understand and trust me that the money is mine." You don't have a clearing house that basically says "Did Jon have the money or not?" It completely shift the balance of power away from very centralized democracies, which is why it's really scary, and it can be used in a lot of different places. I think it's used in healthcare, it could be really interesting around records, so people personally hold the records, rather than it being held in a central point. It could be used for CV's, so I can imagine a version of LinkedIn which basically says, "I did go to Brescia University" and there's a trust statement around that. Basically it explodes this myth of "stuff has to be held in a central database." Actually it can be held by individuals.

Paul: Wonderful stuff, sounds like an episode in itself. Okay Jon, the last thing is this is a show about apps, so we couldn't let you go without getting you to grab your phone and tell us one or two apps that you could recommend to us; not the usual ones, but ones that you think we may not have crossed before.

Jon: Oh, I'm really boring. All the apps on my phone are really dull. The one I could not live without in my life is something called TripIt, I'm sure you're very familiar with. Are you?

Paul: I've heard of TripIt, but how are you actually using it?

Jon: TripIt is quite an old app, I actually discovered quite recently one of the early ambassadors, and I almost leaned across the table and kissed him, which is quite embarrassing. But essentially what it allows you to do is as you get travel itineraries, or invoices or things like hotels, airlines, you effectively can e-mail TripIt and it figures out who you are, and then effectively parses the e-mail and actually puts it into a format which is really valuable and useful. I traveled around the world 12 times over the last two years on air transportation - my 9 year-old son pointed out I'm about halfway to the moon. I spend my life traveling, so it's the most insanely sensational. If you do any level of traveling it's amazing. It's just a good way of aggregating information in a very usable way.

Paul: That is wonderful. Well of course that, and other things that you've mentioned will be on the show notes. This is episode 372, just go to theappguy.co, search for Jon Bradford and you'll see links to the articles that he's mentioned and the app. Jon, what a wonderful episode. I feel like it could've gone on for a long time, but we're going to have to end there. Thank you so much for coming on this show. How best can people connect or reach out to you?

Jon: Dead easy. My e-mail address is jd (at) jd.me and  anybody who wants to, they can reach out directly to me there.

Paul: Great. Jon, thank you so much for coming on this show, all the best and we'd love to get you back on anytime, you're welcome to come on the show.

Jon: Thanks Paul.

What I learned From The Editor-At-Large For The Next Web

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. I love this show, because we go around the world and really chat with the most interesting founders. We've recorded 375 episodes almost, and I am yet to speak with an editor or journalist, and that's who we've got on. This is going to be a great a episode, do stay tuned for it. I want to introduce straight away, it's Martin Bryant. He is the editor-at-large at The Next Web, and everyone listening to this show must have heard of The Next Web. You can obviously go there as well and check it out. We're going to talk about The Next Web, tech and journalism, and just how to help us with approaching journalists. So Martin, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Martin: Hello Paul, good to be here.

Paul: It's great to have you on. You are actually I think our first journalist on this show, which is wonderful. What is it actually you do at The Next Web, just start there. I've noticed you are editor-at-large, what does that mean?

Martin: Yes, well this is a brand new role for me. At the time of recording I've been doing it for less than a week. I was previously editor-in-chief, which is a lot easier to explain. I was managing the team, making sure we were covering everything that we were supposed to, looking at how to grow traffic, hiring new people, all that kind of thing. Another think I did in that role was going to accelerators, to meet startups, talk about pitching to the press, things like that. I was on TV and radio a lot, that kind of thing, talking about tech news and things. What we want to do now... We had a good growth spurt over the last few months, and in July it was our best traffic month ever, in September it was our second best traffic month ever, so traffic is going nicely; we wanted to really push forward even faster into 2016, and so we had to do a reshuffle in the team, and Matthew Hussey, who was previously our commissioning editor, he's become our new editor-in-chief, he's got a lot of ideas for growing the site and pushing things forward. I am focusing on really getting out there and being a voice for The Next Web in all sorts of different ways, including appearing on this podcast.

Paul: Martin, it's really refreshing to hear someone like yourself who actually does provide really good exposure for some of the startups, the apps that we have on this show as well, and yet you're also thinking of growing and trying to promote The Next Web.

Martin: Really at the moment it's social, that's where we can really make an impact with our growth, and I think that's the same for most publishers. Over the last few years publishers have seen Facebook become a really key traffic source. For some people it's more than Google; I don't think we're quite at that stage, but it's certainly an important source of traffic for us. Of course, the problem with relying on Facebook for your traffic is that you are reliant on Facebook's algorithm and it deciding whether each post you put on Facebook is of interest to your audience. Sometimes you might post something and a very small number of people will see it. So the rules for what will be successful on Facebook are changing constantly. So we have a number of staff who is focused on that and the strategies around social growth, the way we use Twitter... For example, we find posting on Twitter with an image pretty much always does better than without an image, and again, you see that with a lot of publishers now - almost every time they tweet they have an image, because it just gets more engagement.

Paul: Yes, I would actually agree with you on that one Martin, because I've been following a strategy of posting images, and I've seen my sort of small audience grow to something like 3 million one month for the number of people that see a tweet, and that's obviously better with images. So it's good to reinforce the requirement of posting with images.

Martin: Absolutely, yes. If you look beyond that, there are all these social platforms, Instagram, Snapchat etc. where they can't really drive traffic to your site, but it's good to build a community around them. I think BuzzFeed is a great example of a site that's being very smart in the way they use these platforms. What they're basically saying is you don't necessarily need to go to BuzzFeed, you can go to Snapchat, Instagram or whatever and see BuzzFeed content; you might not necessarily have to click through from that, because actually getting a link into those services is hard to sometimes impossible, but you'll experience the content in a distributed form around the web, and figuring out ways to monetize that through maybe sponsored content etc. is an interesting challenge. Yes, so social media is definitely our big traffic growth area.

Paul: Martin, I have a lot of app entrepreneurs listening to this show, and I've gone out to a community of them and some of them have actually come back and suggested that we focus on some of these questions here. So how do app entrepreneurs and startup founders catch your eye as a potential journalist who has the ability to give good exposure to maybe a new idea or a new app? Because I can imagine your e-mail is completely over bloated. How's the best way of catching your eye and getting through to people like yourself?

Martin: Yes, it can be difficult to get attention through e-mail, but at the same time it is the best way. I say this and some people may disagree, but certainly a lot of tech journalists I speak to feel the same way. Although they have trouble keeping up with their e-mail, they much prefer pitches by e-mail than any other way. I get people who pitch me by a Twitter direct message, via Facebook messages, all these different ways. I had one via Instagram message once as well, and the problem is, it's impossible to keep up with all these pitches in different places. LinkedIn is another one; I'll get messages there and it's hard for me to reply, because I'll be going through my e-mail and I'll get the "You've got a new LinkedIn message. Here it is." But then I have to click through and go to LinkedIn and reply there, and then the person will probably reply to me on LinkedIn even if I say e-mail me back, and so it just becomes really hard to deal with. If all our messages are in one place it's a lot easier.

In terms of ways to get attention, keep your e-mails short, especially for first contact; it's best to be really plain, straightforward English, really just get to the point about what's new and different about what you're doing and why we should be interested. Don't tell us everything; I get some people who will paste in a 500 word press release that explains everything about them and has loads of buzz words and things in. That's not a good way, because when you think someone's working through their e-mail, and if they don't already know you through an introduction or whatever, then if they just see a wall of text, they're not necessarily going to be that inclined to read through it. I personally know I've missed some great apps through pitches that just didn't catch my eye. That's partly my fault through not paying enough attention, but I only have a certain amount of time to check my e-mail. So yes, brief e-mail, which tells me enough to interest me, and then I'll get back to you and then we can take it from there.

Paul: Martin, you can't leave us teased like that, what if you missed?

Martin: To be honest, it's hard to remember. I just know that for example I've seen things coming on to the site and I've immediately got in touch with the people who launched the apps and said, "Why didn't you contact The Next Web?" and they went, "We did, we contacted you about two weeks ago." And I'll look back and I'll have archived an e-mail or whatever and I'll be like, "Oh, no..." So yes, it has happened.

Paul: It's like all those investors that said no to Google and Twitter.

Martin: Absolutely.

Paul: Also, the other thing is this is a show about apps, and the Apple have just released the Apple News default app, and I noticed that was on your site as well. Do you have a view about that and how that may impact the way we consume our news?

Martin: This is part of a broader trend that encapsulates everything from ad blockers at the user's end, through to things like Facebook instant articles and Google's AMP project - Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is all about stripped down, fast-loading mobile pages. Apple News is similar in that it's a way to browse news in one place. It loads really quickly, because a lot of people complain about slow loading pages on the web, especially on mobile where you might have a slow connection. So in that way it's good, and it's good that people are looking to solve that problem.

Facebook instant articles is another really interesting way of doing that, although it's really slow to roll out. We would like to get in on that, so hopefully Facebook will get us in on that at some point. We're certainly looking at developing accelerated mobile pages as well, as another really fast way of making sure that people can load our pages nicely on their phones. But in terms of Apple News, I think the speed is great; I think the product isn't quite there yet. If I look at it - I've got it on my home screen on my phone - I don't open it that much. The first time I opened it I thought, "Hm, this is..."

Paul: ... Where did this come from?

Martin: Well no, I thought, "This is cool." I knew it was coming on iOS 9, but when I opened it I was like, "Hm, this is actually quite a good idea, but I don't feel like I should go there." I still find my news through social media mainly, or through an RSS reader, old school, because I'm a journalist so I like to keep up with what people are writing, so I'll go through a list of everything they've written. So the Apple way of you going through and suggesting, "I'm interested in these topics or these publications" and then learning what you read and giving you a feed of the news and things you want is interesting, but there's something about it - I'm not exactly sure what it is - something about the way it's presented, or the algorithm, that just doesn't draw me back to it.

Paul: Yes, and actually when you compare it with Google AMP, that is pretty impressive when you have a first go at that. I'll make sure as we're talking that, we do have people listening who are potentially or doing something dangerous, to write this stuff down, so everything will be in your show notes Martin, episode 375, which you can get from the TheAppGuy.co.

We are app entrepreneurs, a lot of us, small startups, and we're often competing against the big companies, with big budgets and also large venture capital funded startups, and someone asked about how do the tech press take more responsibility for maybe promoting diverse role models, and sustainable business models, rather than jumping on the bandwagon and the hype around big venture capital startups. Do you have any view about that?

Martin: You mean in terms of not necessarily just going down the route of rating a load of money, rather bootstrapping and rating money through revenue and growing slower but in a way that means you're in control?

Paul: Yes, it's more about getting attention even though you are maybe a bootstrap startup and you don't have a big VC firm behind you with some large investor who could maybe have the relationships that the tech press did to get their attention during the launch.

Martin: Yes, well in terms of that, we make no distinction between a VC-backed firm or a bootstrapped firm at all. It's all about the product and the pitch. So yes, a startup that has millions in the bank from well-known VC firms might be able to afford an on-staff PR person who knows how to pitch the press, but really the skills you need to contact the press are not that great. It's about relationship building, it's about - like I said earlier - being prompt and being brief in your e-mails, and just getting what we need to know into those e-mails so that we're not overloaded with information and so we're actually interested. So we really make no distinction; a great product is a great product, wherever it's from, and we want to tell our readers about it. So yes, do get in touch.

Paul: Someone else asks, "Have you noticed anything unexpected from your readers?" So you've got some amazing readers who are obviously really into tech, and I wondered if you'd noticed any interesting themes from any kinds of products or services that you're talking about at the moment? Anything interesting that you're noticing as trends, from what your readers are reading?

Martin: So what our readers are reading, as in what's popular on the site?

Paul: Yes, what's popular... I think this is coming from the point of anything we can glean from you that you're seeing as an upcoming trend, based on the amount of interest from readers.

Martin: I think that the most interesting trend this year that we're seeing from readers is - and this feeds into what we've been saying already - is a lack of tolerance around slow-loading pages, around overloaded ads, that kind of thing. And this is something that publishers are seeing across the  web. When iOS 9 launched and included support for ad blockers, people were very worried saying this would be an adblockalipse, and overnight people will install ad blockers and nobody would get any revenue, and traffic would drop on all sites, and all that kind of thing. It hasn't happened, certainly we've noticed no notable drop in traffic at all that we can really attribute to ad blockers and get worried about. So I don't think that's going to happen overnight, but there's definitely room for improvements amongst publishers, and definitely an increasing awareness in the readers that there is more that publishers could be doing. So that's certainly something that we're looking at, from a technical point of view.

Paul: Martin, did you feel like the makers of today, the startup founders, are they making stuff that your users, readers or people that follow you are actually wanting? Do you feel like there's a good connection between what is being made and pushed, via what is actually required? Do you have any views on that?

Martin: It's hard to say, because I don't think there's anything that our readers are asking for that isn't being made, or anything like that. For example our readers - certainly an overlapping audience with this podcast, in terms of we have a lot of people who are developers and designers, and people in the app building business in some way, shape or form, and if they've got a problem, they'll probably work to solve it with a product that they'll build themselves. So yes, I don't think there's anything that I can really highlight that isn't being made and that could be made. But that's what's great about apps - you don't know what you want, until suddenly it appears in front of you and you're like, "Wow, this is just perfect for me."

Paul: Yes, and I'm actually thinking Instagram's latest one with the one second video.

