Grapple Mobile: Growing Friendships To Grow A Business

I asked Alistair Crane how he won XBox as a client so soon after he launched Grapple Mobile, his mobile app creation business. The details are in the interview, but the short answer is that he called on a friend.

That’s pretty much the way he got anything done to grow his business. If you’ve heard founders say that entrepreneurs should never get a job, well Alistair’s experience might convince you that the right job might be the fastest way to get both smarter and better connected.

Alistair Crane

Alistair Crane

Grapple Mobile

Alistair Crane is CEO at Grapple Mobile, the company making apps that are easy to port to iPhones, Blackberries, Androids and other mobile handsets.

 

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Full Interview Transcript

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Here’s your program.

Andrew: Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and the place where you come to listen to entrepreneurs tell you how they built their businesses.

Joining me today is the founder whose company reached profitability within 18 months. He did it by building mobile apps for clients like Xbox, BT and Sony Pictures. Alistair Crane is the founder of Grapple Mobile which makes apps that are easy to port to mobile handsets, like to the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia. Alistair, welcome.

Alistair: Hi, Andrew.

Andrew: Hey, before I get into the business and how you built it, I’m curious about why out of all the different handsets you can carry, you’re still carrying a Blackberry. What’s the deal?

Alistair: You know what, actually it’s two things. It’s habit which is a dangerous but good thing. So, I’ve just had one for so long. And number two, it’s the keyboard. Touch screens are awesome, but given that life often requires me to do more than one thing at a time and we all know for a guy that’s difficult, the keyboard is just something that I’ve very used to, kind of tapping away the messages for e-mail but more often now I don’t say this in some kind of sticking with the times thing. But BBM is just massive. Over half the company’s on it, and it’s a way to get answers from most of the team at any time, day or night. And they know it’s the best way to contact me, for sure.

Andrew: All right. So, you’re one user out of how many. How many users do you have for all your apps combined?

Alistair: Well, for all of the applications that we have built?

Andrew: Yeah, I love numbers.

Alistair: Literally millions. We’re really fortunate because I get asked all kinds of questions as you can imagine at these kind of conferences and also by prospective clients. And that is, how do we ensure that our client’s application is successful? Now, we can, of course, come from things of a development angle, a creative angle and strategically give advice.

But the vast majority of our clients, you mentioned a couple, Xbox and BT and the Post Office, and we’re reaching people like McDonalds. We’re really fortunate because these guys have got major marketing spends and some really, really significant, well used channels in which they can acquire and retain users. So, actually a lot of that headache, the most active developers who are creating their own ideas from scratch have to tussle with themselves. Our clients are well versed in taking a proposition to market.

Andrew: OK. Let’s see. What about revenues? I’m looking for a metric to indicate how big the business is. What size revenues are you guys doing?

Alistair: If we talk sterling, it’s in the millions. You have to think about this. We’ve got 70 people across three offices, so you need to be doing millions in order to be staying in business. But also, if you think about the way the markets moved, and what mobile is starting to do and has done for a while for brands that have been willing to engage in new ideas and new technology. Now, mobile’s moving away from it a bit [??] in our trial budget there, and it’s come into the main stay where I can actually develop some real revenues in this channel.

I’ll give an example, and I know it’s not going to pop one too much about current endeavors. We have a brand here, Premier Inn. We’re not dissimilar to the Holiday Inn, the North American readers and viewers would be more familiar with. It’s a relatively keenly priced hotel chain with hundreds of different sites, I think 500 sites across the UK. These guys have a very established eCommerce history. They’ve done very well, plugging into lots of different aggregates, working with partners.

We’re kind of open to the mobile side of things. They had 10% of all of their website visits coming from mobile devices but less than .1% of their bookings. So, there was clearly a conversion problem going on there. They basically came to us with a business challenge.

A lot of our clients come to us with very rounded ideas about what they need from that iPhone app already. Actually, we take on the journey of what can actually be achieved by going cross platform, number one, and then how to drive additional revenues based on platform, number two.

Andrew: What did you do to their conversions?

