Andrew: Three messages before we get started. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, don’t you have unique legal needs that the average lawyer can’t help you with? That’s why you need Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. If you read his articles on VentureBeat you know he can help you with issues like raising money or issuing stock options or even deciding whether to form a corporation. Scott Edward Walker is the entrepreneur’s lawyer. See him at walkercorporatelaw.com.
Do you remember when I interviewed Sara Sutton Fell about how thousands of people paid for her job site? Look at the biggest point that she made. She said that she has a phone number on every page of her site because, and here’s a stat, 95% of the people who call end up buying. Most people, though, don’t call her. But seeing a real number increases their confidence in her and they buy. So try this. Go to grasshopper.com and get a phone number that will make your company sound professional. Add it to your site and see what happens. Grasshopper.com.
Remember Patrick Buckley who I interviewed? He came up with an idea for an iPad case. He built a store to sell it and in a few months, he generated about a million dollars in sales. The platform he used is Shopify. If you have an idea to sell anything, set up your store on Shopify.com because Shopify stores are designed to increase sales. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to set up a beautiful store and manage it. Shopify.com. Here’s the program.
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Over 700 well-known, profitable, in many cases, successful entrepreneurs have come on here to tell you their stories so you can learn from them, build your own company, and, hopefully, come back here and do what today’s guest is doing, which is sharing your story with others to fire them up and to teach them. How does an entrepreneur get 10 million users to download his Facebook? What happens when Facebook competes with him? Since it took Facebook such a long, long, long time to launch its own iPad app, today’s guest created a Facebook app of his own and got it added into the app store. You’re going to find out what happened. Cole Ratias is the name of the entrepreneur I’m introducing to you. He is the creator of MyPad, which allows anyone to interact on Facebook and Twitter. Cole, thank you for doing this interview.
Cole: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: We’re going to do this. We’re not going to just fire up the audience but we’re going to teach them, based on your experience, how they can do this. How they can build their own company.
Cole: That sounds like a good plan.
Andrew: Good. You’ve got to buy into the premise because a moment ago, I did an interview with someone where I was looking at my camera shot and I said, “What the h**l? This is what I look like? If I go down as the guy who looks like that, who produces just interview online, I’m going to be a waste of a life. But if you and I, through these interviews, can have an impact on people’s lives, then it doesn’t matter what I look like. I’ll get to leave a mark on the world that’s significant.” Imagine you’re at a conference five years from now and an entrepreneur walks up to you and says, “Cole, you’re the guy. Because of you and listening to your interview, this is what I did” and he flashes his iPhone app and you go, “Dude, I saw you on the cover of Wall Street Journal. I know what you built. I helped you?” That’s the kind of pride we want, right?
Cole: That would be awesome.
Andrew: That’s what I’m going for.
Cole: My mom already said that she’s starting something.
Andrew: Your mom is?
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: Because?
Cole: Because of what she’s seen me accomplish. That felt good right here.
Andrew: I do like to hear that. Are you guys profitable?
Cole: We are.
Andrew: Congratulations. How many? I said 10 million users have downloaded your app. Is that an accurate number?
Cole: Yes.
Andrew: How many of them are paid?
Cole: Over a million. But, actually, now the majority of our revenue comes from advertisements and some of our other revenue generation parts of the app.
Andrew: Other revenue generation. I’m writing here a note to get into that other revenue generation. I’m going to keep prying into as much as I can to get as much out of this story as possible for the audience. All right. Here are a few things I was told by a past guest. He said, “Andrew, you’ve got to promo in the beginning of the interview of what’s coming up later so that people get excited and stick around for it.” So here’s what we’ve got coming up later in this interview. First, a little bit of prying and Cole seems up for it.
Second, I’m going to find out how Cole was impacted by Facebook competing with him and then, more importantly, what you can do if a giant comes and competes with you. I think you’ll hear some interesting things from a guy who many of us were waiting for a competitor to come into his space. I think you’ll hear some interesting things about how he dealt with it. We’re going to find out why he beat a competitor, because he wasn’t the only one in this space, why did he win. And, more importantly, how you, too, can out-design the competition to beat them.
A final little promo here is we’re going to find out why he charged for his app, why he asked people to pay for it. If you do anything in mobile, you’re going to want to stick around and learn why he did that and how you can decide whether to charge or not.
All right. Let’s go back in time and figure out how you built this up. You were doing something before you got into the app space and the Facebook world. What was that product that you were working on?
Cole: So, we actually started off – Loytr is the parent company of MyPad. Loytr was building a social music product similar to what later became SoundTracking. We never ended up launching the product because we saw a bigger opportunity. Actually, initially MyPad started off as a way to generate revenue and bootstrap the company (?) the social music product.
Andrew: I see.
Cole: But about two days into actually building this thing that was supposed to be just for revenue, we saw bigger opportunity for the bigger picture and the bigger vision. A vision really started coming around what initially was an idea to generate some money for us.
Andrew: A bolt of brilliance is the impression I got in the pre-interview, and I’ll ask you about it in a moment, but I want to understand this “we”. You had a team? Who was on this team?
Cole: There were just three of us. There was actually a former partner and my co-founder, Christian Hresko.
Andrew: OK. And were you guys all co-founders in the business?
Cole: Yes.
Andrew: You were. OK. Are you guys all still around?
Cole: No. [laughs]
Andrew: Anyone else still around?
Cole: No, it’s me.
Andrew: It’s you. You own 100% of the business now.
Cole: No. There are other people involved. Our lead engineer is actually doing a spectacular job and potentially is going to be stepping up. He actually built the core version of MyPad that you see today and is one of the best engineers that I’ve ever worked with.
Andrew: That’s what I’m hearing. Can you say his name or are you afraid Facebook is going to acqui-hire him?
Cole: [laughs] I’m going to be doing some press to get his name out there for what he’s done.
Andrew: Do you want to say it now?
Cole: His name is Quom Din Lee [SP].
Andrew: Say it again for the transcribers. Let’s get it right for you.
Cole: Quom Din Lee.
Andrew: All right. Quom. The money… There was not much money there, but you had a little bit of cash because you had a background in entrepreneurship. Is that right? Where did the revenue come from? Where did the – excuse me – the funding, the little bit that you were able to put in?
Cole: The funding actually came from my… So, this is my third company. When I was at Berkeley, I started a small entertainment shopping site that we launched on the Facebook platform horrifically named Esench (?). We generated actually $60 EPMs on the early days of the Facebook platform, but it was hard to scale the product. It was basically a sweepstakes marketplace where you could win things similar to Swoobo and QuiBids. But because of the legal constraints we had a convoluted product beyond the point of recognition for most people.
Andrew: I see.
Cole: Despite that, the people could understand it. They were spending a good amount of money, and then I founded another company called Flix [SP] which is real time local news which actually just pinpointed to something called Radius which is really interesting and really exciting. And then, in between Flix and Loytr I was actually doing recruiting for venture backed startups. So, I built the teams at Esench and Flix, and it made a lot of sense for me to help other startups. I think I placed about 30 engineers at maybe, 10 or 15 companies, a number of which were acquired since, including NGMoko [SP], Playdom, SeriousBusiness and quite a few others.