Martin: Yes, absolutely. Boomerang is a great example of an app that when it came out last week I was like, "That's a bit of a silly idea for an app." Because everyone's saying, "Oh, it's like Vine, but rather than seven seconds it's one second loops." But it's not that at all; it's more like a Boomerang of one second videos. It comes forward and goes back again. So you have these very fun individual-looking, very unique-looking videos that you can make with it. I made one the other day of one of my dogs rolling his eyes; it was just waking up and it was rolling its eyes, and because it then plays backwards, it then looks like it's rolling its eyes back the other way and then also forward again. I did one of a tram here in Manchester, where I'm based, with a tram pulling into a stop, and then as it pulls in, it reverses back out again. It's just fun. I saw a really good one of dancing at a wedding. So yes, I don't know whether it's going to stick. I think the problem with Instagram - and Facebook in general, actually - is that they come up with these experimental apps that may be lost about five minutes in terms of how much people are actually interested in them. They might learn a bit about user interaction and what works and what doesn't work, but you end up with all these apps on your phone that never get used. All the other Instagram ones... Layout, for example, another Instagram one. I think I opened that once to try it, and I have no interest in that at all.

Paul: Yes, that's right. I think the same, it's a one-hit wonder. I want to switch gears slightly, because you are a guest who has a background of writing and you got into journalism, and I wondered about your story, Martin. Have you got any suggestions for anyone who wants to sort of follow a similar path in terms of how you did it, how you actually became the editor at The Next Web and then what you're doing now. Any advice for anyone who wants to follow a similar type of career path?

Martin: Yes, I mean for me, I was working in a school and I had a job where I was helping kids make TV and radio programs in the school. It was a fun job but I didn't exactly know where I'd go next, because it wasn't really something you could turn into a career. So at lunch times and after work I'd head over in my office room and I'd write technology blog posts. I'd just write them on my own site. That site, sadly I've left it neglected, without updating Wordpress for a while, and then it got hacked and then the ISP closed it down. So I've basically lost it now, although I'm sure it will be somewhere online if someone wants to dig out and find it. So I was just doing that for fun, and then back on FriendFeed, which was a great service that Facebook ended up buying, but it was a very innovative service back in 2008-2009; it was the first place that had real-time feeds.

I remember the day they launched real-time feeds, and it was like you couldn't keep up, basically. Just a rain of content flying down your screen, as people were like, "Wow, this is amazing! Real-time!" On there, Zee, who was a former editor-in-chief at The Next Web before me, he had just started in that role and he was looking for part-time people to write maybe one post a day, something like that. So I said, "How about me?" and I ended up joining the team and writing one, two, three posts a day, while I was doing other things, while I was doing my main day job. My first ever post was about Google Wave; people were learning about Google Wave, it launched at Google I/O 2009; it launched a day after Bing was launched by Microsoft. My headline was "Google's Wave drowns out Microsoft's Bing hype." I remember that to this day. So yes, in terms of how I did it, I just got out there and wrote stuff. Then I joined the site... Most people will maybe join a site that's quite small, and then maybe join another site that's bigger. I basically did that while staying at the same site, because The Next Web was tiny when I joined them. We're a lot bigger now, and we want to grow even bigger, but [unintelligible 00:23:06] and the best way to become a writer is to just start writing.

Paul: Yes, it's actually so ironic that I'm talking to you on a day following a launch of something I've been involved with which helps writers, actually. It helps writers avoid all the distractions, it's called ilys. What I was going to ask you is about your discipline of writing as well, because I can imagine that producing one to three posts a day whilst you've actually got some other kind of role and job must be quite challenging. How do you keep the discipline of actually writing and getting the content and articles actually written and published?

Martin: Well I think if it was for just my own personal blog, I wouldn't have the discipline. I would probably just go, "Well, I've had a busy day, I just want to sit and watch TV." So yes, on my personal blog I used to sometimes go a few days without writing a post, and if I look at my personal blog now, I wrote a very short post last week, that was my first post in about four or five months. So yes, that would probably be the same, but because I was writing for The Next Web, we were small at the time and there was only one full-time editorial team member - Zee, who was editor-in-chief - that's how small it was; I think there were like two or three part-time people writing with him. So the pressure was on to grow the site, and I was really passionate about writing about technology and I really wanted to grow the site, so I would just make the time. Back in those days, in 2009, I had one of those little Asus netbooks that ran Windows XP; you used to be able to get them for 150 or 200 quid. So sometimes I'd be sitting on the bus, writing a post and tethering to my phone to get it published. I did that many times, on a rush hour bus, through the Manchester traffic. Or I'd be doing it at lunch breaks, staying late after work to write something, writing something really late at night to go out the next morning. The real drive was that we were a small team, we were ambitious, we wanted to grow, and the way to do that was just to make sure that we wrote stuff and put it out there.

Commercial break [00:25:34] to [00:27:55]

Paul: So Martin, there's two things we need to do before we say goodbye to you. One is that we'd love to learn about the challenges that our guests face in their day-to-day work and what they're doing. It helps us come up with ideas for potential apps, for example. So what are, over the last month or two, or in fact as you're doing your new role probably, what are the big obstacles and frustrations that you're seeing, that you feel like you wish there was a solution for?

Martin: A big frustration I've always had and continue to have is e-mail. I think this would be what a lot of people would say: just having too much e-mail. In my old role... It's funny, when I said I turned chief I got so much e-mail, I very often couldn't keep up and I'd have to spend maybe two or three hours of the weekend catching up with my e-mail, because I don't like having... I'm not one of those people who can have an inbox of loads of unread e-mails for weeks and months at a time. I like to keep an empty inbox as much as possible. So I'd be using Inbox by Gmail, or Mailbox, or whatever I was using at the time, to schedule e-mails to come back to me at a time when I could deal with them, and I'd sit in a coffee shop on Saturdays and write them. I've noticed that just in the few days since I announced I was moving to a new role where I won't be maybe writing as much news, or at least I won't be assigning news for the people quite as much as I used to, I got a lot less e-mail; which is nice. But it's still something I need to keep an eye on, it's still something I need to spend a lot of time thinking about and replying to people.

I'm not one of those journalists who likes to ignore people. There are a lot of e-mails that I won't reply to, that I think are completely irrelevant to The Next Web, or sometimes I literally don't have time to reply. But I do like to reply where I can, and that eats up a lot of time, and people appreciate it. So just a way to manage pitches in a way that's really nice, and maybe centralize, so everyone can pick it up. I know ReadWrite, the tech blog, they actually use Zendesk for their e-mail, they were saying that recently on Twitter. That's obviously a customer service platform, and the people who send e-mails to them don't necessarily notice that the e-mails are going to Zendesk, but that means that anyone can handle them as they come in. But there's got to be a smarter way of dealing with massive amounts of e-mail, that maybe doesn't use e-mail at all.

Paul: Well if you have any app developers who want to solve that, maybe you want to listen to some past episodes... I know we had Dave Baggett, he was trying to solve that. He was actually the founding engineer of Crash Bandicoot, that big game in the '90s, and he's working and spent a lot of money on that. Then there's another guy, Branko Cerny who's obsessed with trying to solve that problem; that was one of my earliest episodes, back in fortyish. So have a look at that.

Martin, this is a show about apps, final thing. We love talking about apps, it wouldn't be right to let you get away without giving us maybe one or two really cool app recommendations from your phone, that you think we may not have come across before.

Martin: Well, I was listening to a couple of shows earlier, so I was thinking, "Hm, what could I suggest for this?" And I was actually going to suggest Boomerang, as the app that has come out most recently that I've been having fun with. We’ve discussed that one already. So yes, Boomerang - definitely a fun app. Very minimalist, there's not a lot to it, a single-purpose app, but it does that very well. I'll tell you an app that I use every day, and a lot of people have kind of either tried in the past and decided they don't like and have moved away from it, or they've never tried it, don't see the point of it. It's Swarm, which is obviously Foursquare's app for checking in. Foursquare had one app for place recommendations, where do I go for a restaurant, but also all the checking in, of I'm at McDonald's... I don't know if I've ever checked into a McDonald's, but... They moved that off a couple of years ago to a separate app, and a lot of people I think didn't really like that, and I think a lot of people gave up on it around then, but in recent months they've really improved the app. It's so much fun to use. When I check in at places, basically I'm a religious user of Swarm. I literally check in every place I go. If the NSA ever wants to find out where I've been they will just have to hack my Swarm account.

I check in everywhere, and I just love the fact that if I check in somewhere that I have not been for a while, it will say "This is your first check in here in 3 years", or whatever. And they give you so many fun reasons to keep using the app. I love the coins you get when you check in. For example, if I check in at a place I check in every week and I'm the mayor, I might get 13 points rather than 1 for checking. 3 because I'm the mayor, 10  because it's my 15th week in a row checking in at that place, and just all these fun things you never know. It surprises you with a lot of different things. Every Monday you get extra coins for your total, in the form of a piñata that you have to keep tapping on the screen to make all these coins explode all over the street. I mean it's not for everyone, but yes, I love it and I follow a lot of people that I know, so it's fun to see where people are and what they're doing all over the world. Someone I know is at The Wall Street Journal Europe in London at the moment, and I'm thinking, "What's he doing there?" Someone else I know is on a 7 train on the MTA subway in Queens. So yes, it's a fun app. It's been around for 6 years in various forms, but I think they've really got it right in the last few months, and I really love using it, so that's definitely one to check out.

Paul: Well Martin, I'm thrilled, because you happen to have mentioned an app that has never been mentioned before, an app that I use every day as well. I am a big swarmer as well, I'm obsessed with checking in. That's wonderful, and I can't believe that's never been talked about. This has been great, Martin, what a terrific chat. I'm going to make sure that we have all the links to those apps on your episode, that's 375, and you can find that from TheAppGuy.co, just go and search Martin Bryant if you can't see it. Martin, in the meantime, obviously now your e-mails are drying up a little bit, how is the best way of getting in contact with you?

Martin: Always, always e-mail. Yes, it's Martin@thenextweb.com.

Paul: Wonderful. Martin, thank you so much for coming on The App Guy Podcast, really a pleasure talking to you and all the best with your new role and growing The Next Web to the next level.

Martin: Thank you very much.

5 App Marketing Lessons from Tracking Over 10 Million Mobile App Users

Paul: Welcome to The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. I go around the world interviewing guest startup founders. Today, I'm in Belarus (it goes to shows you just how global my show is now). My task here is to really help you out as an app entrepreneur. I find co-founders, founders, entrepreneurs, app-preneurs so you get to learn from the best inspirational interviews.

Today,  I've got the co-founders of SplitMetrics. Max Kamenkov who works alongside Eugene Nevgen. Max and Eugene -  welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Max: Hi Paul, it's a pleasure to be your guest.

Paul: Thank you for coming on the show. Tell us about SplitMetrics.

Max: Well our service, SplitMetrics, helps app entrepreneurs to A/B test their AppStore pages. It helps them to:

• figure out what variation

• what idea of their graphical assets is the most converting one.

I bet your listeners know that advertising costs are getting higher and higher these days. It's getting very important to optimize the costs of user acquisition to get the most out of these ad campaigns. So we are trying to help people to get the idea of:

• how their pages are converting

• what to improve

• how to improve

...and things like that.

Paul: Okay, so you do a lot of work with websites then, where people are going to the app page on the website and looking at split testing those to see which can convert more downloads.

Max: Yes, you got the idea right. So we create pages that look similar to the App Store or Google Play and analyze user behavior on the pages, tracking all their activity, analyzing them and showing the app entrepreneurs the breakdown of what the users do and how they convert. Using this information, they can make the right decisions.

Paul: Well this is a great episode already. I'm really excited about talking to you Max, because there're a lot of questions immediately coming to mind. So for example, in your experience - and if you need to confirm with Eugene who's near you - how many downloads tend to come from a website, compared to directly from the App Store. Do you know?

Max: It really depends on the quality of traffic that you drive to your website's landing page. We've seen that these numbers are not very different. Actually, no one knows the conversion for the App Store, because Apple is a kind of a black box now.

Paul: Yes, that's right. A black box that no one can open.

Max: Yes, so we are trying to get a brief sight on that kind of data. Different kinds of apps or games have different conversions. We've already tracked over 10one million users on our experiments. I noticed the following examples:

- mobile games have a conversion at about five or six percent

- dating apps have a conversion of about 70%

- travel apps may convert people at a range of 45%

.....and so on and so forth. It truly depends on the category of the product that you have in the App Store or on Google Play.

Paul: That's fascinating, so let me just try to understand the data that you've just given us there. So what you're saying is conversion - I'm guessing that's conversion from landing on a website to then clicking and downloading the app. Is that right?

Max: Yes.

Paul: And what you're saying... What a variety of information, 70% would convert when landing on a dating website and they want to download the app. So 70% of those people will actually go and download the app, whereas if it's travel it's less, it's 45%, and even lower for the other one you said. That's a wide variety, isn't it, depending on the category?

Max: Yes. Again, it really depends on the quality of traffic, but if you drive your target audience to the landing page... Well, naturally we call it here not the website, but the landing that looks similar to your App Store. So if you drive your target audience, it will act similar to those people that get to your App Store page, so yes, you will see the conversion like that.

Paul: Okay, I've just had an aha moment, which means that I've totally clicked on something. I'm guessing a lot of people listening to this are sending traffic to the Apple page, where you can download and it opens up iTunes, or to the Google Play page, where you get the install button. But I'm getting it's a lot better to send it to your own server, your  own website, and then start split testing those to see how you can get more people to click that install button, or go to Google Play and click the download button.