Alistair: So, with Premier we took their conversions that were widely documented, actually. The client actually did a lot of the hard work for us in terms of releasing a press announcement. In their first ten weeks of operation they made over a million pounds worth of new sales, which was really important that the mobile wasn’t kind of cannibalizing their IVR or their online.

They found that 47% of the bookings from the app were coming from people who were staying that night or the night after. It was amazing. There was this clear need for consumers on the move to find a hotel nearby. I think their corporate foot soldiers is their kind of internal term, but basically people like you and me have to do a fair amount of business away from home. And often, we find ourselves in between meetings, maybe, for a night longer than we intended, and we’ve got to stay somewhere.

Actually, the application was a great way of getting people to book the rooms quickly and easily, but it wasn’t this magic thing. Actually, the consumer journey is quite different to what a lot of people expect when they first think of it.

Andrew: Let me ask you this. Let me go back to the question you asked me in the beginning of the interview or before we started to push you for openness.

Alistair: Yes, please do.

Andrew: When it comes to revenue, I just want to establish the size of the company, and then I want to talk about how you built it to the size. What can you say about revenue and feel comfortable with in this interview?

Alistair: I’m saying it’s in the multi millions.

Andrew: But you can say more than five million?

Alistair: No, I can say three to five million, in that bracket.

Andrew: Three to five million. And how old is the company?

Alistair: It’s 18 months old just.

Andrew: And can you say anything about profitability?

Alistair: No, those figures are very private. There are things… When I refer to being able to reveal figures, I don’t want to lie.

Andrew: I don’t want you to say… I understand. Listen, we’re dealing with businesses. There’s no reason why you should reveal to me something that’s private. I just want to know what information we can have. What about this? How much funding did you get for the business?

Alistair: So, we actually raised less than a million pounds.

Andrew: Less than a million pounds. OK.

Alistair: But the interesting thing is, Andrew, actually over time because this was in the acquisition of technology that started Grapple. So, the Tech is actually way older than Grapple as a business, and the technology had a little under ten million U.S. dollars invested in it, but it was never commercialized. So, when something isn’t commercialized…

Andrew: What is this technology that you used?

Alistair: It was quite interesting. There was a company in Canada called Cascara Mobile which was backed by a large VC out there called Price Bark. They had invested around ten million U.S. over about four and a half years to solve a problem in essence which was the fragmentation of Symbian. Now two and a half, three years into their development cycle, Android and iPhone launched and that, of course, meant they had to get back to the drawing board and start rapping in those platforms. It took them about a year to do that.

Four and a half years down the line, they basically had a great technical offering but no commercials went with it. The VC hit harder times and actually wanted to offer it anything that wasn’t core. We actually were very fortunate in hearing about this opportunity, so my business partner and I went through an IP acquisition which is an education for anybody who does it the first time.

We were also very lucky in that the core team in Canada who had been developing this product believed in our idea in terms of using the tech to underpin an agency services offering, and they’re still with us today. We have a Toronto office. We started with the Toronto office. Actually, it’s quite interesting. Anybody who’s kind of going through the starting a business for the first time thing which I was.

It was quite an experience, kind of having more people in an office abroad that you’d not really spent much time working with before, then you did in a office where you’re kind of actively hiring, intending to run yourself. So, this is kind of where we started and I mentioned to you…

Andrew: You said you had an IP acquisition.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: Did you acquire the IP in exchange for equity in the new business, or did you use the money that you raised in order to acquire it?

Alistair: No, we used some of the money that we raised to acquire the IP. We used the rest for cash flow. Actually, what was really good was the old VC, the VC backed the initial idea. They came in on the business with us, so that meant they had enough belief in our ideas and the management team we were putting together to keep their involvement.

It was one of those rare occasions where it wasn’t about hard negotiating on commercial terms. Everybody wanted the same outcome.

Andrew: If I understand you right, you paid cash, you paid a little bit of equity and you also ended up with an ongoing relationship.

Alistair: Sure thing.