I had some money from that, and…
Andrew: Some is not huge, though, right? My understanding is I know that as soon as you said I had some past companies that there were some people in the audience who were thinking, “Andrew, we thought we were going to get an entrepreneur who’s a bootstrapper who pulled something out of nothing, but here a guy, of course, he had all this success before. So, of course, he’s going to be successful here. Of course, he’s going to have all of this money to invest in his business.” It’s not a huge amount of money. If you were doing a business on the side, if you were doing recruiting on the side, it means that the money was probably coming from the recruiting more than the two businesses. Is it fair to say that?
Cole: Yes, it was basically just living and working (?).
Andrew: OK.
Cole: We didn’t have a huge amount of money. We didn’t pay the engineers. It was all blood and sweat equity, which we think has paid off.
Andrew: Alright, fair enough. Then something happened. I called it a bolt, a lightening bolt or a, what was it, you woke up at what time and what happened to you that made you, that made you go on this path?
Cole: In October I woke up at about five in the morning, cold sweat, knowing I had to build something that allowed you to connect with your friends on these devices in a better way. You know, you can still use Safari to access Facebook or Twitter, but it’s not really that passionate, fun experience that you get from the product itself. It’s more about, you know, the people that you’re interacting with and how you can do that with them, and so, when I use Facebook it’s a phenomenal utility and that’s what they repeatedly call it. But as far as a product itself, you know, for me personally, and I think a lot of other people feel this way, it wasn’t evoking that emotional sense of passion for the product itself, and so we set out to build something that we thought we could do in a better way.
Andrew: But you told me in the pre-interview you woke up at 4am with this thought that you could do a better job. Why would you have a-, are you someone who keeps thinking about ideas like this and wake up in the middle of the night or are you someone who was just frustrated and it suddenly came to you that you could solve it, because I never wake up in the middle of the night with a thought about how Facebook could improve or what Twitter needs. I wake up in the middle of the night and say, did I say something stupid in yesterday’s interview? Is this really going to work out or is this whole Mixergy thing just a big joke? But I never think of how to change other people’s worlds. Tell me about your outlook on the world and the thought that you had at the time that led to this idea and this discovery.
Cole: Well, I’m constantly thinking about new ideas, new products, how to solve existing problems, or, you know, come up with a new product or company that solves a problem that people don’t necessarily know they have. As a user of Facebook since the early days my, I originally joined at John Hopkins so that was one of the first 10 schools on the east coast that got access. You know, I’ve been using it for years and it’s the site that I’ve been on longest on the internet, and so, you know, just personally as a user, I thought I could be better, and I wanted to build something that I felt better evoked that sense of passion from using the product.
Andrew: I see.
Cole: And so I woke up in the middle of the night realizing that I had these resources that I had put together for Loiter to build this social music product and that I felt that there was a, that that opportunity to rebuild it and build a more fun experience was something that I felt I needed to do and put our resources towards.
Andrew: OK. And the iPad was out at that point and there was no Facebook app for the iPad and the experience of using Facebook on the iPad wasn’t ideal.
Cole: No, there were-
Andrew: I like when you say no. I don’t want you to ever let me lead you to tell the wrong story. I’m here to guide you to your story.
Cole: Oh, no, exactly. I was agreeing with you, but-
Andrew: Oh. OK. It is true. So the iPad was out and you weren’t happy with the iPad’s des-, the iPad was out. There was no Facebook app for it and the design on Facebook.com on the iPad didn’t really take advantage of the iPad’s goodness of the touch interface and so on, right?
Cole: Exactly. So we set out to build, the original version was actually called Facepad. At the time when we launched and when we started building it there was a number of other Facebook clients in one space and they were doing a more simplistic design that was basically a wrapper on top of the mobile version of Facebook. Because of that it was overly simplistic. It was the big full screen with the big back button, and, you know, various shortcuts into the different parts of Facebook.
You know, some of them, one in particular was doing extremely well, but it still wasn’t taking advantage of what the iPad is known for. I mean, you can access, they built a great browser. Safari helps you do almost everything you can do on the computer. But that’s not what these devices are about. They’re about interacting with whatever service or product it is in a completely new way based on this very beautiful device that allows you to touch and move photos and interact with these things that you haven’t been able to do with a computer before.
Andrew: I see, I see.
Cole: And so, as a user that had an iPad, I wasn’t getting that, you know, sense of fun and wonderment that Steve Jobs kind of had.
Andrew: And you know what, and frankly, I understand the mindset of the other entrepreneurs who basically said, hey, you know what? We’re not that technically sophisticated, or maybe they said, Facebook eventually is going to come out with its own app, so we don’t have a big runway to really develop this out. So we’ll just essentially create a big bookmark that takes people to facebook.com and lets them interact there. And that’s all they decided that they were going to be, and maybe quickly make a quick buck off of it. You had this vision for doing something way bigger. Now, how long did it take you to build this idea?
Cole: So, the first version, we just wanted to test and make sure that people actually liked the idea, that they liked this new user experience which was the navigation on the left and, you know, panels that when you tap to interact with them they slide and new windows that then you can kind of multitask and also quickly get them out of the way without losing your place. That’s a big complaint on the Facebook news feed, that you scroll all the way down to point X, and then you click into something and you have to go all the way back to the top.
Andrew: Ah, you know what, you’re right. I have that frustration too, and I never even noticed that I have that.
Cole: So, you know, we built the first version in just two months. And we put it out into the App Store, just wanting to see whether or not the reaction was positive, negative, we were able to retain any users. And, you know, we threw it in front of some people before that to get their feedback, and feedback was good, so we put it out there right after Christmas. You know, during Christmas on the App Store there’s a lot of marketing money and dollars put into advertising and new products because there’s, you know, certainly a large number of new devices.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Cole: But we wanted to avoid all that because we were bootstrapping and didn’t have any money. And so we launched December 29, and we were actually hoping to take some time and take a little vacation to Tahoe, but I checked the ad networks a couple hours later and we’d already served a few hundred thousand impressions.
Andrew: A few hundred thousand impressions.
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: Wow. All right, before we go on with the story I have to dig in deep into what you did before. All right, to launch within two months means that you have to sacrifice some of your vision and you have to focus on the key parts of your vision. Am I right?
Cole: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: What are the parts that you had to include, and what are the parts that you said, I’ve got to sacrifice this because I don’t have infinite money, infinite time, infinite availiablity, infinite resources?
Cole: So the first version of the product, we actually built as a hybrid application, meaning it was part native Objective-C code and then part HTML5. So.
Andrew: OK.
Cole: For the navigation we built it in native code, but in a lot of ways, the way you described it, there were essentially shortcuts into the various parts of mobile Facebook.