Max: Yes, correct. Well, let me tell you how this system works, to avoid any misunderstanding. So basically with SplitMetrics you enter the URL of your AppStore or Google Play page, you create or upload different types of variations that you may want to A/B test... Say you have a bunch of icons and you are not sure about what to choose, you can create the landing pages that will look similar to your real AppStore page, but will have different icons. You get one link, you'll use this link for your advertising campaign. People that click that link will get to the web landing page that will look similar to the app page that you have in your AppStore or Google Play. They will click there, engage with the screenshots or whatever elements they want, we will track all this information and show you the breakdown of the data. When people click the Install or Get button on that web landing page, they go to the real app store, download that from there and then start using the app.

Paul: This is great. First of all, the testing of the icon... I'm already thinking actually for myself, testing the podcasting icon and getting people to the page and see which is better. But I can imagine that's really useful because it could be quite a disparity between different icons; one icon could lead to that conversion of 70%, another icon could lead to that conversion of 45%. I mean, this is a big difference.

Max: Yes, absolutely. That's basically the idea that stands behind this service. When we were working on a special project a few months ago, we got a promotional artwork request from Apple, and we were not sure what kind of artwork to choose and to upload, because every designer has his own vision, his own ideas, and the more people on the team you have, the more difficult it is to choose only one thing. So we were spending hours talking, discussing and decided to upload one variation that fits some extent to everyone's vision. But the reality was a bit different, and we got fewer installs than we expected. So then we decided with Eugene whether we have to find if there's any kind of tool that will help us to define the quality of our ideas, before uploading them to the store. Unfortunately then we didn't find anything and decided to build it ourselves.

Paul: That's what we want to hear, and that is the inspiring bit for any app entrepreneur who's listening to this right now: if there's something that is not being served out there, then go build it. Like you did.

Max: Yes, that's the only way.

Paul: Yes, and that's really where... Rather than trying to copy things that are already successful and that have big marketing budgets - that I fell into the trap of in the past - build something that's not out there. I think that might be the takeaway so far. Tell us about this Apple approach then. So Apple were promoting one of your apps, and they approached you and they wanted to feature you, is that right?

Max: Yes, absolutely. This app is basically a kind of an additional tool for the service that helps interpreters to sign their docs by a digital signature, so it's not like the mobile standalone product. But in any case, when we got that kind of request we were absolutely excited because you know, when big brother tells you, "Hey, get on board", you always get excited about that.

Paul: Normally it's all the other way. It's me constantly bombarding Apple, saying "Hey, can you promote this? Can you do this?" And they're coming to you, which is much better.

Max: Yes, so we were excited. But you know, after we spent many hours discussing what kind of idea to choose, we got absolutely exhausted and the version that we decided to upload was far away from the initial one. To be honest, we didn't decide to build this service from scratch, because before doing the first string of code we talked to our peer mobile gaming companies, friends or mobile marketers, and describe them this kind of idea; we got massive feedback, analyzed everything and it took about three weeks for us to get the idea and deliver it to all our target audiences, get feedback, analyze the results and start prototyping.

Paul: Right. So let me get this straight then, you guys are a team of app builders, app entrepreneurs yourselves, you're releasing apps into the Google Play and the Apple AppStore; but this is like a pivot for you, because at one point in time you had the idea, then Apple approached you, you got stressed out about what to present to Apple for the ultimate conversion, so you started to build your own tools. Then you started to push that out to your own community, and that's the birth of SplitMetrics.

Max: Yes, so we were doing the mobile app that I've already mentioned for service, although we weren't alone there; it's like a company that builds that project. Besides that, we had a mate in our team who has been doing user acquisition for mobile apps for about two years, and he probably got one of the first influencers for our service, delivering the most  valuable feedback. It appeared that he had tried to build something like that, but using Excel spreadsheets and some other tools, on the knee, as we call it here.

Paul: Yes, that's just not going to do nowadays, is it? So hence the idea, and I'm guessing the most valuable is the split testing of various landing pages. Could you split test anything else other than the icons?

Max: Sure. Almost any point or element that you see on your AppStore or Google Play page, you can easily A/B test here. To name a few, they are video app previews, you can measure whether there is any impact on your conversion if you add or remove video app previews; you can A/B test different types of screenshots, the order of screenshots, you can change descriptions, you can even try to test the price of the app, placing different numbers on this buy button; you can A/B test and measure how people pressed Read [inaudible 00:15:20] and engaged with the description, and we currently finished developing the Apple Watch compatibility to give people the opportunity to A/B test whether they have to add Apple Watch support to their app.

Paul: Yes, you could almost add Download on Apple Watch, and not build the app, but just see how many people click that, then you know the demand.

Max: Then also you can decide whether you have to spend the time to develop that kind of integration. An additional thing is that you can also A/B test whether you have to translate the description of your product to a foreign language. I remember Matt was telling us that one day he translated the definition of his app to the Dutch language and saw no impact at all, just because people from the Netherlands speak English.

Paul: It's like their second language.

Max: Yes. Besides the Netherlands, there are a good number of countries that you can't be sure enough, so thus you can A/B test and see if there's an impact on conversion.

Paul: So Max, in all the episodes I've recorded, I feel I've got to ask you some generic questions I'm asked all the time, because these app entrepreneurs are constantly asking me these things, and maybe you can think about your own... We don't need to give specific numbers but give us your own examples, your own results maybe, from some of the campaigns that you've worked with. Do you get more clicks having a video preview, or just having the plain screenshots?

Max: Well if we speak about mobile games, then the answer is yes; a video preview is absolutely a good idea to add to your game because we noticed that gamers do like to engage with the gameplay of your product before installing these 600 megabytes files. So we saw that these video app previews increase the conversion greatly. If we speak about utility apps, which are basically non-gaming apps, it really depends on the category. We ran a few tests with travel apps and saw that there is practically no impact on conversion after they added these video previews.

Paul: Wow, so those depend on the category. Okay, so here's another one: should app entrepreneurs release on iOS or Android? And so I'm guessing if you must have a landing page with both icons, which one gets clicked more? The iOS or the Android?

Max: Well, to be honest, we don't have such information, because in order to measure that you will have to invite both iOS and Android users to that kind of landing page.

Paul: Well what about conversion rates then? How about if you do a campaign for an Apple AppStore, do you get more people clicking the Apple icon to download that app, as opposed to the Google Play store?

Max: I think that numbers are pretty similar, and the reason for that is again, the success of your experiment really depends on the quality of the users that you drive to your test. So basically if you have an Android app, you might be driving the Android users there, which are the target audience for you. That means that they will be more likely to click the download button.

Paul: Have you ever done an experiment with a paid app, where you are inviting someone to a landing page and you announce that it is a paid app, and then you look at the conversions and wondering if there's any difference between the Android users clicking that paid app and installing it, or the Apple users clicking? Because that's an urban myth, isn't it? We all often are told that Apple fans will more likely buy an app, compared to Android.

Max: Yes, so I can say that there is a difference, and the iOS users are more likely to play the button which a price on it, compared to Android users.

Commercial break [00:20:21] to [00:22:55]

Paul: Thank you. There you go. All those people that keep asking me that, there's your answer. If you're going to do a paid app, do an iOS app to start with, because you are more likely to get paid.

Max: Yes, well actually we've run a good number of tests and we keep running them, and sometimes we get absolutely amazing results. I can also share a very interesting point here. We were amazed to learn that only one percent of people click the "Read More" button and read the full description of your app. So it basically tells at least us, or some friends that develop apps that we know, that you basically there is not much need to pay a lot of attention or effort to create a very long description for your app, just because people don't really read it.

Paul: That is fascinating. So just to repeat what you've said, only one percent of the people actually click "Read More." So that is not the most important thing of what you do; the most important thing is the title, the description, and the icon.

Max: Yes, absolutely. Right.

Paul: Wow. And what are you seeing from the cost of acquisition then? You said it was going up. Have you got any guidance on acquiring new downloads, any good place you found to acquire new users?

Max: Yes, sure. I think that before doing any kind of user acquisition, you have to spend some time trying to figure out whether the screenshots or description that you have on your store are good enough, because even one percent change of the conversion may bring you a good number of new users, or may soak your budget. For example, we've been playing around with these statistics and calculated that, say you have a gaming app which has a five percent conversion, and you are able to increase this conversion up to seven percent. One day you want to run a user acquisition campaign, you buy one million clicks to your product, and by having the conversion at 7%, you basically save $70,000 per this user acquisition campaign, which means a good number. This is something that we want to help app entrepreneurs to do.

Paul: I see. So what you're saying is you're helping people save money because it's easier to increase conversions, rather than try to spend more money on getting more people to your landing page.

Max: Well yes, so basically you have to think about both sides. But if you have an optimized AppStore page, then it will be easier for you to run effective user acquisition campaigns.

Paul: Max, I'm loving this chat. I almost feel like we need to go deeper into the launch, and I'm tempted to invite you on to the AppStore launch stories podcast that I'm doing, which goes into more detail. But for now, that was excellent going through all that stuff. There's one more thing I'd like to do before we say goodbye to you, Max, it's the fact that we love to know about apps, we love to know what entrepreneurs have got on their phones. I'm wondering if you could give us one or two app recommendations from your phone; one or two that we may not have come across before. So do you have an app or two on your phone that you could tell us about?

Max: Well I have one of my favorite apps for traveling, which is MAPS.ME. Basically, it's a kind of an offline map of any country in the world, that you can download prior to traveling to that kind of place, and then use it there. Since from time to time I travel to different countries, like Russia, Poland, you don't always have internet connection there, so it's difficult to use Google Maps or any kind of online maps. So what I like about this kind of app is that I can download the app, it has all the points there, like subway stations, restaurants, bars, whatever you might want to find in your city, and I can use it on the go and get around the city easily.

Paul: Great, Max. I will make sure I put links to that on the show notes, so for you listening, just go to episode 299 and it will be Max Kamencov and Eugene Nevgen, and you'll see the links to the things that we're mentioning. Also, I guess I can put a link to some examples of the websites and landing pages that you've been talking about.

Max: Well, in terms of a good app combined with proper AppStore optimization, I could also tell you about WiFi Pro app. They have done a good job in terms of screenshots optimization. Besides that, the app is also kind of useful for me, because it's generally a database of Wi-Fi passwords that you may use while going through the city. If at some point in time you run out of your internet balance or your cell phone can't connect with 3G, using this app you can get connected to a public Wi-Fi or to a Wi-Fi with a password and use it.

Paul: Yes, I will make sure that we put a link to that so people can check it out, not just for the app but also for the landing page because you said it's a good example to see somebody who has improved conversion and what they've done to do that. So I'll make sure I put a link to that. This is great, honestly. What a great episode. How best can we reach out to either you, Max or to Eugene? What's the best way of getting in touch with you guys?

Max: Well you can reach out through the LinkedIn app, or Facebook, or just drop us a message on SplitMetrics.com website and we'll reach out.

Paul: Great. I'll make sure we put links to those as well. Thank you so much to Max and also to Eugene who's sitting there as well. I thoroughly enjoyed going through the chat with you. All the best with SplitMetrics, thanks very much for bringing the world and awesome service, and I really hope the best for you. I'm sure it's not going to be long until Yahoo! or Google are knocking on your door.

Max: Well, you'll be the first one to know.

Paul: You'll get another approach from Apple.

Max: You'll be the first one to know about that then.

Paul: We would love that. Okay, all the best.

Max: Thank you, Paul, thank you.

What I Learned From A Top Journalist At TechCrunch

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I'm your host, it's Paul Kemp. I love this show, we get to speak to the most amazing people in tech from around the world, and I'm going to just jump straight into this, because who better to speak to us about tech than someone who's writing for TechCrunch? His name is Steve O'Hear and he is writing for TechCrunch, editor at TechCrunch, but also he's got a wonderful, long history in technology, in startups, and we may even be able to tease out from him his experience of starting up a company called Beepl. But for the time being, Steve, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Steve: Thank you for having me.

Paul: Thank you for coming on. First of all, tell us about writing at TechCrunch. How many years have you been doing it?

Steve: I've been a technology journalist for eight years, but I think I joined TechCrunch in 2009 and stayed for about over two years, and then as you mentioned, I did drive into a startup and then I came back about three years ago.

Paul: Let's just jump straight into that startup, because a lot of people listening to this show are going through the same thing: they're either thinking about starting a startup, or wanting to do their own thing. Now you're had the good fortune of trying a startup and you've also got the good fortune of being in technology for years and being an influential writer and totally tapped into the tech press. So it must have been a big hit for you when you went through your startup; tell us about the story.

Steve: Yes, I've been mainly covering European startups for TechCrunch for almost two years, and you get to talk to tons of entrepreneurs, particularly at the early stage, so before they get big and before they have PR people. My background before journalism was a mixture of teaching web development, so I've always considered myself to be a bit of a product-type person, I don't like the creative process. So you're talking to all these entrepreneurs and you're seeing them raise funding and launch really cool products and you sort of think, at some point I started to think, "Do you know what? I'd love to be on the other side of the table." And then an opportunity came up where a very talented developer, a tech-type person approached me to do some consultation - which I don't really do, but I offered to the kid a product, and he was just going to get some advice. Then he kind of talked me into getting a bit more involved and then it came to a point where he said, "Do you want to be a co-founder?" and that was really tempting. After a lot of persuasions, I quit TechCrunch and co-founded this startup, with someone I'd met online.