Andrew: Wow. That’s an interesting way to launch, and the reason you found out about it, as I understand it, you worked for Navteq Nokia, right? And that’s the way you found out about it. Where do you get the idea that you see this technology, that you can go and acquire it and build a business off of it? I think most people and companies would see this great IP that was just sitting there going to waste, or even being made available for sale would say, “It’s too bad that they spent all this money. I hope good people end up with this business, and I’ll watch from a distance while I plot out the rest of my life.” But you saw it as an opportunity. How?

Alistair: It’s quite interesting. Actually, it would be totally wrong for me to take all the credit. So, I have a total super hero of a business partner in the form of a guy called Jamie True. He’s been involved with multiple tech startups and also floated several on the A market which we term the investment market over here in the UK. I met him while I was at Nokia and Navteq as you mentioned. It was interesting because I think any good partnership requires like a combination of skills. So, Jamie had lots of previous history in investing in good technology.

My background was in, of course, knowing the mobile market coming from Nokia. But also all the clients and partner contacts that we’d then use to go on to build the business. The big thing, I think kind of where you’re coming from in terms of… It was pretty scary. You’re stepping away from a well paid, secure job in a business that has lots of interesting opportunities despite all of this kind of rumor around Microsoft and this, that and the other.

There’s only good things really. When you’re inside, you can only see good things happening. For me, it was all borne out client demand. So, it wasn’t some noble epiphany I had one morning when I wake up, and I wanted to unite everyone under this banner of kind of apps for everybody.

It was actually a whole string of my clients while I was at Nokia saying to me, “Look, we love what you guys are offering in terms of the location based stuff Nokia was pioneering.” All of these different kind of left field things, but actually brands and business biggest challenge is taking their ideas for iPhone which is a significant but still an actually quite niche market, if you look at handset calls globally.

How do they make themselves available to more people? How did Unilever get the message about the soap they want to sell more of, to more people across Asia Pacific, all that kind of stuff? Now, how do Hertz rent more cars across their hundreds and hundreds of sites globally, all that kind of stuff?

Actually, iPhone just didn’t quite tick the boxes. I tried to actually match that need while I was at Nokia. As you do with many big businesses, it was quite hard to kind of branch out of the box that you were put in. So, it was really out of frustration that we launched the business, and thankfully there are a whole heap of people just clamoring for that kind of service when we went to go live, our early clients as I mentioned.

Andrew: I want to find out in a moment how you got those clients because that’s impressive. Based on how you did it, I want my audience to be able to go after these big name clients for their companies.

What I’m curious about first is when you launched the business, how do you end up being the person who’s the CEO, someone who doesn’t have experience before as a CEO, who hasn’t launched a company before. How did you get to be the person who got to run this business?

Alistair: You know what? Rightfully or wrongfully, and this is quite an emotional response actually, Andrew, but I think blind belief is probably a polite way to describe it.

Andrew: Belief in yourself or them in you.

Alistair: Oh, it has to be belief in yourself, number one, that you can do the job, of course. Also, something in the proposition. You can’t be involved with running something that you simply don’t believe in its core.

Andrew: So, how do you communicate that kind of belief?

Alistair: Actually, in several ways. The main thing is leading from the front. So, I was prepared to say… I’m not a technical person, but I sat in on the technical meetings to start with, on every call on how the platform was built to its very core. And I’ll tell you what, you’ve got a steep learning curve when you learn it’s directly indexed to how much money you can make. I, of course, sat in every one of our initial commercial meetings. I signed our first dozen clients up. I signed our first half dozen agency partners.

Andrew: Before you even had the title of CEO, you went out there and started signing up clients?

Alistair: Oh yeah, absolutely. The [??] was more of, how can I put it, it was more of like, it was nice to formalize my position within the business. Actually, between my business partner–there was only two of us. There was my business partner and I.

Andrew: You and Jamie.

Alistair: Yeah, Jamie and I. I didn’t know what title I would have. I didn’t know what title he would want. To be honest, we just didn’t care. We both saw the opportunity to make lots of money together. I recognized that without his investment expertise, it probably wouldn’t be as easy for me, and he was very open in deciding early on that my market knowledge just made the idea feasible for him. So, there’s a lot of trust. You have to have one, belief in yourself, and I think on the flip side that’s trust in other people, too.