Andrew: OK.
Cole: And so, we certainly had to have enough functionality that people wanted to use it as opposed to going to Safari directly. But it was optimizing for that initial launch which we wanted to build this beautiful, robust, fully native product that performed better and had a lot of the nice UX that you see in a lot of the apps today. But we didn’t have the resources to do that, so we came up with this hybrid solution that worked pretty well. People liked it enough; they continued using the product. But, you know, when we launched MyPad 2 in April of last year, the reaction was completely different. That’s when we, I think that was the beginning of when we stayed at the top of the charts for about eight or nine months.
Andrew: Wow. All right, we got to hold off there, we can’t give it away all right now. Cuz here’s why. I’m imagining the person in my audience who’s saying, I want to build an app because I’m reading all these success stories. I want to build an app because there’s more opportunity and less competition there, there aren’t a lot of experienced players that are so entrenched that I’m frozen out of this base. I want to do it, and that’s why I’m listening to Cole. And so, they’re thinking, what’s the first thing that they do? Is it, did you do market research? Did you sketch it out? How did you know what it should look like, what to include, how to make those early critical decisions that then your developers would have to act on?
Cole: Well, so, we knew the basic infrastructure that was kind of the layout of the app. So, the team started building that right away. For me, it was more about them getting the user experience right and tweaking the designs a little bit and getting feedback from people. For us, certainly, there was a very clear demand, which was there wasn’t an official Facebook app. But we’ve since realized that our audience and our target users are not strictly those that are looking for a Facebook app, but in a lot of ways, those that aren’t satisfied are looking for, again, that richer experience. Understanding the market and what the demand is, is very important because there are a lot of things that aren’t done well in the app store, but search is one that’s done fairly well. You can search for something and hopefully surface the apps that you’re looking for.
Andrew: I see. So you were thinking ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t have to go out and do my own marketing. When people type in ‘Facebook’ into the app store expecting a Facebook app, if there’s no app, I’ve got a shot at winning them over. If there happens to be a Facebook app in the future, I still have a shot at winning them over by giving them something that’s different from Facebook. A better design, et cetera.’
Cole: Yeah. There was an incumbent there. The same way when somebody searches for Facebook now, Facebook comes up at the top. When we launched there was another app that was that first spot, especially on these devices, people are looking for something that’s unique and lets them do something that they haven’t seen before. That doesn’t mean that it’s useless. Just for the sake of being unique, it has to actually do something they’re looking to do. But there certainly is an opportunity, especially with tablets, where you have all the screen real estate, to do something different that catches the user’s eye.
Andrew: The first thing you did for your developers was you said ‘Here’s the basic layout that I want. The navigation at the left, not at the top like we’re used to on computer programs, but on the left.’ You want things to slide in a certain way and you said ‘That’s it. Build that for me. Then after we get that, I’m going to talk to you about some of the finer details of it, like the polish of the design. We’ll talk about the functionality. Anything we can’t get done quickly ourselves, we’re going to offload to HTML. Meaning we’re going to basically send people to a webpage.’
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: You’re smiling, which means I oversimplified it and I missed something. Call me out on it. It’s more important that my audience gets what they need than I come across as a genius who figured this all out quickly.
Cole: You hear about all these apps and products that come out all the time. A lot of them spend months and months and months in development and I’d say the chance of success of those are no better than the ones that come out with a functional product that really resonates with the users. I got a lot of push back after the first version was basically hacked together, adding the design elements that I’ve been doing since. At the end of the day, we ended up launching the product without a lot of those design optimizations and fixes and it didn’t matter for the users. They loved the simplification of the design and having all of the options clearly laid out for them. That’s what resonated with the users. Not if the avatars were rounded or had a nice drop shadow. We certainly improved those things over time and that’s helped with retention and built a better product for us but that initial pop and that initial reaction from the users wasn’t required to have all of the bells and whistles.
Andrew: So your smile wasn’t ‘Hey, Andrew, you oversimplified it.’ Your smile was ‘Yeah, that’s all I strung together and if you want to laugh at me for linking people to HTML pages, that’s fine. Laugh all you want. I needed to get something out the door and it worked.’ And that’s a point of pride for you. That was a smile of pride, not a smile of ‘Andrew, you just don’t get it’.
Cole: Right. There were a number of other people that strung things together. That’s not to mean it didn’t have a lot of thought behind it, but none of those other products were able to see the kind of success or download numbers that we’ve been able to achieve. It’s been a lot of hard work since then.
Andrew: For details on that, of course, we have at mixergypremium.com all kinds of courses where you can see how to lay out the design. If you don’t know how to program, we talk about how you can hire your developers and how you can communicate with them. So we won’t go too deep into it here in the interview. What’s important here is to move to the next step and understand you get in the store. Does that mean that immediately you get orders? Don’t you have to do a lot of work to market it? Don’t you have to do a lot of work to get people to understand that you exist?
Cole: In our particular case, our vast majority of new users are from word of mouth. A lot of the things that are, we haven’t really done any marketing. You know, we’ve done a few small byes here and there to just test the [??] needle. But the vast majority of our usage is actually, or new users are actually coming literally from verbal word of mouth.
Andrew: From me downloading and saying, holy, this is really good, telling my wife and my sister and my brother and my everyone on Mixergy you should go and use this program, which was called Facepad at the time, that’s the way you were getting it, but now looking at my screen over here on this side, I’m looking at iTunes with your app loaded up, and there are a few things that catch my attention on it. The icon, for example. It looks like the Facebook icon. It’s got the Facebook colors on it. It’s got the plus on it. Was that all there at the time when you launched?
Cole: We, so Facebook required us to change the name and the design of the logo.
Andrew: OK. So back then the design of the logo was some form of marketing too. How much money did you spend on it? What was your thought process around getting that logo, not the logo but the icon to look good? Why are you smiling? What did I say? What’s wrong?
Cole: Because you’re assuming I didn’t do these myself.
Andrew: Oh you did it yourself. OK. Are you a designer? You seem-
Cole: I’m not.
Andrew: You’re not? Oh. OK. So how did you design the first icon yourself?
Cole: But I have, I think, a good eye for design and I, so I hacked something together that I thought looked good enough in Photoshop and showed it to people, and, you know, part of that design was also, showing kind of, a sliding panel interface in the design itself with the icon. So that was part of something that I wanted to convey to the users that it was something beyond just a static image with the little, they put that little sheen on the icons by default. But you know, again, we were bootstrapped. I didn’t have resources to find a designer to spend, you know a couple thousand bucks or a thousand bucks to design an icon, and that didn’t matter.
It was again, about, it certainly caught their eye, and you have to do that. It has to be an icon that looks polished enough, but it was, you know, beyond that, that users really weren’t happy with the current options and they still, you know, now that there is the official app out there our download numbers are still doing extremely well and we, we are still a staple app in the App Store.