Paul: Steve, I'd to pick up on what you've just said there about quitting because a lot of people I know listening to this right now are thinking those same thoughts about quitting, but it is a massive risk in terms of that leap of faith. How did you overcome the feeling of just taking a big risk? Talk us through how you overcame it and actually did it.

Steve: Yes, sure. So publicly, I made it seem like the decision was quite decisive, but it really wasn't. You know, in tech journalism TechCrunch is pretty big, so I felt like I'd reached that sort of Premier League of tech journalism, and I wasn't really sure if that'd be a way back if I quit. So I really, honestly, I spent weeks and weeks deciding on moving in a pitch stage for the startup that we were pitching to investors. I even made it slightly jokingly part my Interim CEO, or iCEO, which I think Steve Jobs used when he came back to Apple. That's how, I suppose, slightly daunted I was about quitting journalism and doing a startup. So I think it is something that you really think through. On the other hand, I saw this as a really unique opportunity to swap sides of the table, and rather than writing about other people's stories, hopefully write a story of our own.

Paul: How did you go about the initial stages of raising money and getting good exposure about the idea? Talk us through the early part of your journey with Beepl.

Steve: We raised at the worst possible time because we literally didn't have any money left. The co-founder - the technical person - had already developed a lot of the technology on his own, and was literally unable to pay rent. So that's when we quite desperately went fundraising. We had a lead with a Prague-based VC called Credo Ventures, so at the point when I quit TechCrunch was the point when we'd already started talking to Credo Ventures. We knew there was a very good chance of crowding a funding round with this particular VC; but again, as a journalist I covered funding rounds time and time again, but I'm going to be honest, I didn't really fully appreciate the fundraising process. Particularly when you get a VC who says yes and maybe you're offered a terms sheet, that's when the negotiations really start. I remember the first long phone call I had with the VC firm when we started to negotiate what was originally not a particularly favourable terms sheet, because we were so desperate. Like I said, we were raising at the entirely wrong time. You should always raise money when you least need it because then you have a stronger negotiating position. I remember after this first phone call... Having seen the first terms sheet, I remember phoning up my dad and saying, "I've just stared capitalism in the eyes, and I think I blinked first."

Paul: I don't think we've had on this show anyone who's talked in such detail about that process. So you eventually went out, I'm guessing that the negotiations went okay and you did actually manage to raise some money?

Steve: Yes, we closed around... I think on paper it was near $400,000. European startups always announce that or try to. If their funding round isn't too high, then obviously in dollars it would look better. But the original terms sheet wasn't brilliant, and I did multiple negotiations, phone calls. It was really serious, like a stalemate at one point. I managed to get a terms sheet knocked into shape a bit more and by the end both we and the VC were sort of happy that we moved the right amount if you know what I mean. Because this is the weirdest thing about fundraising, and I thought about this as a journalist since a lot: it's a complete conflict of interest. Because when you go into a fundraising negotiation, your job is to make the investor think you're a brilliant proposition; in a way, you're tempted to tell them what they want to hear. But the minute you sign the terms sheet and then you do the shareholder agreement and the money lands in your bank, then you're there in effect, you're a partner. So you're no longer wooing them, you're on a level playing field again, and you have to make sure you level with them. The startup we did wasn't really successful, to say the least. So you're in a partnership where you did everything to make yourself look as attractive as possible, and then in effect you get married and they see the [unintelligible 00:09:03].

Paul: That's a beautiful way of putting it. So what happened then? Because you ultimately learned a lot of lessons and the risk of you never going back into tech was completely a fallacy, because you did. What did you learn from the whole experience that you could help teach us?

Steve: Several things. The biggest surprise was the startup failed ultimately. It was a consumer-facing product, an app where anybody could ask a question and anybody could answer the question, so in some ways it was a little bit like Quora, but with a difference because we had some smart tech that looked at the questions that you had already answered, looked at your LinkedIn, your Twitter, your Facebook and essentially redirected the questions that people asked on the site to those that our technology decided who was best to answer. It tried to match questions in a smart way to those who could answer them. So it had some cool tech and it got really positive reviews. Obviously with a journalism background, I worked very hard and managed to get us covered in every single tech publication more or less, and even place like CNN; so it launched very publicly, but ultimately it obviously didn't solve a problem that resonated with enough users and we ran out of money, so it failed in that respect. So I guess what I learned in a really harsh way was that no matter how much publicity you get, how much hype you build, how strong your relationships are in the industry, if a product doesn't resonate with enough people, if the problem you're solving isn't one that enough people have, then you're probably not going to succeed. And also I've been told many times, it's probably harder to launch a consumer-facing startup maybe in Europe than it is in the Valley, because in the Valley there are more early adopters that will help to make your thing get a certain amount of pickup, and spread a bit more virally, I guess. But that said, this was a few years ago and the AppStore platform helped your product move quicker; everything was getting quicker and quicker. So that was one thing I learned, that PR is not a magic bullet by any means.

Paul: Can I just pick you up on that? It's just genius what you've just said. Seriously, because everyone listening to my show over a length of time knows that I repeat this time and time again: it's about solving a real world problem, and that's the thing I've learned from 378 of this show. You've just confirmed that it doesn't matter because often people think it's publicity, but it is about building something awesome that is actually solving a problem, and I love that you've picked up on that huge theme that runs throughout my show.

Steve: And the problem has to be big enough, at least from a commercial point of view. You may solve a problem for a thousand people. Maybe that problem is a massive problem for those thousand people, but that isn't probably going to be a business.

Paul: Good. Okay, so you just added to it: solve a problem but solve a problem that's going to affect enough people to create a business from.

Steve: Definitely. So that was one lesson, and the other thing I learned was I honestly thought that when I quit journalism that my contact book - which wasn't bad back then, it's a lot better now; but it was pretty good - would probably become useless overnight. Because when you're a journalist you are pitched stories, everybody wants your help, you can do a lot for other people, so they're very nice to you. And when I did the startup, I mainly started cynically because honestly, people want your attention so much when you're a journalist. I thought, now I've quit, right? Most of my Twitter followers, people I've established a relation with, I'm no longer useful to them. And what I've found was the opposite. Actually in this industry people are very willing to help and even though we failed, we got tons of help. There were technical problems we couldn't solve, and I literally e-mailed a contact saying, "Hey, I know you did a startup a few years ago that solved a similar problem." It was really heart-warming, the amount of help I got on that journey.

Paul: Yes, and I almost want to echo that in the app world, as well among app entrepreneurs it is the same. If anyone listening who is deciding whether to get into this game, you've heard from Steve there that it is truly a remarkable thing that's almost very collaborative, even though many of the ideas are crossing over in this potential competition. We're going to have to switch to journalism now - tech journalism - because you are at TechCrunch and no doubt I have been in touch with many of the listeners who have come out with some specific questions. Do you mind if we go through a few of these?

Steve: No, go over it.

Paul: Cool. One of the listeners was wondering, with sites like TechCrunch how do you manage the relationships, as a journalist, with large companies? With really big VC's or the large companies that have fully staffed PR agencies, and how does that compare with smaller, indie app developers or the smaller startups?

Steve: The huge companies - the Facebooks, the Twitters - they have internal PR people and sometimes even a PR agency on top of that. So you tend to get to know who the PRs are, and at TechCrunch if I don't have a contact, hopefully somebody else does. So reaching out to those big companies is pretty standard. How does it compare? So with the smaller indie companies or the startups, they often don't have a PR agency, or they think that if they hire one, that's their PR - done. That's a mistake, because if you're the kind of journalist I am when you're covering really early stage stuff you want a relationship with the founders. They're the best people. They're the people that can almost always tell their story, talk about their product better than anybody else, with more passion and more knowledge. So I guess the difference is big companies are very corporate, they have layers of PR; smaller companies either do it themselves in a very naive way - which I quite like - or they hire an agency. Now when they hire an agency, they're often in the situation whereby if they hire a bad agency, that agency has much bigger clients, so they're not really worth too much to them. Like I said, or like I alluded to, there's the mistake: if you hire an agency as a small company, that's not PR done. It's not like hiring a cloud provider. It's the beginning, it's not the end. And I know, with this sort of avalanche of Kickstarter campaigns - as journalists, we are so tired of products that get announced two years before they're going to hit the market because they're doing a Kickstarter campaign. But I've had startup founders write to me and say, "Nobody's backing our Kickstarter, but we hired an agency that's really expensive and we still don't get any pre-signups."

Paul: That's not their pitch, is it, by any chance?

Steve: Practically it is, yes. Desperation. So yes, I guess that's where the difference really is. Big companies have massive PR machinery, which is layers of PR; this kind of sometimes slows things down. Small companies either do it themselves - which is okay, but obviously some are better than others - or they outsource, and if they outsource wrongly it backfires because they think the job's done, and really it's not.

Paul: Well Steve, that's music to anyone who is listening, music to their ears because we often want to think that there is a level playing field, and as these big tech companies and big sites grow up, the smaller indie entrepreneur, smaller startup founder can sometimes feel like it's a bit against them if they don't have the money, but it's nice to hear that from your perspective you're on top of this, and you want relationships with the founders.

Steve: I can give you an example. It gets back to what we were saying about solving a genuine problem, or creating an awesome product that people like in enough numbers. I know there's an app called Dubsmash which is blowing up over the last year or so. They didn't pitch me, I reached out to them because I was getting told by a sum of people this app is blowing up.

Paul: Oh I see, so you don't want to be left out in a way, you've got to identify the trends early and make sure that you're on top of them.

Steve: That's right. As a tech blogger, or as a tech journalist, whatever you want to call it these days, I have several things that I try to do, but one of the things that every tech journalist or influencer does is they're a filter. Their job is to filter out the crap and introduce the readers to the good stuff; I mean, on a very basic level. So every now and again there's a breakout hit like Dubsmash, where even if we weren't the first to cover the app, you can't ignore it, right? You can't ignore an app that's doing that well. So again, it gets back to just building a product that's good, that solves a problem or resonates with enough people and the PR, to a certain extent, will take care of itself.

Paul: That is fantastic tips. How about this one then: As an app entrepreneur I know you get this many times, so answer it how you like: how do people catch your eye? Because you talked about wanting to look out for things that are really blowing up and speak to the founders, but how's the best way of making that initial contact with you and catching your eye on something?

Steve: If it's an app that hasn't yet launched, but let's say is going to launch in a couple of weeks' time, then it's literally just e-mail me, tell me what the app does, why it's better or different from what already exists and give me a sense of the timeline of when it's launching. Because if it's too much in advance I'll go, "Okay, whatever. Get back to me a week before you're ready." And if it's today or tomorrow you have a chance of missing out from me personally, because I'm usually pretty booked up with other launches. We have breaking news, we have [00:20:19] that I'm trying to chase where I've been given some insider information, I'm hunting down contacts trying to get a second source for it so we can run it. And then we get stuff that is pretty planned, so a funding announcement that's going to happen in a week's time or an app launch. I always try to [00:20:36]. But basically just tell me what the app does, what the problem is that it solves and why it's different and hopefully better than what already exists. Because to be honest with you most apps don't feel particularly original; and in a sense that's a good thing, because if somebody else is trying to solve the same problem, then it sort of validates that that problem maybe actually does exist for enough people, but I always need to know what the differentiation is. Why is it better? Why is the stuff out there not very good? And you see this time and time again, that many apps just simply take an existing problem that already has some solutions, but we all know that this isn't good and that somebody covers them much better.

Paul: Just moving on now, someone else wants to know what do you feel about the tech press in general? Do you feel like there needs to be a push to promote more diverse role models and more sustainable businesses? Because there obviously is an element, as you said, of hype on the latest thing, but do you feel like there's enough exposure to those sustainable models of tech? Do you have a view on that?

Steve: In terms of revenue models you mean?

Paul: Yes, I think the actual listener is asking about, you know, you read everywhere about the 18-year-old who gets bought up by Yahoo! and all that kind of success stories, but we don't get a good flavour perhaps of all the horror stories as well. For example, you know, how much it was reported about your failure. I feel like this is where the listener is going. Do you feel like we get enough exposure to those things that don't work, as well? Or is there a complete focus on the things that are blowing up and are successful already?

Steve: Yes, we don't. There isn't enough written about failure or enough about horror stories or enough of the bad news. I wouldn't blame tech journalists, we work really hard to get out stories, to get our insight and to get to our information, but at the end of the day everybody says they want the industry to be more open. But those who are really in the know are the least likely to spill the beans. What happens is when an app or a startup fails, you don't get an e-mail a hundred times a day by an app entrepreneur saying, "Yes, we might have launched but you know what? We got a hundred downloads so we ran out of money. We're going back to our day jobs." That doesn't happen. But if that really is what the reader is getting to, I'd actually like writing about failure or near-failure. I wrote a story about a startup that is doing really well now - I forget the name - but they took out a payday loan for the business.

Paul: Wow, that was brave.

Steve: Yes, and I don't know how many days they had left, about 30 days. And now they're fully VC-backed. I think the company is Marvel, which makes a prototype app.

Paul: I've been using Marvel, I think I was told about it over a year ago, maybe two years ago. That's amazing, I didn't realize... Well, I'll tell you what, we'll take a link from you and we'll just confirm that that is it, and we'll put it on the website. So it's TheAppGuy.co for anyone who want to go and check that out; TheAppGuy.co, just search for the episode with Steve O'Hear. Steve, are you okay to do one or two more of these?

Steve: Yes, sure.