Actually, prior to meeting Jamie it was something I found very hard to give. You work in kind of big corporations, and it’s all very political. You constantly kind of vying for your own position the whole time. Actually, when you step into a startup you have to invert that. You have to put total faith in the people around you because otherwise you won’t realize as much of the potential as you could.

The best thing with startups is it’s OK to fail. In a large corporation, it’s not OK to fail. It’s against policy to fail, right? Whereas with a startup you can be really open about your own personal failures and also about the businesses and correct them immediately.

Andrew: All right. I want to come back in a moment and ask about the failures.

Alistair: Oh, sure thing.

Andrew: I’m curious now, you have this idea and you start hunting for clients. Who’s the first client you go after? Can you tell me how you did it?

Alistair: Oh totally. My advice to anybody, and people with a sales background I’m sure would agree to this, but go to your friends. Go to all these people that you’ve done lots of good business with in the past.

Andrew: How did you have friends that you did business with at these big companies?

Alistair: How did I have friends?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, was it from Nokia? Was it the agency that you were working for?

Alistair: Even before that. My background had always been working with the major brands and agencies globally. So, I started off in press, and that’s where my second dirty word [??] now. But I started off kind of dealing with a lot of off line media. I left school when I was 16 and started selling advertising then and kind of accidentally muddled my way into mobile. I don’t know of many people who did it deliberately. I’ve built up a trading history with Nokia, before that a startup [??] which was an ad funded mobile network.

You’ve got a history. You’ve got a reputation with these people, and there’s a compromise. It doesn’t matter what company you start. At the very beginning it’s only a good idea. Until you’ve got your clients and you’ve got that proof, it’s only a good idea. So, when you go to the people that know you, you have a reputation. And actually there are times when you do have to put it on the line, but that again is the role of the CEO. It’s for him to take the lead, put his reputation on the line because it’s something that he really believes in. When you start doing that, it’s amazing other people follow.

Andrew: Who’s the first person that you went to? Success or failure, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m curious about that very first friend who you turned to with this idea and what their feedback was.

Alistair: Actually, it was really good. There’s a guy called Tom Rothenberg who actually I owe more than one bet to. He’s a good buddy of mine, and more importantly he’s the Managing Partner of McCann Erickson in Europe working on the Xbox accounts. He had a direct need. He was one of the people actually that spoke to us when we were starting the business up, saying, hey guys, I think this is a good idea. We went to him and he was one of the first really to embrace our proposition and to take it to his ultimate client, Xbox. He was the agency, the intermediary and use us as a supplier. He could have used anybody.

McCann, a really well established agency network, they could have delivered it themselves, to be perfectly frank, but they picked us based on the fact that we prioritized their work and that they would mean a lot to our then small business. So, that was him, and that’s kind of the opportunity to use your friends. And then, it made me smile.

One of the early ones we picked up was a political party called the Green Party over here in the UK. I guess they’re a littler smaller than the big three. We have the Conservatives, the Labor and the LibDem, and the Green Party is kind of a fringe party but still relatively well known. I think we had two and a half weeks to build an application for them. They’d never won a seat in government before, and I saw it as a good opportunity. It’s kind of good being involved. You know what? Even if they just won one seat, it would be in my story, something good to be involved with, something to get our PR machine turning. You need an excuse, right? You have to write a press release for something.

If kind of starting our work with Xbox wasn’t it, it would take us another three to six months to deliver a tangible result. Yeah, I didn’t want to wait that long for a story, so we started working with the Green Party. We managed to build an app in two and a half weeks and get it live, and lo and behold the Green Party did win a seat. We played a part. I can’t take all of the credit.

Andrew: What did the app do?

Alistair: So, what did we have to do?

Andrew: What did the application do, the software?

Alistair: Oh, what did the application do? It was really, really simple. The application had ten questions, and it profiled you on how green you are, and then you could post your results to Facebook. So, it was really cute.

Andrew: That’s it. A couple of weeks to get it running. It gets how many users, do you remember?

Alistair: It was in the tens of thousands.

Andrew: OK.