Andrew: OK. Wow, I didn’t realize you put it together so quickly. How about this? As a past entrepreneur I’ve done many interviews with lots of IOS and other mobile entrepreneurs. Many of them who were in the Apple App Store have told me that they do some SEO tricks to stand out, like mention their competitor’s name somewhere in their results, in their description, to say, unlike this guy-, what do you, what do you say about that? I will pause and let you talk and tell me.
Cole: Yeah, so we, I don’t think we’ve done any SEO tricks.
Andrew: Did you put your competitor’s name in there? Any one of them?
Cole: Oh, we have Facebook in there.
Andrew: Facebook in there, and yeah, in the title.
Cole: Yeah, but, and that’s the way Facebook and Twitter had asked us to display their names, but it wasn’t, if you type in MyPad you’ll see all of our competitors come up.
Andrew: I did and I did see your competitors and they do seem to stick your name in there description, don’t they?
Cole: Yeah, they do. We, we don’t do the same.
Andrew: Did you do it in the beginning?
Cole: No.
Andrew: No, you didn’t. So if it wasn’t that, what else beyond the logo, what am I missing here? This is way back in time when you launched. We can reveal some of those secrets because you guys have moved on past them.
Cole: I, as far as secrets, I mean, we had some press that came out after we were already in the top of the charts but you know, it was, it was really kind of just a viral explosion fortunately.
Andrew: Alright. So people just talking to their friends about it.
Cole: Yes. And showing them really, because everybody has Facebook it’s also, you know, a common thing that you can explain to somebody. Check out MyPad that shows you Facebook in this format and so you can see that it’s a format that you don’t necessarily have on your existing page or on your iPad and when a friend shows it to you that really resonates with our users, so, that didn’t use it.
Andrew: OK. Actually looking at one of your competitors who comes up when I search for your specific name and he’s not using your name anywhere in there, so it looks like Apple is also saying users who search for MyPad also, at the same time, looked at these competitive apps so we’ll show that to anyone who searches for MyPad in the future. I don’t think that was going on when you launched, but I’m not sure.
Cole: I think they’ve had that in the app store for a long time, the ‘Users also bought X, Y and Z app’. I wish they didn’t.
Andrew: I mean, even within the search results. For a long time, I think even from the beginning, when you looked at an app they said ‘Here are all the competitors’ but it seems like even in search results they’re showing them. All right. This is a very competitive marketplace. Which sucks for you know because you’re the leader in the space. But at the time, it was helpful because it meant that you had a shot when people were searching for anything related to your product. All right. You guys do well. You told me in the pre-interview that you were just trying this out as a way of earning revenue to fund your other business. Where did you imagine the revenue would come from? Just ads?
Cole: Advertisement. Our strategy has always been a combination of premium app sales plus the advertisements from the free users. We launched the free version first and then the paid version about two weeks later. At that point, we were still number one at that point so I think we stayed number one the first time for about three weeks and topped out at about, and this was a long time ago, 150,000 downloads a day. Since then it’s been a lot of different changes but we’ve added a music section. We’re very passionate about music since that’s where the company originally started. We’ve been adding, through a partnership with hypemachine.com, a way for you to listen to music and very easily share those songs with your friends. They continue to play in the background as you browse your news feed, timeline or other things. Initially, the majority of our revenue was coming from the premium app sales of our product, from MyPad Plus.
As soon as Facebook came out, this was a speculation by a lot of the naysayers, they said that as soon as Facebook came out, no one would pay for our app or nobody would be willing to tolerate the advertisements in our free version because there’s a free version of Facebook without advertisements, which is going to be changing at some point soon with either sponsored stories or some of the other things they’ve been talking about recently. Despite all of that, users have been very loyal to the product. We have still a massive number of users that use the app every single day.
Andrew: Let me ask you this: you launch it, you do well. Do you remember the first month’s revenue from that?
Cole: No.
Andrew: No, you don’t. Do you remember when you said ‘We’re actually making enough money. I don’t have to worry about money now and I can think more creatively’? When was that? How long after the launch had that happened?
Cole: A couple hours after I looked.
Andrew: Really? So you launched and you immediately know ‘We’re onto something. This is working.’?
Cole: Fortunately, yes. We had checked back with the ad networks literally a couple hours after we got the email saying that we were in the app store. We’d served a few hundred thousand impressions in those few hours. We knew that there was going to be some money coming in the door and we could start building the vision behind the product that we really wanted.
Andrew: How did you celebrate?
Cole: Working more.
Andrew: You didn’t do anything? My wife recently got a promotion at her job so we celebrated with hard cider that I was given as a gift. It was special. It was phenomenal. I’ve got to get you the name of it at some point. It’s so good. But we took a moment and we celebrated that way. In the past when things have gone well at Mixergy, I remember taking her out and having a nice dinner. Do you do anything like that? I don’t mean big celebrations like “Hey, Porsches for everyone on me. I’m the founder.” But anything to just mark the success?
Cole: We’ve been working. There are only three of us on the team. Supporting 10 million users is not easy with three people. So it’s certainly a ton of work. That being said, we did have, I think, a 10 million download party and we’re planning a 10 million user party.
Andrew: I see. OK. It isn’t an official party. It’s more work it seems like than a party, is it?
Cole: No. We’re going to celebrate and pop some bottles of champagne.
Andrew: OK. Let’s see what’s next for us in our story. You had a competitor. I mentioned this in the beginning. This competitor wasn’t a tiny mom and pop failure that was limping along for years and you came and disrupted them. It was a competitor who was also building Facebook apps, who I still see in the store right here. You still have many competitors. Why did you win? Did you become bigger? Is it fair to say that?
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: You did. Why did you become bigger when they were first?
Cole: Because I think a lot of our competitors consider themselves Facebook clients.
Andrew: Facebook clients? I see.
Cole: Just as offering a portal into Facebook. Beyond offering other options like Twitter and Instagram is coming in the update in a couple weeks, that really hasn’t been our focus or where we see the company. We’ve been trying to build a better way to interact with your friends and the people you interact with socially. That can mean Twitter followers or your Facebook friends or your family members. I think that vision and trying to look beyond just the options that Facebook has and how we can port that into the iPad.
The other thing is we’ve never wanted to compete directly on the individual features. There are a lot of features that we don’t have that Facebook has. For example, you can’t send a message directly from someone’s profile. Optimizing for the user experience of these devices is also something very important to us and just simply offering everything that the competitors have or that Facebook has, has never been our goal or our vision for the company. Users have really reacted positively.
Andrew: I see. You can, by just being first, you can come up with a simple product, grab a big audience and do well. But if you really want to survive longer term, you have to re-imagine it or think more uniquely. It feels like there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. Maybe not just two, but two for this example. In the early part of my life, I said ‘What is it going to take to just bring in revenue right now? I don’t care about tomorrow. I just need to make revenue now.’ If I saw someone else was doing something, I would say ‘I’m going to copy it in a simpler form and just grow it’. That does well for a while. But if you really want to survive even through stiff competition, you’ve got to do what you did, which is to say ‘I’ve got to think more independently. I can’t just copy and do a cheap copy’. Cheap knockoffs never work and don’t work longer term.