Paul: A lot of people, obviously they don't get this time and I want to make sure that we cover a lot of these things that are asked. So here we go: what trends are you seeing amongst your readers? Anything interesting that you feel is kind of a good insight in terms of products, services or apps that are coming out? What interesting trends  are you seeing from your readers and what they're reading?

Steve: That's a hard one. I get to see trends because I get pitched so many ideas every day. There's a lot of emphasis at the moment on the so-called "on-demand" apps that allow you to get something really quickly; which is interesting, because it means that the length to purchasing a service and getting it is shortening. So that's like in cleaning... Everybody calls himself the Uber or apps... So anyway, that's one trend; the short time between thinking you want something and it arriving somehow; it's interesting. And the other thing I still am astounded by is I get pitched a lot of startups that are essentially taking a legacy industry and still moving it online. There are still industries where people do things primarily with phone calls, fax machines, Excel spreadsheets, and a lot of startups I'm seeing are taking in a sense a business process and making it digital. Whether that be finding a room to rent, or farm-tech, agriculture-track, tracking farming processes that again were done with spreadsheets or pen and paper, freight... I've covered recently a couple of startups that are moving the freight industry away from the fax machines to online. And that sort of astounds me, because you think that job surely would have been done like five years ago.

Paul: Yes, that seems like a no-brainer. Wow.

Steve: I think that's where you cannot underestimate specific industry knowledge, right? Because I could probably get a developer and build a better way of tracking farming stuff, fields and weather and all that sort of stuff in terms of crop planning, but I don't know anything about farming. So I couldn't do that. I could do the tech side and I could help design the product, but I don't have that industry knowledge. And that's what I still find interesting: there are still a ton of industries that haven't been digitized yet, and that surprises me.

Paul: Yes, you kind of reminded me of the example of Halo as well, where the three tech guys go and meet the three most seasoned taxi drivers and had a really good insight, wanted to do something like Uber but in London and obviously that was successful, but you think that the bigger advantage they had was insiders who knew the industry back to front.

Steve: Yes, it has to be. As a tech journalist, especially at TechCrunch, I'm so focused personally on European startups. Sometimes it's not tech journalism, it's business journalism and my biggest learning curve often on some days is literally getting my head around a whole industry that has nothing to do with tech. It's just that tech is coming along and is disrupting the existing way of doing things, which is really a completely way of looking at it. So it's not the tech I have to understand, it's a whole industry and why a particular [unintelligible 00:30:37] is going to change that industry, hopefully for the better, although not always.

Paul: Steve, what is nice is that normally I have a section where we try to flesh out an idea for an app, but I think you have just given a lot of people listening to this a great idea, which is to look around for industries that are in the stone age, in a way, and just try and bring them into the digital age. It just seems like an obvious possible winning solution for potential problem-solving.

Steve: Definitely [unintelligible 00:31:13] startups suffer a disservice have an inbuilt business model, which is people pay, right? They pay every month to use that software because it makes that business process orders of magnitude more efficient.

Paul: Wonderful. There is only one more thing we need to do before we say goodbye, Steve. This is a show about apps; you obviously are inundated, your inbox overflowing with apps coming to the market, how on earth can we get you to pick one or two...? But would you be able to give us one or two app recommendations of apps you feel like we may not have come across before?

Steve: That's really tough, I feel on the spot now.

Paul: Okay, what's on your home screen, how about that?

Steve: I'm really traditional. Seriously, because I have to get stuff done. My home screen is a ton of messaging apps, WhatsApp, and all of them virtually. I rely on Skype every single day, and I still do tons and tons of e-mail. So I'm kind of flat boring when it comes to apps. I still am a big fan of Foursquare or Swarm. I think a lot of tech journalists are like probably the only people that use Swarm because they like to check in and see where they've been, and that's kind of funny. But no, I tend to try a lot of apps for a very short amount of time which is really, in a sense, terrible. It's a demonstration of why the app market is so hard to break through because there are so many new apps and often of a very high standard. Over the last few years, I've seen the standard of app design improve remarkably.

Paul: Definitely. Steve, what a wonderful chat with you, I've really enjoyed it. For anyone who want to get links, just go to Episode 378 with Steve O'Hear and you'll see links to Swarm and to other things that we've talked about; I'll make sure we put those in there. Steve, in the meantime, how best can people reach out to you? What's the best way of getting in touch?

Steve: To be honest, e-mail. I'm very responsive on e-mail. My e-mail is pretty public, you can put a link to it in the show notes; and Twitter, I'm also really responsive on Twitter. I like how with Twitter it's quite a good way of having a bit of banter, having a bit more of a human relationship with readers and people who want to pitch me. That said, don't ever pitch me on Twitter. That is kind of annoying because I manage everything in my inbox. So by all means, exchange banter and good conversation and send me links to other stuff that isn't yours on Twitter, but if you want to do a serious pitch, e-mail. Keep it short, keep it sweet, tell me why the product solves the problem, who it solves the problem for, and maybe why it's better or different from what else is out there. Simple. I do tend to reply to every e-e-mail, and if I don't then trace me up a couple of days later and then I definitely do.

Paul: Wonderful. Steve, it's so wonderful to hear that because I've spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs who just get disenchanted with the reaching out and never getting any response, and to hear you say that is wonderful, so thanks so much...

Steve: The only other thing I'll say is you're going to get a lot of no's, right? So take it on your chin if you get a no. It sounds horrible, but don't always expect feedback. I get a lot of people lately when I say no they want to know why. If I did that I wouldn't get any writing done whatsoever.

Paul: Yes, they kind of forget you've got a day job as well.

Steve: Yes, exactly.

Paul: Wonderful. Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us on The App Guy, what a wonderful journey, and all the best with your next 10-20 years. And hey, don't get too tempted for the next startup but you never know... We'll have to keep a watch, watch the space, right?

Steve: Yes, totally. I'm pretty sure it will happen again, but not for a while. Right now I'm loving being back in journalism, so yes, thanks.

What I Learned From Over 60 Million Views

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show that we go around the world and we introduce you to the most inspiring, interesting guests that we can find in the world of PR, entrepreneurship, mobile apps, whatever we can do to help us in our journeys. So if you're an app entrepreneur, or if you're working for a startup, if you're actually running a startup this is the show for you. Man, I've got a great episode. I actually went recently to Apps World and met with this wonderful guest, he's agreed to come on this show. Let me introduce Ryan Johnson. He is the VP of Mobile Engineering at BuzzFeed and we're going to talk about BuzzFeed, I'm sure that you've heard of that. Ryan, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Ryan: Thank you, Paul. It's good to be here.

Paul: It's good to have you on. Now, Ryan, we're going to talk a lot of stuff but I'd love to know about you personally before we start... How long have you been at BuzzFeed and what encouraged you to join?

Ryan: I've been at BuzzFeed for about two years now. They were actually a client of mine when I was doing consulting back about three years ago. I've been doing apps for about six, seven years now, [unintelligible 00:01:29] and then when the opportunity came around to work for BuzzFeed I jumped on it. It's a part of what we do at the company, it's a part of how we view distribution of our contact, and when I had the opportunity I joined the team, to evolve the team and grow our ever-expanding series of apps. I was pretty enthusiastic, I moved halfway across the United States to do it.

Paul: Actually it's a really big outfit as well because I know in your presentation you were talking about just the size of the number of people working at BuzzFeed... Maybe you can give us a sense of the size of the operation.

Ryan: Overall we're well over a thousand people throughout the entire company, but as it relates to apps we've grown the team from when I started from about four or five people, including design and engineering, to well over 50. So in about two years we had ten times growth, which kind of shows how important all this is to us.

Paul: Okay, so we're going to have to jump into some of the things that I can remember from your wonderful presentation at Apps World, and one of them is the sheer growth of the way we share content through messaging. Probably you can talk a little bit about what you're seeing with regards to mobile apps and the way we're actually sharing.

Ryan: Yes, I think it's a bigger picture thing. You look at how people are using their phones, and primarily it's a social communication device, right? In a way I think we've lost touch with that. We call them phones, but we act like they're more computers. A phone itself is a communication device, the entire device started around people talking to each other, communicating with each other and reducing the friction around doing that. It's expanded from there and it went from people calling each other, to people texting each other, to people broadcast-messaging, so when you post something to Facebook you're broadcasting to all your friends, or Instagram to a larger audience, to really now even back to a focus on one-to-one messaging. And you can see that there's been this increasing time spent on social apps and now an increasing time spent in messaging apps, and you look at something like WhatsApp which has 800 million users. Facebook Messenger has 700 million users every month and they're being kind of the primary way people communicate nowadays. I don't know about you Paul, but I always find a way where somebody calls me, as opposed to messages or texts me, but I think that's more a matter of a growing trend.

Paul: Let's just try to understand this behaviour from people, because we love to learn about the way people are using apps, it's something that I'm passionate about as well. So if we see something interesting, we jump to WhatsApp, to Facebook Messenger, to WeChat, to Slack - I guess that's growing - and all these different ways of communicating almost directly with the recipients, or doing group chats. Is that the difference between that and social media?

Ryan: Yes, I think there are different reasons for both. Sometimes you want to broadcast your message out to a large group, you want to maybe announce the birth of a child or some important life event, you want to share it with everyone.

Paul: Ryan, if you want to announce the birth of a child you can do this on this show. We've had this several times now.

Ryan: Well, there's no birth of a child that I know about right now.

Paul: I actually had somebody who almost... I think his wife, ironically, texted him to say that she was going into labour, and he had to finish off the interview.

Ryan: That's a good excuse. Paul, I may be worried if my girlfriend shows up on this show.

Paul: It has known to happen, yes.

Ryan: But anyway what I was saying is that there are different utilities for both of these social experiences, and the messaging one is that inter-personal but one-on-one relationship. I share very differently with my girlfriend than I would with, say, broadcast everyone. I have maybe more public persona that I want to maintain, an image I want to maintain and I think everyone does, and that's different than the one-on-one interpersonal relationship. For us, one of the questions is how do we harness both of those experiences and leverage that in our apps.

Paul: Yes, so how are you harnessing that whole explosion of these messaging apps? What are you doing for that?

Ryan: We recently about a week ago launched QuizChat, which is kind of a [unintelligible 00:06:01] on our quiz format, which allows you to take quizzes with your friends and family, and instead of being focused around one person taking a quiz and then posting it to Facebook, it's about two people taking a quiz together and then sharing it with each other, as opposed to broadcasting it. So we've launched that, it's been doing great. It's also around the idea that the app itself can go viral, and there's a re-engagement there. So far it's been great, it's been growing internationally.

Paul: I noticed in your chat about the QuizChat, you're actually not promoting this through the normal channels, you're just seeing how it grows organically. What have you seen from those organic results?

Ryan: Yes, so first of all as you said, we soft-launched this which is kind of unique for us. We wanted to really treat this like an experiment and see what happened, so we didn't do anything more than the bare minimum amount of promo to get some seed users on the app. We haven't been featured by Apple, we haven't been featured by Google. We leaked a little bit of PR, but not much by our standards. We really wanted to see if there was something to this, whether you could drive app installs from the content of the app itself.

Paul: Yes, because that's actually how a lot of apps have become successful. I'm thinking back to all those apps that have been bought out by bigger companies, and in a way they've all started with this kind of crazy, viral sharing.

Ryan: I think it's something that we as app developers need to be cognizant of, and I think there are very legitimate concerns about app discovery. It's tough to do, there are a lot of apps out there and I think instead of just saying that app discovery is tough and then resigning yourselves to that fact, it's like, "How do we work in that context?" And one of the ways you do that is by focusing on virality in the app itself, and this is one of our experiments around that. But more broadly, we all should be thinking about that; it's an important part of the experience. And you ought to do it in a good and engaging way, you don't want to be annoying. You don't want to be that game that's messaging Facebook friends without people's permission, right?

Paul: Yes, you just click that one button and suddenly you've got posts galore. We've obviously all gone through that with the early parts of FarmVille, and CandyCrush as well was pretty big on that.

Ryan: Yes, and every now and then you still hear that app that still tries to do that or that one thing that slips through where they text message everyone in your contacts or some other horrible thing. In a way, it's losing sight of the goal, which is to create a great user experience, and you can do that if you think about a good virality of the app and the user experience. That's two intertwined things and not like, "I'm just going to blast this out there to promote the app." You can always kind of get focused on the metric and not the reason you're pursuing the metric, and I think those apps lost that fact, but I'd like to think that social quizzes aren't that.

Paul: If anyone's driving and they want to download the app, they can actually go to the show notes; I'm going to put all the links into Episode 388. Just search Ryan Johnson for TheAppGuy.co.

Actually really interestingly, the episode before you we did actually talk about BuzzFeed, and it was because BuzzFeed made a massive difference to this app. About a year ago they featured this app called Beam Messenger and it was life-changing for the founder, because he went from five downloads a day to this crazy viral app, and it was all because BuzzFeed took the initial interest in the app. So it makes such a massive difference to developers when you feature apps. I wondered how you actually go through that whole process of choosing who to promote and how in a way we can catch your eye to get mentioned by BuzzFeed for our apps?

Ryan: First of all we have a great group of tech reporters in our San Francisco bureau who cover all things tech, and I think they're always on the lookout for new apps that provide great user experiences in new and innovative ways. I'm not familiar with the app you talked about, but all the apps they focus on are those fun, new ways to approach problems, they solve problems for users and they're great apps, too. So I really think if you focus on the user - just generally, this isn't just how do you get featured by BuzzFeed, I think this is how you get featured and be successful generally. If you focus on the user and you create a great quality product, a great quality app that solves a problem for people, the rest kind of flows naturally. You have to do the outreach, it won't necessarily sell itself, but if you focus on those kinds of things you'll be successful.