Alistair: It was really, really positive. Lo and behold, iPhone wasn’t the highest downloaded platform to our surprise. Nokia featured really, really well, so people using the Nokia handset clearly cared about the environment. What I compare it to, Andrew, is quite funny. It’s like going through kindergarten and then finishing your fine art degree and looking at that picture of your mom that you made and you patched stuff for her hair curls, and then looking at that portrait you just painted, age 21, 22 coming out of college. It’s kind of like that now. We’re looking actually at people [??] McDonalds that I mentioned and this kind of good stuff. You look at the early days and you go, wow,

.

Andrew: Let me ask you this. At the time you must have had this grand vision for how beautiful the apps you were going to create would be.

Alistair: Yes.

Andrew: And you must have understood that this didn’t live up to that dream.

Alistair: Oh totally.

Andrew: But how did you feel comfortable releasing something that didn’t live up to this beautiful dream and your capabilities as we’ve seen since then?

Alistair: You know what? I think probably one of my biggest faults is that I’m a bit of a perfectionist.

Andrew: OK.

Alistair: I’ve kind of grown to realize that actually perfection isn’t always the main thing. For clients and especially commercial clients, it’s not perfection, it’s success. If you can achieve perfection through success that’s wonderful, but otherwise success will do just fine. Do you know what I mean, as far as that’s concerned?

So yeah, an app that you build in two and a half weeks can always be better, but in that stage actually I wasn’t so worried about hitting the dream the first time round, I was more worried about being able to do what we said on the tim [sp], right? I was more worried about being able to get eight products that were more than good enough to market.

Andrew: Because you committed to them?

Alistair: Yeah totally. It’s a commitment you make to them.

Andrew: I see.

Alistair: This is no joke. I kind of gave my soap analogy earlier. This isn’t selling hand soap. This is getting someone elected. This is getting people into power. They really care and their money also. It’s not about being refundable, right? If other agencies took on business and they did a bad job for a client and they didn’t sell enough t-shirts or TV ads, then if the agencies really switched on them, they’ll offer them a refund and tell them they’ll do some pro bono work.

You can’t turn round to a political party and say; “I’m really sorry. I’ll work for you in four years time when the next election comes round.” It kind of doesn’t really wash right then. They might not even exist.

In a way, it was kind of a small client to get involved with because they’re a niche political party, but in another way it helps you grow up real fast because all of the team realized that it’s no joke.

Andrew: Is that a shark behind you, by the way?

Alistair: Is that a shark?

Andrew: It looks like a little baby shark. It just disappeared.

Alistair: OK, right.

Andrew: It appeared behind…

Alistair: There is a baby shark. Can you see that over there?

Andrew: Is that right?

Alistair: Yeah. It’s not like a shark with teeth. They’re river fish, but they’re cool.

Andrew: Yeah.

Alistair: There’s relaxing, right?

Andrew: I don’t see it right now, but it’s somewhere back there. I saw it swimming around.

Alistair: It heard the American accent. It thought you were going to…

Andrew: Coming to get me. So then, you did it. You did it with the idea that you can get some press and use it as a press release. What happened? How did you use it for press, and what was the impact of it?

Alistair: You know what? One of the smartest things, and again I have to give my business partner, Jamie, some credit for this. He said, “We’re in a really hot space. We’ve hired a couple of developers. We’ve got a sales guy. We’ve got you and a CTO”, he said. The next person we need is a PR Manager.

And I said, “There are six of us. We’ve got less clients than we do people. So, we definitely do need a PR man.” He said, “No, that’s exactly why you do need a PR Manager”. So, we’ve got this wonderful lady called Amy Shannon who came from one of the big agency networks, Webasha [sp] Wick. She downloads the stuff, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and just was really passionate about all of the things that she’d done before.

It’s actually become part of our hiring policy, like do you get it or do you care? She was just someone with so much energy and enthusiasm. To be perfectly frank, she’d do a ten times better job than I would at getting us coverage. So, she came in, took the results and what happened. Of course, made the most of the fact that the Green Party had won a seat in power, but also she taught me some quite valuable lessons which is you don’t have to do everything yourself.