Cole: Agreed. I think that beyond our own position, you can see that after the official Facebook app came out, the other so-called clients have fallen away with the exception of us. I think that, again, it’s not just because they’re looking for an alternative Facebook client, but because there’s a core offering inside MyPad that is focused on the user experience of the iPad and iPhone.
Andrew: All right. Before we go on with the story, at this point, you’ve done something that a lot of people would like to do. Especially people in my audience. They’d like to get in that store. They’d like that app to do well. Before we go beyond this part, you launched it, it’s out there. What have you learned that you can pass on to my audience? Specifically, let’s think about that one person that’s saying ‘I want to do whatever it takes to make my first app a hit’. What advice do you have for them based on what you’ve learned until this point to get that first app in the store, to get people to download it?
Cole: The first thing you have to do is get your app in the store. Don’t think about making it a hit. Think about what you can learn from either successes or failures. So many people try to over think the process and at the end of the day, even companies like Zynga, or, initially, the Mafia Wars app, they all start as gross simplifications because the very simplified core products are what resonate with users best. Part of what we’re actually building is an easier way for developers to integrate with the users we have and to build simple products for them. Part of that is taking a step back and realizing you don’t have to necessarily over think. To solve a problem, find a problem that you need to solve or you want to solve and get it into the store as quickly as possible.
Andrew: Okay. Get it into the store quickly, cuz you’re going to learn, and go for the gross, I quoted this down on my piece of paper here, gross simplification.
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: Gross simplification.
Cole: I think people call it, minimum viable product or, a bunch of different names for it. Yeah.
Andrew: You know what? I prefer gross simplification even to minimum viable product, even though I never heard this phrase. And I’ll tell you why. Minimum viable product sounds a little too jargon-y, so it’s lost it’s meaning. And I believe in M-V-P. It also feels like it has to be right, it has to somehow be a scientific test. Where sometimes, we’re just launching, a scientific test takes too much energy. A scientific test is too much of a challenge to your own pride, because you want to make sure it’s the perfect test for the perfect product that you’re building. Because gross simplification is easy. Call it something gross, just launch it.
Cole: [laughs]
Andrew: Is that fair?
Cole: Well, I think that that in and of itself is a gross simplification. But.
Andrew: Okay.
Cole: Yeah, I think getting something into the market is the first step [??] So.
Andrew: What happens with this? Mixergy started as a gross simplification. It’s still a gross simplification. I still don’t have a way of getting a video to be clear. I’m taking a look again at myself. This is not the way that this should be looking. I mean we should have all things sliding in on a screen, we should have texts coming in with what you just said, to summarize. All kinds of things we should have. It’s tough, when once you do right with a gross simplification, isn’t it tough to push yourself to get better? Because the market accepted the gross simplification? Life is good there, why rock the boat when life is so good?
Cole: You know I think that’s where some of our competitors ended up ultimately failing.
Andrew: I see.
Cole: We’ve pushed out updates on average every two or three weeks for the last 16 months. So, I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of another application that does that number of updates and it’s because we learn things every two weeks. And we make improvements on everything that we hear throughout that entire process. And, yes it’s with, a large audience and a large user base. I feel for Mark Zuckerberg every single time he releases an update, that there are going to be naysayers and people that bitch and moan about the entire process. But, ultimately trying to build what you feel is the vision behind it, is what you have to continue doing.
Andrew: All right. Fair enough. And I shouldn’t beat up too much on our work here. It is gross and design, I’ve got to say, and I do have a lot of work to do when it comes to design. But I’m postponing that until later on. Now what I care about is getting the content of the interviews better. And you and I made an exception here where I did a pre-interview with you and I did a lot of the research, but ordinarily what we do is, to improve, we spend more money and more time on researching guests. We spend more time on guests, pre-interviewing them and prepping them and making sure that everything is geared towards getting as much value for the customer, for the audience member as possible.
Cole: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: All right. Let’s talk about the charge first fee. Early on, you made the decision that you were going to do both. Why both?
Cole: Well, initially the product was meant to bootstrap our social music product. So, the goal with it was initially to make as much money as possible. We put out a product that we thought was worth charging for. And a lot of start-ups and I think a lot of reasons behind when entrepreneurs potentially don’t try and charge, if they’re just trying to acquire the maximum number of users etc. but, even after the official Facebook app came out, which is free and has no advertisements in it. Our free version with advertisements has continued to do well. And, that’s because I think, the offering is above and beyond what they get elsewhere, and it’s something that they’re willing to pay for or tolerate. And, there are a lot of other products in the App store [??] that avoid monetization, you know advertisements in it’s current form is by no means the end all of what we what we’re building and what we have planned. But, it makes us profitable now and gives us a lot of flexibility that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
Andrew: So, it was paid first with ads, and then an ad version? And then a free with ads?
Cole: No, we had a free version with ads first.
Andrew: Okay.
Cole: And then about two weeks later, we launched a paid version, without ads.
Andrew: OK. And which did more revenue in the beginning? Obviously, things have changed as you said.
Cole: In the beginning it was the paid app.
Andrew: The paid app, because it’s money quickly.
Cole: Yeah. But, actually we realized pretty quickly that our paid app was a losing proposition. It was the amount of money we were giving up for advertisements just for, at the time, a dollar or two. Upfront was losing money for us long-term, but for a bootstrapped company having that money in the door immediately as opposed to over the lifetime value of the user, was more valuable plus there’s also some organic advantages to rising in the pay charts. You get a lot more discovery as well as not just beyond the people inertia buy.
Andrew: What’s a user worth to you, a free user, in advertising revenue?
Cole: A lot.
Andrew: I see. So, it’s fair to say that a user is worth more than the two bucks that you guys are currently charging for the paid version.
Cole: We think so.
Andrew: What happened when you increased prices? Did revenue grow or stay flat?
Cole: Everything we do is constantly in flux, so we’ve been testing different pricing. It’s worked out.
Andrew: OK. [laughs]
Cole: It’s generating more money though.
Andrew: I’m looking online as we’re talking to see what else I can bring up here based on what? I’m spotting in your store. All right. Let’s move on then to the next part of the story, which is – you get the app in the store, you decide you’re not just going to relax, you want to keep improving it, and you start to make design changes. What did you learn from that initial launch that made you say, “Oh, we absolutely have to do something different about our design and about the way we create this product in the next iteration.
Cole: HTML 5.
Andrew: Why?
Cole: Well, let me rephrase. Also, a gross simplification.
Andrew: [laughs]
Cole: HTML 5 in its current form on the iPad and iPhone is not nearly as performing as native Objective C code, and to a user all they care about is performance and how nice and well their app works. They don’t care that you can port it to Android, which they may or may not have. They don’t care if it works on the web. They care about the place where they bought it or trying to use it which shouldn’t be that jarring, when you think about it.