Paul: Yes, because Ryan, if you can imagine, many of the people listening to this do actually get slightly despondent when thinking about trying to get those apps discovered, because we're all competing against the mighty companies now that have huge marketing budgets, they have their own PR agencies. I wondered if there is any room for the small, indie app entrepreneur who is trying to promote their app without any kind of sizeable marketing budget?

Ryan: Yes, absolutely. I think it's difficult, right? It's a lot easier when you're King Games and you have a million billion dollars and you can go buy AdSense at $10 a pop. That makes it easier, but it's not the end-all and be-all. There were a lot of times that that's failed, and there are a lot of indie success stories. Discovery is only part of the issue. You can go get your app discovered, but if users aren't coming back to it, if they're not finding value in it, the discovery is all for nought, right? It's the same thing if you're a big app maker; you can go spend all the money on app installs, but if you haven't made this quality product that has good retention that users love and they want to share it with their friends, it's  only part of the issue. You need that discovery, I think we should view discovery as a way of getting those initial seed users for the app, that then want to share it with their friends, than then have that viral mechanism to come back, to tell their friends about it, to go and message their friends that piece of app content. Discovery is a launch, it's step one. Step two through four, which is keeping users coming back and sharing out your app is equally, if not more important.

Paul: I've actually had one or two people listening to this show ask me to ask you how sites like BuzzFeed manage relationships with the large, major companies that have maybe an attachment to a large venture capital fund, and they have a lot of contacts and a professional PR agency with all the contacts. How do you manage those relationships compared to maybe the smaller, solo entrepreneur who's maybe working from a garage on their own where they're doing apps? Have you got any guidance for us?

Ryan: Yes, I've been on both sides of the isle here. I've done some solo stuff and now I had the chance of working at a particularly large app company, but I think in the end you don't just get to that point where you have those relationships with the big publishers and the big VCs until you kind of reached scale of your app. Once you do that, your entries are aligned. Apple and Google have a desire to promote great, amazing apps and it doesn't matter to them if that's a BuzzFeed or if that's an independent publisher. They have a vested interest in just featuring the best that's out there, providing the best value to their users.

Paul: Yes, I can actually resonate with what you're saying because I recently helped get an app into the Best New Featured section and it was truly because the app was good, and not because we had any influence other than that. I was wondering, you are actually into news and discovery, what did you think to the Apple News default app with iOS 9? Do you have any views on that?

Ryan: Yes, we partnered with them actually. I was responsible for that project at BuzzFeed, working with them to get our content there. We're excited about it, we're excited to get our content anywhere they will pretty much have it, and we think the news apps are a good opportunity for people we may not reach otherwise to read BuzzFeed news, which is a growing part for us. And the native experience there is really solid, the native articles are really well done. It's something we're actually trying to emulate in our apps.

Paul: Yes, I have to say Ryan, clearly BuzzFeed are taking a slightly different viewpoint to maybe other PR and people in tech, because you are focused purely on the content and getting the content out there wherever people may see it or read it, whereas maybe the other viewpoint is we need as many people to come back to our website, so that we can show them ads and all this sort of stuff. What's behind the strategy of just getting content out everywhere? Maybe talk us through the feeling behind that.

Ryan: Yes, I think we go where our users are and get our content in front of them however possible, and then from that we want to get that data back, from all these different platforms, and use that to power better creation of new content. Then you have this cycle of content and data going from one place to many places. And I think one of the reasons we're also really excited by multiple platforms is we can apply the learning out of one platform to a different platform. Things we learn on our upgraded platforms like our BuzzFeed app, we can get say maybe a lot of data around engagement, we can have a better sense on a smaller scale because we own the platform, we can get all the data back from it of what's working, and then we can use that to make a better article to post to Apple News, right? We can just get a very virtuous cycle and the more places we have people interfacing with content, the better, the more data we get back.

Paul: That is so great, I actually now get that. So it's all about the data gathering in a way, from seeing what's popular and what people are reading, and then you can almost incorporate that into your team, the 50-odd people that are working with mobile apps, to make better, more awesome apps. And also talking about QuizChat, the fact that you're creating that because of the trends that you're seeing with the content that goes out everywhere.

Ryan: Yes, exactly. We can see things from all over the place and then apply those learnings elsewhere. We can see what video is working in our app and then promote it on YouTube. It's a very synergistic relationship across all these platforms. Even as an app developer, you can't just view these like wild gardens, right? You don't want people to just go in one place. You want your app to get out in multiple places and your content to go out to multiple places and then eventually funnel people back, if possible.

Paul: Ryan, I've tried not to ask you this, but it's just too tempting: the dress. You probably are so sick about talking about this dress, but this dress is a phenomenon and I know that you use it in your presentation. For anyone who's wondering, it's that dress that gold and white or black and blue. I love that presentation, you showed the server blowing up and how it went viral from a few tweets. How viral was that whole campaign with the dress?

Ryan: Yes, I think that's a great study in the power of virality, and the power of cross-platforms. I just want to say it's clearly a blue and black dress, it's definitely not white and gold.

Paul: I see both, just to sit on the fence. Come on, you were consulted.

Ryan: That's true. The consultant's standpoint is whatever your client wants to see, but I clearly see a blue dress. Many of arguments I've gotten into about it, but it really is a great case study. You can see how a Tumblr embedded in a BuzzFeed post goes to a tweet from BuzzFeed.com and from there it spirals out. Our Facebook post spikes 8 million views and then in the end when it's all said and done it's a very cascading flow of information. One tweet goes out to be posted to Facebook, goes out in the dark social, which is what we call e-mail or other forms where it's tough to track the source of... The compounding power of social media was very apparent there. In the end it, spirals out to about 60 million views from that post alone. At one time, we had 40,000 people on our apps and 600,000 people on BuzzFeed.com, at a given second. And all those 600,000 or almost 700,000 people are probably in apps themselves; over 70% of our traffic is mobile, so most of that is in somebody else's app. So apps are these very important things, it just may not be in our app where the traffic is coming through. It's coming through a variety of apps.

Paul: What's the biggest thing you've learned from that whole experience with the dress so that you could help maybe someone who is an entrepreneur, maybe working for a startup, building their own app and they want to try to learn something from this whole experience? Can it be replicated, and what can we take away and learn from it?

Ryan: Yes, the lesson here is finding that really engaging content that multiple people can either identify with or they find a challenge themselves, something they want to share with their friends. And from that, things could... There is such a low barrier to sharing something, there is so low friction that something can cascade and blow up in a matter of hours nowadays. It's the beauty of something. From an engineering side point, you should be very concerned about being able to scale your site and your traffic for when these things happen, because they absolutely can. It didn't have to be BuzzFeed, it could have been anyone who had that kind of content that gets out there and blows up in a short period of time.

Paul: Yes, and I'm guessing it has actually done very well in terms of bringing attention and talking points in terms of what you're doing.

Ryan: One other thought too is that in August it was something like that Yo app, which is a social phenomenon that people share this virality in the app and things grow out of nowhere overnight too.

Paul: Yes, I mean I feel very honoured with this show, because I've been doing it now for several years, and within the space - it's a bit like London buses - within the space of less than a week or so I'm getting to talk about the Yo app with the person who has campaigned for that, and now the dress; so it's like two pluses at once. You know, I'd love to know what you're seeing; you talked about all this data and...

Ryan: ... Sorry, that's my dog... Wants attention.

Paul: Play with your dog, that's fine. If it was a cat it would probably end up being more viral.

Ryan: It probably would have hopped on my keyboard and knocked off the call.

Paul: It's a shame we can't try to incorporate your dog into a podcast somehow to make it more viral.

Ryan: It's just pretty cute...

Paul: One of the questions someone has asked in the apps to try, the listener is wondering what trends you're seeing in tech that could help makers of products and services in apps? Maybe a trend that you think we probably haven't come across yet.

Ryan: I think some of the biggest trends are right in front of our faces. I think the people at Google and Apple are very smart and talented, and sometimes it's interesting to see where they're investing their time, their resources and their money and where they see things going. And it's into wearables, into the watches, right? You have Android Gear and you have the Apple Watch; and it's in the TVs, too. I find this exciting, there's like an untapped landscape there - how do we create great, engaging kinds of apps and content there, for these two nascent platforms? TV itself isn't nascent, but the idea that we are using this large screen with a different kind of remote to do things beyond video is new, and I think that's an interesting area. And the other really exciting thing too is VR. I think a lot of publishers, ourselves included, are getting really into VR and some really cool things are going to be happening there in the coming years.

Paul: Yes, I'm all into that. In fact, when I met you at the conference I put on Oculus Rift for the first time and that blew me away. Have you put one of those on yet?

Ryan: Yes, I think I wore one at [unintelligible 00:24:24]. I played with a lot of them with Google Cardboard, too. I think we're at a tipping point there, as that starts to be adopted by your average consumer. There are guys like you and me who are really into tech and will jump to this stuff, but when your average person comes into contact with that, that's when it'll hit that tipping point and it will really start to take off.

Paul: Terrific. Well this has been a wonderful job, and the last thing I need to ask you Ryan, this is a show about apps after all, and one of my favourite things is to discover new apps from our guests. Do you have maybe one or two app recommendations for us, that you think would be good discoveries?

Ryan: Recently I've really gotten back into using Swarm, from FourSquare. I've also been using FourSquare a lot, for finding recommendations of things and restaurants. When I was in London last week I was using FourSquare to find where to go.

Paul: Can I reveal a trend to you?

Ryan: Yes, yes you can.

Paul: It's pretty strange... Swarm has never been mentioned on my show, but every time I get a journalist on, or someone in the tech press - so we had someone from TechCrunch, we had someone from The Next Web - everyone is using Swarm in the tech circles. So maybe it's making a massive comeback and that should be the app for 2016.

Ryan: There are a lot of really smart people at FourSquare, and I think they had a tough decision they made with their splitting up the FourSquare app. I think it's really [unintelligible 00:26:11]

Paul: Well, it's very coincidental that you happened to mention Swarm and it was mentioned by the others that maybe compete in your space. So hey, there you go. There's a trend.

Ryan: It's always interesting... One last comment, one thing I always have to remind myself is the world isn't always me and the people in tech, right? There's probably a group of users out there that don't use these things. It's always interesting to see how they use apps and what they find interesting.

Paul: Yes... Isn't it frustrating when you go out and you look at someone with an iPhone and they've just got the standard apps, there are no downloaded apps. They're not using their phone correctly.

Ryan: I know. Well, it's like, "You're missing out on half the experience. There are a lot of great things out there."

Paul: Yes. Ryan, this has been such a great chat. I'm so glad you and your dog could join in. As I said, there will be show notes at Episode 388 with Ryan Johnson, just go and check that out. In the meantime, how can people get in touch with you? What's the best way of reaching out?

Ryan: Yes, I love to talk to people, I love to talk shop. They can just e-mail me at ryan.johnson@buzzfeed.com. I'm also on Twitter, which is @_ryanjohnson_ That's what happens when you make a bad Twitter handle choice.

Paul: Yes, I've got plenty of underscores in mine.

Ryan: Either way, I can be gotten a hold of there.

Paul: Right. Wonderful, Ryan, this has been so great. Thank you so much for joining us.

An App Entrepreneur Learns About An RTB exchange And A Mobile First Publisher Platform

Paul: Welcome to The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp and this is the show where we go around and meet some of the great business founders, entrepreneurs, the leaders in mobile, and we try to help you as an app entrepreneur or app developer. Even if you're doing this as a side project or working on a startup, this is the episode for you because I have a great guest. He delivers huge amounts of ads in an ad network that is called Smaato. He is Ajitpal Pannu and he is the chief business officer, so we're going to talk to Ajitpal. Hi, welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Ajitpal: Thank you, Paul. I am happy to be here. Just one correction - we are actually not just an ad network, we are an RTB exchange, and you can call it a supply-side platform if you will.

Paul: Yes, please educate us, Ajitpal. That's what you are here for. How would you describe yourself?

Ajitpal: Smaato as a company has been around for the last 10+ years, and within the last three years or so we have identified an area where we're able to demonstrate a lot of value, and that is essentially on the supply-side of things. When I say supply-side of things, it means anyone who creates content, anyone who creates an app, they are creating something that attracts users and audiences. Some of the times they can generate revenue by selling something inside the app, or charging for their app inside the store, but most of the times they are creating content and they are leveraging advertising to help them generate revenue. We are a company that built a platform that helps those guys get started without having the expertise of being an advertising expert internally.

Paul: How do you do that?