And so, our first version was a hybrid, and a lot of things that we did to build the framework quickly just didn’t scale in HTML5. We allowed users to stack panels so you could go from the news feed to a profile to another profile, and they were layered, all of these pages on top of each other which caused memory issues with the HTML 5. So, that was one part of it. It just didn’t perform, and it wasn’t as smooth and crisp as the native version. And so, that’s why we immediately started rebuilding the native version.
Andrew: OK. How long did that take you?
Cole: About two months.
Andrew: How do you get the feedback to do this? Is it coming to you through the app feedback system, or are people reaching out to you somehow?
Cole: All of the above. We have, at this point, almost 200,000 Facebook friends or
Facebook fans on our fan page. So, we get a lot of feedback that way. We get a lot of feedback from the app store, from the comments there as well as emails.
Andrew: How did you organize it all and figure out what to do? I find when there’s not enough feedback, we entrepreneurs complain that it’s not scientifically reliable. It’s a couple of people who are complaining so you don’t know whether to listen to them until more people come in. When you get a lot of people coming in, you say, “I can’t even figure this out. There’s just too much data. Should I be satisfying the crowd? Should I be trying to figure out some kind of system?
I think Automatic has a voting system where people can vote on the feedback. What do you do?
Cole: We tried to get satisfaction from (?). We tried to group things together that way. At the end of the day I think you absolutely have to listen to other people, internalize it and then kind of take it to the next level. Whatever that means. I think the product depends on the entrepreneur. For me, it was staying very focused because we do have a ton of feedback. At one point, our Facebook page was getting 1,000 comments a day, which was impossible to go through. So it was trying to group the things that were common, which can be bugs, can be future requests. It can be a lot of things. I think for our particular product, it’s been about staying very true to the vision of what we’re trying to build, which is the next level of social interaction on these devices.
Andrew: Am I understanding it right? It’s your vision filtering the feedback that comes in?
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: I worry about that because it’s my vision that’s filtering the story that you’re telling, I wonder sometimes if because I’m so obsessed with revenue as opposed to fundraising, if I get excited about the revenue stories and ask more questions about them, and I end up biasing the data that I’m getting in my interviews. For you, it’s an equally, if not more important challenge, because if you listen to the feedback you want to hear, and not the feedback you don’t want to hear, you’re missing out on a direction that the audience is clearly pointing you in. How do you do this right? How do we, as entrepreneurs, do it right?
Cole: I definitely don’t block out anything. I listen to all the feedback and internalize it. I think you definitely can’t ignore certain things. It’s very important to look at the big picture. What I meant is the product is where it is because of our vision to build the product that users are interacting with and they’ve resonated with that. Moving on, I can’t just take every little complaint and try to cram that into an existing product. In some cases we consider building alternative products. In some cases we try to figure out how or if it fits into our existing use base or existing product. It’s about knowing what you’re building and listening to the feedback around that. If 1,000 people tell you to build a black screen and you know you’re trying to build a wide screen, maybe there’s a bigger demand for the black screen and you should certainly consider that. At the end of the day, it’s the entrepreneur that should know what they’re trying to build and be malleable with that. But if they don’t know what they’re doing than nobody does.
Andrew: I see. So even if the majority of the audience is asking me to do comedy, I’ve got to stay away from it because that’s not the vision. That’s not what I’m good at.
Cole: No. If the majority of people are telling you to do comedy then maybe you should consider doing comedy. For us, a good example is we don’t have a simple way to message people. That hasn’t been the focus because we don’t want to copy every single thing that Facebook has., But what we’re trying to do is allow them to interact with each other in a more natural way. For the most part, that’s writing on your friend’s walls. That’s what you want to do and that’s how you tend to interact when you go to a friend’s profile. A fair amount of people have requested a better way to message. That’s something that we’re considering, but it hasn’t been that I’ve dropped the ball, to terminate everything else we’re doing, to focus on that.
Andrew: How are the paid customers different from the free customers? How are they different?
Cole: They’re a lot more loyal.
Andrew: They are?
Cole: Especially pre-Facebook because we were the largest client and we were the default search result on iTunes. Millions and millions of people were using us even if they were just doing it out of spite it seemed, in some ways. A lot of people complain for the sake of complaining or take the time to write a review from MyPad saying ‘Where’s the official app?’ A lot of those people were not the ones that were really affecting our bottom line or our revenue or our engagement numbers. Those were the people that just downloaded it for the sake of downloading it and then never really used the product. The paid users are even more along the lines of loyal MyPad users that don’t just use the product as a way to access Facebook, but use it as a better way to interact with their social lives.
Andrew: Marco Arment of Instapaper famously said recently ‘I’m not going to support a free version of Instapaper anymore. The paid people are much better’ and he wasn’t seeing enough of a transition from free users to paid users. What did you think of his decision?
Cole: I think a lot of companies make that choice. I think Bank of America, for example, stopped supporting the free checking accounts a long time ago because it was just a losing proposition for them. Or they weren’t generating enough money as a result. There are a lot of Twitter clients that don’t have a free version. I think that it’s important for our users and we have a pretty good conversion rate.
Andrew: So you are seeing people go from free to paid? You are?
Cole: Yes. A large percent. It’s about roughly 10%.
Andrew: Wow. All right. Also, your product is different from Marco’s because I don’t remember seeing any ads in his free version, if any at all. It was more of a lite version to get you to taste what Instapaper was about. Where with you, there’s a real monetization in the free version.
Cole: Yeah. We have people using the product for hours a day, which-
Andrew: Four hours a day.
Cole: Some of them, yeah.
Andrew: I can’t imagine that.
Cole: There are a lot of people that love their social media. And we love that they love MyPad.
Andrew: God bless them. Mobile ad networks. This whole industry is new to them, too. What are some of the challenges that they’re having and that you, as an entrepreneur working with them, are dealing with?
Cole: Mobile ad networks have a lot of problems. The UDID issue is just one of them. The fill rate. I think the largest problem with mobile ad networks is they’re very focused on advertisers and not very focused on the publishers or developers. For the most part, developers that make money for the ad networks are long tail. They’re not large publishers like us. As a result, they don’t have the bandwidth or even savviness to know that they’re being taken advantage of. I will literally watch our ECPMs drop for no apparent reason and you’ll get feedback from the networks claiming that it’s campaigns are ending and different life cycles or sales cycles. At the end of the day, it’s them bending to the advertisers to give them cheaper clicks while screwing me. It’s frustrating.
Andrew: The same advertiser negotiates heavily and ends up getting a lower rate at your expense. That’s what’s happening.
Cole: Yes. You can do anything except complain to the ad network to turn them off. But then as a result, my fill rate drops. It’s a big problem.
Andrew: What’s the fill rate issue? I wrote a few issues down and I want to make sure to hit on each one and spend some time on each one. What’s the issue with fill rate?
Cole: With mobile ad networks, no single network is capable of filling all of your inventory. It depends on where your geography is, different requests from the advertisers its targeting or location. Things like that. The solution for that is using an ad moderator like Ad Mob has Ad World, Mo Pub has their solution, Burstly has their solution. I’m sure there are a number of others. At the end of the day they basically do a waterfall effect. If Network X fails, they try Network Y. If Network Y fails, they try Network Z. It’s not at all optimized. It has a lot of problem and fill doesn’t quite hit 100%. If you take out Network X then you have a smaller opportunity to fill the overall request. The entire process is very manual. You have to continually interact with the networks. Tell them your concerns or why we’re seeing a drop for no apparent reason, other than an advertiser on their end is requesting such a drop.
Andrew: So smaller advertisers, you said earlier, too, does better on a CPM basis, an effective CPM basis that someone like you, who has a lot of inventory. Is that true?
Cole: Sorry, say that again.
Andrew: That, is it that smaller publisher does better on an effective CPM basis than you do?
Cole: I would be surprised if that’s the case.
Andrew: Oh, I though you were saying that they were.
Cole: What I was saying is the majority of where these ad networks get their better margins are not from “savvy-publishers” like us. But all the guys that are happy that all of the sudden they have a million impressions in a month, little do they know they should be getting $0.50 [??] CPM over all that traffic and instead the publishers slowly wiggling away and dropping it down to $0.05.
Andrew: I see. So how do they know that? How do you know what you should be generating? How could they know if they’re generating as much as they can?
Cole: They don’t. There’s no mobile network that is focused on publishers, on helping publishers.
Andrew: I see.
Cole: Because in a lot of ways it’s a hit-based business, as well. So, if they focus on the big publishers, that’s great for overall but, you know, in terms of, they’re happy of sign us up and all the networks are happy to sign us up, other big publishers but, then, as soon as we start noticing the differences, they look for other small networks and either sign with small networks or a small publisher. Sorry, it’s a point of frustration for me.
Andrew: What’s the UDID issue that you have?
Cole: So, the way, right now there’s very little transparency with the entire funnel so how a user gets to an app and then whether or not they download it from the app store. Obviously, they eventually have to go to the app store to actually make the download but how they got there and then who they are, that entire process right now or up until last week, was primarily tracked through UDID.
So, if an advertiser promotes in a certain app, and the user clicks that, typically I think what’s happening is the UDID is being sent to that advertiser so they see that some UDID viewed their advertisement and then, if that user goes to download it, which is their app, they’re tracking that UDID match to the one that they saw before or making the assumption it must be because of that advertisement. Now since there is no global solution in lieu of UDID since Apple’s banning apps that track those things, it’s going to be a problem for tracking that funnel and so advertisers are probably, my expectation is they’re going to probably reduce their spending a little until they find a better solution and they’re able to track those [??].
There’s no global solution right now that I’m aware of. People been talking about Mac addresses, a lot of different things but it needs to be a kind of global solution in order for it to work well and I haven’t heard of one that is wide-spread enough to do that.
Andrew: I don’t want to leave this section of the conversation on a downer. I want to give some advice to another entrepreneur who’s listening to us who wants to generate some ad revenue.
What’s one piece of advice that you can give them based on your experience? You are one of the biggest publishers.
Cole: Be very proactive.
Andrew: What does that mean in this case, specifically?
Cole: Do you mean as far as building…
Andrew: In advertising, I mean.
Cole: You have to be very proactive.
Andrew: With the ad network?
Cole: With the ad networks and part of what we’re actually building is a publisher focused ad network where we’re trying to control some of these things for the developers because of the problems that we’ve run into ourselves. But if you are doing millions of impressions, life is generally going to be ok.
It’s just really about optimizing it and as long as you’re paying attention to it and keep listening to what I’ve just had to say, keep track of the ECPMs and as long as they are consistent or you know which levers to pull in order to maximize those, you’ll be fine.
Andrew: OK. Final part of this interview needs to talk about what happened when Facebook came in.
You had a space of time that Facebook didn’t came out with their own app in the iPad store. You were in there. You were the leader and suddenly they come in. How do you feel the day they come in?
Cole: he day they came in was kind of a relief, actually.
Andrew: Why?
Cole: Well, we knew it was happening at some point. I had some speculation as to the delays and I think I should mention I don’t know or have any inside information about the reason there was a delay. But it seemed to me that it was eventually going to happen and it was just a matter of time. We did everything that we could to build the best product and still, today, we’re doing very well as a result of that.
Andrew: You took a hit when they came in. I don’t even know what article I copied this from because it’s been so long, but you said ‘We took a hit when Facebook came out. There was a dip once the official Facebook app launched. The number of new downloads has taken a hit as well, a large part due to Facebook’s official app ranking higher in search results in Apple’s top app listings’. So this was a hit in revenue and a hit in downloads.
Cole: No, revenue’s been great. Although the way we generate has completely switched. Before Facebook, we were generating the majority of our revenue from premium sales in the paid version. After that switch and there was a free version of the Facebook app, our ranking for the paid version dropped. We’re still about the 100th most-downloaded paid app and roughly the 120th most-downloaded free app. The majority of our revenue now comes from advertisements as well as our trending apps section, which tries to show users new applications that are popular based on some recommendation engines that we’ve been building.
Andrew: And this is within your app, applications for Facebook?
Cole: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: OK. Which, from what I remember, I can use those applications on your app, right?
Cole: Some of them we’re working on. In I think it was March or April of last year, we launched a game section so we partnered with Tiny Co and a couple of other game developers to basically put shortcuts to the apps directly in MyPad and then you can actually launch them from my pad if you had them installed. That was something that Facebook did as well when they launched their app and that’s worked pretty well.
Andrew: This is iPad apps that are separate from the Facebook property itself. You just hit a button, you go and launch those apps. You get paid when they hit the button to launch?
Cole: No. We have a long-term relationship with these developers to do more lifetime value of the revenue that was generated from the users. You go in and download Tiny Zoo because you found it in MyPad. Then you start playing it and pay money to Tiny Co. Part of that money comes back to us.
Andrew: I got you. OK.
Cole: We’ve since added not just a game section, but a general trending apps section that shows off not just the apps that we’ve partnered with, but these are any apps in the app store that we think would do well among our users and what they would like. So we generate money as a result of the affiliate revenue from Apple.
Andrew: Even though the number of new downloads took a hit after Facebook came out, you’re saying your revenue stayed the same and kept growing?
Cole: Yeah.
Andrew: And the reason it kept growing is because you’re still installed on so many people’s iPad that whenever they launched it, even if they launched it after Facebook came out, they downloaded it before and they still have it so they keep coming back for ads and so on. Because you have the stickiness.
Cole: It’s sticky and also a lot of those earlier numbers from just the massive number of downloads. Those people weren’t our most engaged users. Our most engaged users use the app over and over again and like the trending app section and play the games. Those people continue to use the app over and over again.