Ajitpal: Sure. First and foremost, anytime you're driving a vehicle from point A to point B, you need a vehicle, and that's essentially a platform. What composes that platform is something that allows you to manage your entire monetization stack. So if you're selling any advertising to anyone, we call that direct sales. If you are looking at someone in a programmatic world, helping him monetize that inventory, that's usually an RTB exchange, and then obviously you also work with a few folks who will take your advertising, or take the advertising space on your app and help you fill that with ads, and most likely those are ad networks who will be going out and reselling your inventory, if you will. In order for you to manage all three of those monetization stacks - that's what we end up calling them - you need a platform that allows you to do that, and the platform is called an ad server. So first and foremost we provide an ad server that we built within the last 18 months. The reason I highlight "the last 18 months" - it's an ad server that's built with all the efficiencies of monetization that are in play today. It's not an ad server that was built 10 years ago and we're repurposing it, reselling it or handing it over to our app developers, if you will. And then the second most important point is this is a free ad server. You can go to Smaato.com and within three steps you can sign up for it and start generating revenue for your app. So that's the first thing we do. Second thing is, once you have an ad server, what do you do then? How do you make money? Obviously, if you have a sales team, you could go out and sell the ads, you can traffic that inside an ad server - that's possible, but most of the times you are good at building apps, you are not good at going out and hiring a sales team and selling that content within those apps to attract advertisers. So in that scenario, programmatic marketplaces have been extremely helpful, because a programmatic marketplace is where a lot of demand partners, a lot of advertisers are connected and they are looking for sources to help them buy inventory, and they do this in a very fast-paced auction environment. So we own and operate our own exchange, and you'll hear me mention this as an RTB ad exchange, and we are very mobile-specific. This exchange operates globally, it's got a total of 290 demand partners that are plugged into it. Happy to go into details, you can tell me when it's too much or too little detail.

Paul: Well, first of all, this is great because I do remember coming across Smaato way back in 2009. What I love is that you're helping app entrepreneurs. My big question to you is there are a lot of app entrepreneurs listening to this show right now who are trying to make an income on the app store. From the things that you deliver, the ads that you deliver, the app developers you work with - is it possible for small, independent app entrepreneurs to make a living in this world now?

Ajitpal: Of course, I think it's a lot easier to make a living in this world than it was 20, 30 or 40 years ago because you needed to own a printing press, and you needed to not only own a printing press, you needed to also find a method of circulating your message. Today all you do is you build and app, and if you build an app that fulfills a need or gap within the ecosystem, you go in and put that on really just two app stores, obviously iOS and Android. And once that's done, if there's a need for it, either via word of mouth, or either via some sort of creative marketing techniques you will gain traction, you will have audiences. If you have those audiences, advertisers are interested in those audiences. And if advertisers find value in those audiences, you have a programmatic way of literally not only attracting those audiences globally from within the app store, but then also monetizing those ad impressions, where people are viewing content within your app, either playing a game or they're essentially reading through something that you might have out there. And you're able to monetize those audiences within three steps if you will.

Paul: Actually, Ajitpal, I was wondering from your perspective... The types of entrepreneurs listening to this show have sometimes tens of thousands of downloads, sometimes hundreds of thousands of downloads. What kind of revenue could they expect from monetization strategies that you offer, for several hundred thousand downloads, for example? Could you give us some sense of what we would likely earn?

Ajitpal: Sure. If you have several hundred thousand downloads, let's just say each one of those downloads happened to come in and spend time in your app... I'm trying to simplify the message here, so let's say they go in and they click on ten things within your app. So that's hundred thousand translates into somewhere in the ballpark of a million to 2 million impressions, if you will. Again, it depends on your app, how much usage there is, how much time somebody is spending in the app, and how much navigation there is and what other things they're doing. Because every single time someone goes to a new page or new section of your app, you have an opportunity to serve them advertising. So let's just assume that number is somewhere between 10 to 20 for those hundred thousand downloads. That adds up to somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million or so views and let's assume they end up visiting your app, to be realistic, 20% of the time within a given month. So that essentially translates into somewhere in the ballpark of 8 or 10 days, and you multiply that with 2 million, so you're coming at somewhere around 20 million impressions on a monthly basis. If that is the case, 90% of the audience - again, these are all assumptions I'm making - let's assume happen to be based out of the U.S. So out of those 20 million impressions, you have the ability to monetize around - another assumption - 15 million impressions, and those are U.S. audiences. Average CPM, which is Cost Per Thousand impressions in the U.S. happens to be somewhere in the ballpark of a $1 - $1.50. Again, this is a global average or a very high-level average. The more unique content you have, the more targeted, better audiences you have and we can talk about at point... Data allows advertisers to buy that inventory more aggressively and pay higher prices. Examples of data are age, gender and location. Let's assume you're able to pass all three of those. If you're able to pass all three of those, you can probably generate somewhere around $2 CPM. Again, for this conversation's sake I'll keep it very simple: $1 CPM on average is what you're able to generate, and you have around 15 million ad impressions, so you're looking at generating somewhere in the ballpark of approximately $15,000 a month as an app developer. Then obviously, if you're running  [unintelligible 00:11:22] that's a decent amount of revenue.

Paul: That is great and inspiring to know because we have an audience that are really eager to try and carve out a lifestyle as an app entrepreneur. So in terms of the monetization strategies you mentioned a lot of different figures there. What can we sort of target in terms of the best monetization strategies, from your perspective? You know, video, banner ads, that kind of stuff.

Ajitpal: Sure. Yes, I think it's a great question and the reason I was thinking a little bit about it is because I'm also thinking about ad-blockers that are being introduced, and I'm sure that's a pretty hot topic if you haven't talked about it. I'm assuming you had to talk about that as a topic...

Paul: Yes, it's obviously a very hot topic for us. What do you think to ad-blockers?

Ajitpal: Well, obviously no one is doing this for free, so I think anyone who is introducing anything that allows you to do ad-blocking, they're looking for a way to make money. And if they're looking for a way to make money, usually they're not driven by cleaning up the ecosystem; they're more driven by generating revenue for themselves. However, I think as an app developer the most important thing for you to monetize your audiences - and I think anytime someone is building an app, if they focus on the content and they focus on the context, their content is being presented in, and they also incorporate advertising with those two themes in mind, and I think the easiest or one of the best ways you will hear about advertising being content and context-relevant is anytime somebody speaks on native ads. Because a native ad is nothing other than a custom ad unit; a custom ad unit where multiple assets are being communicated and you can plug-in the advertiser's assets there, that allow you to have a very soft message delivered in the form of advertising that does not overtake the content, and definitely does not overtake the context when somebody is using that app. So if all of that is kept in mind, I think that's the best approach a given app developer can take. What this also does is it does not make advertising more intrusive, it actually makes advertising more acceptable, but at the same time it also allows you to monetize your app while you're giving away free content to users that are coming to your app for the real reason you developed that app for. So I think that's the overall theme an app developer should think about: they have full control of their app. They have full control of the content, they have full control of the context. If that is the case, they also have complete control of how the advertising should be presented. And I think if all of that is done, ad-blocking probably will not be as big of a topic.

Paul: Actually it just comes on the back of a few episodes before you - episode 375 for anyone listening - we did talk about ad-blocking with the editor at large at The Next Web, and it was his view that actually even though we expected this huge uptake of ad-blocking and all the users will be using ad-blocking, he didn't think that there was this big wave of people switching it on. It just seems like that's not a big issue. Would you agree with that?

Ajitpal: A hundred ten percent. And the reason I say this is the amount of inventory and amount of apps has exploded, and I think even if people start blocking a certain percentage, it will have a very minimal effect on the entire ecosystem. I think more importantly ad-blocking only plays a role when someone is annoyed, and I think if someone is annoyed from a given app and from a given experience, that basically means whoever developed that app, they did not focus on user experience, they did not focus on their audience, and I think they deserve to be blocked. So I agree, I don't think ad-blocking will have any negative impact. If it does, it will have an impact towards more cleaning up the ecosystem as a whole.

Paul: We were going to talk about the types of monetization, differences between video ads and all the other stuff... Maybe we can go through that, because there are developers who are listening to this show and would expect to know what would be the best to put into their apps, to cause least frustration.

Ajitpal: Sure. I'm a big fan of all the different formats, and I think the way we look at the ecosystem is we look at a box. You have a box within your app, and the goal here is to present that audience when they're reading the content with the most relevant advertisement that is tied to the content, context and all other parameters where the advertising message is getting delivered to that given audience. I think that's really what advertisers look for. So with that in mind, I don't think there's one or the other format that's better. I think if you have the ability to incorporate video, obviously there's more value for video, but also at the same time if video volume grows significantly you'll face a supply and demand problem, where basically there will be too much supply of video available; that drives down the price and obviously increases a lot of ad quality issues, increases problems. So I think it really comes down to someone looking at the content and someone evaluating what's the best format I should be presenting the message in. I think - and this is where I mentioned the word "native" - within a native ad unit, you can display a content, a message, you can control an image inside a message but at the same time you can also serve something of a format which is a video inside that same ad unit, and I think that's really where it's going. I wish I had a simple answer for you, to say "Yes, everybody should do video ads because they generate a lot of CPM." However, if that video ad - or the box - is not relevant to the context of that given app, or the content of that given app, then obviously you'll have a bad audience or user experience, and eventually you'll lose someone who is using your app. So I would say more to think about is you have a box and think about all different options of presenting whichever is the right format that fits into the message you're trying to deliver as a whole.

Paul: Yes, what I'm learning from you there is just keep it relevant to the user experience; that tends to cause less frustration and more monetization.

Ajitpal: Yes, exactly. Really when it comes to the format and you supporting those formats, that is very simple and there is a lot of content that's available around it. We've just recently released a monetization guide inside of our blog post area for app developers [unintelligible 00:18:51] and I think the decision should be that you leave yourself open to all the different formats; then you can accept and you also maintain control through an ad-serving platform where you essentially are able to plug-in the right format that fits into the content and the context.

Paul: There are two more things, Ajitpal, before we say goodbye to you we'd like to cover with you. One is that we love to try and identify problems and pain points that our guests are experiencing, and I wondered, in your role there as chief business officer at Smaato, what are the real pain points you see in trying to do your role, and maybe we could flash out some kind of solution, or even an app idea.

Ajitpal: Sure, so what is the problem in my role... Thinking out loud...

Paul: What's causing you a real frustration?

Ajitpal: Sure. I think there are a lot of apps out there that allow you to manage your day and manage all the different things you do during the day, so, for example you can take notes, you can do a number of those things; however, the biggest challenge I think any individual faces is how exactly do you use that content and then that content automatically prioritizes itself based on... So I guess I'm talking a little bit about machine learning here, and the ability to not only just read that content, but based on the content it prioritizes the given tasks that you should be focusing on. I think all of that kind of comes back to being very efficient with your time and with the opportunity you have in front of you within a given day, in order to address the most important items. I think that's a challenge we all face - efficiencies around getting things done.

Paul: I love that, yes. Machine learning as well, for things coming into us, the way we choose time even if it's just a few minutes here and there, trying to focus time. I definitely think time is one of the hardest things to manage. Ajitpal, this is a show about apps, this is the last thing we'll ask you... We love to talk about apps, we'd love to know... Do you have one or two apps you could recommend to us? Maybe ones that we may not have come across before.

Ajitpal: Sure, so let's see... What are one or two apps that I use on a regular basis? I think there's a Pocket app - I really like using Pocket app because I'm able to cut and paste and put things in there that I want to come back and revisit on a daily basis. Frankly speaking, I think app discovery is much easier and I think the goal is how do you minimize the number of apps, but more importantly is... Actually yes, two additional ones that are my favorites come to mind. I think when you're having an extremely busy schedule with family and with work, how do you relax yourself? So I have two apps that I use to take a break from everything else, and you'll laugh at the first one. Because the first one is an app my daughter installed and I end up using it quite a bit just to kind of play the game, and it's the Frozen app. It's by Disney, and it's themed around the Frozen Movie and it's called Free Fall. It's just a game. Frankly speaking - I hate to admit it - I end up playing this quite a bit, partially to get my mind off everything else; that's one. The second one is Buddhify, it's actually a paid app and it's a very good relaxation and meditation app.

Paul: Those are actually two apps that we've never heard before, so congratulations: 377 episodes and they're the first two we've ever heard, Frozen and Buddhify. I will make sure, for everyone listening, you have links to those apps and the things we've discussed on episode 377 of The App Guy Podcast. Just go to theappguy.co and you'll be able to also get links to Ajitpal. How best can people reach out to Smaato or yourself, Ajitpal? What's the best of getting in touch?

Ajitpal: Sure, if you're an app developer, I highly recommend you go to Smaato.com and you sign up for the SPX Platform. It's free, you literally have the ability to integrate your app within three steps, and you can start generating revenue. The end result is if you can help someone make money they will always like you, so I would say that's one that they can reach out to. If they have any questions for me personally, happy to be contacted, it's my first name @smaato.com

Paul: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on The App Guy Podcast and all the best with growing over the next ten years.

Ajitpal: Thank you, Paul. Looking forward to it.

How Developers Get Celebrated As An Essential Part Of The Workforce

Paul: Welcome to another episode of The App Guy Podcast. I am your host, it's Paul Kemp. This is the show where we go around the world, talking to the most inspirational people we can find in the app world, and if you are into app entrepreneurism or if you just love the journeys of app developers, app startup founders, anyone that's loving this world of apps then this is the show for you; it is called The App Guy Podcast, after all. Now let me introduce to you today's guest; we have a different guest every day, and his name is Jake Ward. Jake Ward is the co-founder and CEO of the Application Developers Alliance, which is a completely appropriate to our show. Jake, it's a very warm welcome to The App Guy Podcast.

Jake: Thank you, Paul, I appreciate it. I'm happy to be here.

Paul: Tell us about the Application Developers Alliance, what is it you guys have got going on there?

Jake: The Application Developers Alliance is a non-profit membership organization for developers and the companies that care about them. Like many of your listeners today, I share the common trait that we are still very much a startup, that we've been around for nearly four years and have grown to several hundred companies and nearly 60,000 individual developers in our network. There are days when it feels like we're still working out of a very cramped space on cardboard boxes for tables.