Andrew: To answer the question that I teased in the beginning of this interview of how you were impacted when Facebook competed with you, we did that. But we didn’t answer the second part, which is what you, the audience, can do when a giant competes with you. So we’re learning from your experiences. First of all, have stickiness before that giant comes in because that stickiness is going to give you longer term revenue. Build that loyalty and, in your case, you’re finding that some people are spending up to five hours a day on it. Is that right?
Cole: Yeah. Finding the core usage and really building the product for those people that that continue to love your product.
Andrew: What is the core of your product? That makes sense. You said this is the thing that people really love. Focus on that and make that great. What’s that?
Cole: The experience.
Andrew: What do you mean by the experience?
Cole: The way you are able to use the touch interface to interact with your social [??].
Andrew: I see.
Cole: On these devices.
Andrew: And adding Twitter and soon you’re going to be adding, I don’t know how much you feel comfortable sharing, but you told me about some of the plans for the future for what you’ll be adding. How has that impacted you guys?
Cole: It exposes us to a bigger audience, it’s part of it, and it’s been a request from a lot of users that they want more services added into the product. That’s been part of our usage as well. They like the close integration between Facebook and Twitter. Somebody posts a hashtag in Facebook, you can quickly clink the link and it shows you the hashtag results in Twitter. And so building that seamless experience has been important for us and we barely scratched the surface, in my opinion, and there’s going to be a lot more coming soon.
Andrew: All right. Quick plug and then I’m going to ask you another important question here. Here’s the plug. The plug is for MixerGPremium.com, where I bring on entrepreneurs to teach how they built their businesses, to turn on their computers and show you. So we have a couple that, if you remember, I recommend. The first is Outsourcing Mobile Apps with Michael Moon and Kwak Boi. These are the guys who turned on their computer and said, “Look. Here’s how we placed an ad on Elance and we hired developers to build our apps and this is what we gave them to develop our apps and this is how we get feedback and so on.” They did that. And then there’s another one. A lot of people check the one out with Mike Moon and Kwak Boi, but there’s one that people are missing.
It’s called Just Mobile App Design and it’s taught by Jen Gordon of Taptics and she did a phenomenal job of showing you as an entrepreneur who wants to get mobile apps built, how to take that vision, how to make sure that it makes sense, how to pass it on to developers in a way that makes sense, and how to give them feedback. She shows you all the tools that she uses when she does it. Jen Gordon of Taptics, if you’re a member, you got to go and check her out. If you’re not a member, just go to MixerGPremium.com, join us, take those courses, and so many others. What do you learn, by the way? How do you get better at this part of the process now that you’re so far ahead of most people? Where do you turn?
Cole: Meeting people like you. Through my network. That’s great. The problem for a lot of people just starting out is they don’t know how to take that first step and what you just described sounds like a couple really great first steps to understand not just the design, but literally who is going to start building this for you. I grew up in the Bay Area so I guess I know enough people. I studied engineering at Berkeley. I guess I got a head start on some of those things, but that is what allowed me to build this business and finding those first few steps is extremely important and knowing where to turn. That’s awesome that you guys offer that.
Andrew: Thank you. Mixergy Premium.com, guys. If you’re not members, join us. There’s so much there and I hope you become part of it.
Cole: You didn’t pay me for that, by the way.
Andrew: No. I didn’t. We don’t have a budget. People can tell by the video I don’t have a budget here. Here’s a question. We did this interview with the idea that we were going to help other entrepreneurs learn from your experience and, throughout, I just kept touching back on that. But I want to be extremely clear. If there’s one thing that you can leave other entrepreneurs with, based on your experience, one thing that you can teach them, one piece of advice, what would that be?
Cole: Try it as quickly as possible.
Andrew: Try it as quickly as possible.
Cole: I’ve had three companies with varying success in each of the products, in each of the stages, and all of them started with an idea that we decided to execute. Nothing comes if you don’t do that. I think it was Steve Blank’s older book, “Four Steps to the Epiphany,” that talks about their [??] inside and I am going to misquote it now, but basically you don’t know what the hell you are doing until you get a product out there, outside of your. . .
Andrew: Outside the building.
Cole: Room or your office and get real people to use it, realizing that generally, real people are not those that you are having these conversations with is equally important and getting feedback from real people and people that are not necessarily app savvy or tech savvy is extremely valuable because it opens your eyes to things that you didn’t realize were either overlooked in your product or oversimplified or they just can’t figure out.
Andrew: Well, I want to make sure that people go and check out your app. Obviously, you are going to get more downloads in a heartbeat than you are going to get from this whole interview, but the kind of entrepreneur I think who is watching, I think it is good for them to see what your product is and it is good for you to have them in your network. Every time I go to your site, I get redirected to app.net/mypad. Is that the best way to send people or is there a single URL that we should send them to? Is it just mypad.com?
Cole: That is the best way, app.net/mypad. If you are on any of these devices, it redirects you to the app store. We know there are Facebook links on that page as well and you get see screenshots as well.
Andrew: Cool. If you are out there listening to this, I hope you commit to yourself that in five years, you are going to find a way to connect with Cole and say, “I saw you on Mixergy.” You don’t even have to say Mixergy. “I saw you, I don’t even know which one, maybe with CNN, I don’t know, but you helped me out. Here’s where I am today because of it.” I hope you do that, not for him. The guy is doing fine. He doesn’t need a pat on the back. I hope you do it for yourself. Set that up as a goal because we are seeing that there is a lot of opportunity here and it is not going to be around forever. In 10, 20 years, people are going to be looking back and saying you guys had it all, you had the opportunity to jump in before it got taken over by the giants.
Cole: I mean you see this every few years. Now, it is Apple or now it is iPad. Before it was iPhone, before it was Facebook, before it was a thousand. . .
Andrew: Yeah, before that, there was a time when really if you could just build a webpage, you can charge companies just about anything because they were dying to get on the web.
Cole: I mean there are still so many problems, particularly with mobile that are completely unsolved and I have many pain that I would be happy to talk to anyone that wants to discuss ideas for my business about. The other thing that I would say about entrepreneurs that are just getting started is don’t be afraid to talk to people. Generally, whether it is me or somebody else that is considered an entrepreneur, seasoned or whatever, we have typically so many things that we are already thinking about or wishing we had time to do that now hearing your ideas are not competitive. We do this because we love doing it. We want to help you, but I mean mobile is definitely a big opportunity right now and there are a lot of things going on that need fixing and can be optimized. If it is not in five years, it will be something else in six.
Andrew: All right. I got to give them a sense of urgency that will get them to act now.
Cole: [??] studios, how about that?
Andrew: Do it now. Do it now, guys, and connect with Cole. Cole, thank you. What is a good way for people to say thank you for doing this interview?
Cole: Shoot me an email at cole@loytr.com.
Andrew: Cole@loytr.com and I am going to say it right now. Cole, thanks for doing this interview.
Cole: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for watching.