Paul: Actually it's funny you should say that... I think that cardboard boxes just come out as a standing desk, and they seem pretty clever. Anyway, four years... Who would be your ideal member?

Jake: That's an interesting question, Paul. Let me back up... From the beginning, the Alliance focused on many consumer mobile app companies and the developers who were building into this new and exciting marketplace. We did so in a number of ways, helping with business education, hosting events, creating resources and materials that would help developers build better products and better businesses, help them understand what metrics of success look like, how to monetize, how to solve the discoverability challenge. It was always our goal, and to some degree I hope we have already achieved it, but it continues to be our goal that we would support the larger developer ecosystem, which is to say we believe that software engineers at all levels, on all verticals and all skill sets are the manufacturing class of the digital age. They're an essential workforce, they build everything that we encounter in this increasingly digital world. So our prototypical or ideal member can range from a 2-person startup just entering into the consumer app space, to General Electric, and everybody in-between.

Paul: I would love to know about you, Jake, what inspired you to start? You are the co-founder, what inspired you to start this Alliance?

Jake: I'd love to be able to say it was a lightning bolt moment, but like most ideas it is a slow matriculation, a process of refining and iterating... My co-founder, Jon Potter and I worked on this idea, this concept of a non-profit membership trade association for developers for nearly two years before we launched in 2012, and the cause behind it was really the vacuum that was being created around individual coders with the launch of the AppStore, with the ubiquity of mobile technologies and the increasing sexiness of mobile apps. It became clearer that there was a real need for a collective voice on policy issues, for a resource content organization that could act in the best interest of the workforce and do so in an unbiased, objective way.

Paul: So was it really born out of also a frustration that you were having and anything that you were getting out to at the time? Because a lot of the guests tend to talk about solving their own frustrations; were you experiencing anything that lead you to develop this?

Jake: Yes, I think that that's an accurate way to describe it actually, Paul. I was working at a digital marketing firm and I was doing a number of campaigns that focused either directly on, or sort of around developer engagement, including the launch of some pretty significant TV SDKs. I don't want to get into brand-specific information, but the idea was to release these SDKs in a way that attracted developers to build killer apps for TVs. Now this was six and a half years ago, this was not...

Paul: Kind of timely, you know? It has taken this long for Apple to come up with this...

Jake: ... and for Amazon to be right on their heels, and for Samsung, Vizio and other to integrate it right into the hardware. We were way ahead of schedule. It was pretty clear, early on in that campaign, that nobody knew who our developers were, and everybody sort of pointed to the Valley and to California and said, "That's where people who write code that make apps are", but there was largely a misunderstanding of what they did, who they are, how do you engage them and what do they want to work on. I've heard it described pretty recently as being analogous to medicine in the 1900s. If you were a doctor in 1901, you were very important and did an incredibly important work, but that profession doesn't even resemble what it means to be a doctor now, and being a developer today of five years from now is rooted in the science and the technology that it was 10 years ago, but the profession is not going to be anywhere near the same. Coming at that ecosystem from a non-technical perspective - I'm not a coder, I am not somebody who's able to sit down and manufacture digital experiences out of lines of code - I thought of it from an organizational standpoint: how do I solve this problem? How do I give people access to developers? How do I give developers access to each other and to people, and do so in a non-profit, unbiased, objective way?

Paul: It's so great to come across you because I do feel like a lot of listeners listening to this do feel like they're on their own. Let's talk about the networking effect then within your organization. If anyone listening were to become a member, what sort of networking opportunities to you offer, and what online tools as well do you have to achieve those networking challenges?

Jake: Sure, so I would urge all of your listeners to go to AppAlliance.org and sign up as an individual member, with a couple of short questions answered about the type of work that you do and how we can help you. You'll be on-boarded, given a password and user login; that gives you access to our member portal. Inside that member center you'll find hundreds of videos, of white papers of research, articles, things that have been generated from and in partnership with our members over the past few years, that answer a number of very important questions that developers who, as you said, feel as though they're on their own need answers to: how do I make money? How do I know the difference between this monetization option versus that monetization option? What is the lifetime user value equation that I should plug into my app? How should I consider the expenditure of marketing dollars per user acquisition? Those are all important questions that sit at the heart of building a business around an app, and we can help answer that question.

Paul: I was going to say, if anyone is thinking, "Oh, I can go and maybe find that stuff online", tell us why it's more important to source that from inside your Alliance, and from your members than perhaps just doing a Google search?

Jake: Well you can find it online, I don't think there's any question about that; you can find some of it online. What you are not  going to find is unguarded, unvarnished, directly-sourced materials online. We hold a number of events each year called App Strategy Workshops; we have one series that is called App Strategy Workshop Fundamentals that focuses on exactly the kinds of startups and business decisions of early-stage companies that you are referencing, and we ask the top ad networks and the early-stage ad tech companies to give us unvarnished, non-pitch content that developers can then use to make decisions. We go right to researchers and look at numbers, market penetration opportunities, and trends so that we can deliver that information without a sales pitch associated to it.

Paul: I love this because like my whole show - you're episode 383, but throughout the whole series over the several years I've been doing this, I'm always trying to get the genuine viewpoint across, without... Because in a way I hear a lot of my audience, they come into it thinking that they'll be an instant app millionaire because of all the press, and they maybe get the wrong viewpoint. Do you see a lot of that as well, the misguided news about instant app millionaires?

Jake: No question, it is often the case that building the app is the easy part. The user experience is hard, no question, the code is complicated, though not nearly as complicated as, say, any number of enterprise applications, but that the business side is very, very complicated, and is often pre-determined by some luck, by partnership opportunities and just by the market; what is out there at the time and are you able to catch lighting in a bottle. There are a number of companies, big and small, that are doing truly innovative work from a business standpoint; from a monetization, user-acquisition, standpoint. And there are others that are doing tremendous developmental work, or even user experience work. It's pretty rare that those two combine. When they do, it's Angry Birds; it's Uber; it's something sleek and perfect, that reaches millions and millions of people and generates money in a continuous, virtuous loop.

Paul: Jake, you're really exciting me because I'm thinking back on all the big themes I've had from the show, and one of the successes that most of the guests seem to point to is a network. How important do you think that networking effect is for app entrepreneurs?

Jake: I think it's incredibly important. The Alliance recently published our first Annual Developer Insights Report, which is ostensibly a census of the workforce. We asked more than 1,000 developers across verticals and 47 countries about the work they do, on the technologies they work with, etc. One of the questions that we asked - and will continue to ask in every piece that we do - is where are you getting help? Where are you finding resources and answers to questions that you face on a daily basis as a developer, as a producer of these things? And more than two-thirds said their primary ask, the place they go for answers is a personal community.

Paul: That is wonderful. It's like it takes it full circle back to the... I remember doing this, where you spend days and days searching minefields of forums and Google searching, and it would have taken maybe one minute to ask an expert.

Jake: That's right. And increases, whether it's stack exchange or whether it's a personal e-mail distribution or just doing a Google that takes you into a forum, the proliferation of expertise has increased significantly the expectation of answers, the expectation of support has gone up tremendously. Now much of that is technologically-based, right? I need a workaround for this challenge, or I need to find a way to deliver and render in this specific way. What we found and how we've shaped our particular offerings for both our network of individual developers as well as our corporate membership is to answer business questions, is to find ways to almost crowdsource, whether it be among individuals or the companies who are providing those services, answers to business-specific questions, and workforce-specific questions, right? Not, "How do I solve this problem through code?" but "What problems am I going to face when writing on this platform and how do I make money out of it? How do I ensure the integrity of my product? How do I get to market?"

Paul: Jake, I've actually had an e-mail today from a listener, and he is kind of fairly despondent about getting into apps, and I've wondered... You've got this beautiful, wonderful access to all this network, and a lot of different app entrepreneurs; if you could think about those app entrepreneurs that are on the smaller end of your spectrum, would you say it's worth it, getting into the app business?

Jake: I'd say it depends on what your metric of "worth it" is, Paul.

Paul: Okay... Good answer.

Jake: I think a lot of people - certainly in the last decade - have romanticized, and I don't even mean that in the pejorative, but have romanticized the idea of working in startups, and of being an entrepreneur. Here in the United States I know that for nearly three years running the number one profession chosen as an aspiration among high-school juniors is 'entrepreneur'. That's never happened before, it may never happen again, but it happened three years in a row among high-school juniors in the United States. That is a trendline; I like to call it "the Mark Zuckerberg effect." But it's the idea that you can learn a skill, build a business and live a happy, fruitful, profitable life with no boss. Who wouldn't want to do that? But if you can prioritize those things, is it more important to you to make your own hours and to work and be a creator, to make things? Then yes, it's worth it. That's the job, right? It's like being an artist. Is it more important to you to make money? You might want to think about developing for somebody else then, because we know the numbers, and there's no question the proliferation of profitability across the app ecosystem is becoming, let's say more democratized; more people are able to make sort of a living wage, but the space isn't getting any less crowded. Consumer-facing mobile apps are really, really hard. The good news, or potential good news I suppose you could say is that the number of platforms, the technologies and the frameworks for consumer-facing apps and apps, in general is growing at an exponential rate, and the number of connected devices and the requirement of software to guide those devices is going to grow exponentially in the next five years. So if your game didn't take off, or your startup is stuck, without being able to raise funds, it may be the case that your business would have succeeded if there were an audience, but that your skills can be applied in a way to build a different business, where the market hasn't yet been created.

Paul: I love that, yes. Actually building a skill from all the things that you're doing, with the view that it's only going to become more in demand, as the whole market grows.

Paul: There are actually two more things we do before we say goodbye, Jake. One is that I would love to get... We tend to try and find out ideas on this show, ideas for building apps. Now, maybe it's more appropriate for you to answer this, which is what are the big pain points in what you're doing right now with App Alliance? What are the big frustrations, pain points, things causing you a bit of a headache, and then maybe we can flesh out an idea for a potential app to solve that?

Jake: I'd say the number one pain point that we face hasn't changed much in the last three years, and I don't imagine it will change much in the next three years, but it will continue to be the thing that drives us, which is the engagement, the education and ultimately the celebration of developers as an essential workforce, and that the number of companies, traditional tech and non-traditional tech who are increasingly thinking of themselves as software companies coming online makes it easier for us as the organization that represents developers to speak intelligently and passionately about the importance of developers. But the hard part is speaking to the developers themselves. How do you create, whether it be curriculum, or certification, or content or resources, or even research - how do you create that silver bullet solution that can be a rising tide for a workforce of 23 million plus that is generally unorganized, that is mercurial by nature, but more importantly, they're artists, they're craftsmen, and the work that they do is often in small teams - the best work certainly is - and increasingly individualized? How do you reach that audience with credibility and authenticity, every day? That's our challenge.

Paul: I have to say I really resonate with what you're saying. I actually changed career... I've talked about this before, in different episodes; I actually came out of a City job in London, in finance and I remember thinking the tech guys were kind of the back-office, we were the front-office, and there was definitely a divide. Now, having spent years and years in the app business, I'm all for trying to celebrate the achievements...

Jake: You mentioned that you worked in finance... FinTech - financial technologies - are one of the fastest-growing, software-powered verticals in the world today. The number of companies, from American Express and MasterCard who are both members of the Application Developers Alliance and sit on my U.S. and European board of directors respectively, to Barclays and Capital One and Deutsche Bank - all of these companies, these almost ageless institutions that have been around for 100+ years have woken up to a world where transactions are invisible, and the idea is to make the seamless exchange of goods and services and money even more seamless, and to put it in each consumer's hands. That's a very real challenge, particularly on the highly regulated industry that moves at the speed of light and is contingent upon customer satisfaction.

Paul: Yes, I can definitely see a lot of disruption. Jake, the final thing then is this is a show about apps; we wouldn't be right without asking you for maybe an app or two on your phone, to give us a recommendation. Maybe an app that you feel that we haven't come across before, so one or two apps that you recommend.

Jake: You know, Paul, I'm a pretty basic app user when it comes to... I take advantage of a number of utility apps, whether they be banking apps or payment... Obviously, I have the normal Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn stuff, but Hotels Tonight is probably the app that saves my life on more than a monthly basis certainly, when I find myself having to get on a plane, and six hours later I'll be in a city that I did not have time to book a hotel for; I might as well take advantage of a very cheap, open-sourced solution that often delivers really good accommodations.

Paul: I love that, I love Hotels Tonight and, in fact, you reminded me that about a year and a half ago I was actually in the Google Pit, at the Google I/O with Hotels Tonight, and The App Guy was on a podcast that happened to be for one of the other apps, PlayerFM, that was being showcased; so they did amazingly well over the years. Jake, this has been a wonderful chat. I'm going to put all the show notes in Episode 383, so for anyone listening, just go to TheAppGuy.co and search for Episode 383, for Jake Ward. In the meantime, Jake, what's the best way of getting in touch with you, or reaching out and connecting?

Jake: Yes Paul, this has been a lot of fun, I have to do it again soon. I'm at jake@appalliance.org if anyone wants to drop me an e-mail, also follow @jacobmward on Twitter. So give me a shout, I'm happy to answer any and all questions, and for developers out there looking for information on building a better business, better apps, education opportunities and really just how to get involved in the community, go to appalliance.org and sign up for membership.

Paul: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jake, for coming on.

Jake: Thank you, Paul, I appreciate it.