So, her experience and her background had taught her that when you’re working with a big partner, like the Green Party, they have a far better PR machine than you do as a startup. So, we actually worked with them to get us coverage and kind of joined up to feed their press releases as well and make sure we were featured. The power of just being to slip in your company name to those kind of releases, I had no idea. I learned really early on that it’s good to collaborate and work together rather than try and do everything as a long soldier.

Andrew: So, Alistair, I see why that’s a benefit to you to be in their press releases. Can you tell me a little bit about why it’s a benefit to them to include your company in their releases?

Alistair: Yeah, totally. I think that first of all there’s a lot of good will that goes with something when they can tell that you’ve done a great job and that you’ve put every effort into make sure it was a success, kind of be on the 9 to 5, right? If you’re committed to a project, then you’ll find you’ve got all kinds of good stuff from your clients and partners in return.

Also, there’s this whole thing about being associated with something dynamic and young. They’re a party that wants to be aligned with progression and giving young people and companies a start, and it was kind of everything that we stood for. So, it was just another thing that tied in with their key messaging. We were rather fortunate there.

Andrew: All right. If I get nothing else out of this interview except for that, I feel that I got more than my hour’s worth. That was really interesting, actually that you did that. OK, so I understand how the Green Party project helped you. Let me see if I understand with Tom at McCann.

Alistair: Sure.

Andrew: You went to him and you said, “Do you have any clients who could use some mobile apps?” He said, “Sure, we’ve got Xbox.”

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: Is that about right?

Alistair: Well, actually it was quite interesting. It happened a different way. Now, McCann world renown is one of the leading creative agencies. So, they don’t really care about mobile or TV or the Internet or any kind of platforms. They’re not trying to sell one thing over another to their clients. What they’re briefly their clients on is sell more stuff, sell more product, make people love us more, make people talk about us more. These are the kind of briefs they get from their clients.

The Xbox is the Subways of this world, the big retailer. Actually, their whole thing was he sent me a challenge about how you could take the console game experience out of the home without people saying, “Oh, this game isn’t as good as the one I play on my Xbox, right.” So, actually it was quite interesting because they’d come up with the idea. They just weren’t sure what the best way to deliver it was.

So, they wanted people to go out of their home and to actually start playing this medieval kind of war game. It was for something called Fable 3. They wanted to play this war game themselves in the real world. So, we said, well getting people to game, getting people to interact in the real world outside of home. An easy way to do that would be from a mobile application. We went on to understand the game which is where you go around conquering lands and kind of going up the feudal system, if you like. So, you start off as a peasant, and you become a soldier and end up being a knight, you’re a king and owning your own castle and that kind of stuff.

Actually, we worked with them on developing the app [??] whereby when you downloaded it, regardless of your phone, you’re apportioned to one of the other side. There’s two teams, the Royals or the Rebels. One was red, one was blue.

Andrew: You don’t think of it yourself. The game assigns you a…

Alistair: No, so the agency came up with a lot of the creative thinking. Our expertise is then making sure that it translates when it comes into development, so how the phones will work, how the little user experiences will play out. And, of course, something that every client can buy into is the new trending technology. So, he said, “Look, Foursquare is really hot right now. We’d like to find a way of people kind of interacting and checking in.”

So, instead of checking in, we came up with the idea of planting flags in the map. Every time you planted a flag, it would calculate how many other flags of that color had been planted. Depending on whether there was more blue or red, it would turn your square the appropriate color. People kind of went to war conquering areas of London and seven different European cities, and every time you planted flags you got points.

Now, this to me was all sounding quite cute, but from a commercial perspective a bit pointless. I didn’t get why Xbox would want this to happen, but it was made clear through the agency that they could expose an API to us, whereby when gamers then looked into their Xbox Live account, they’d be able to take the points they had won in the application through into the console game, and everybody else would start online with nothing, and they would start with a whole

and they could buy all these new weapons and hopefully win the game which is what people wanted to do.

Andrew: When I was researching you, Xbox kept standing out to me, and I’ll tell you why. You’re essentially a software company, consulting and software.

Alistair: Correct.

Andrew: Xbox comes from one of the top software manufacturers on the planet.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: Why wouldn’t they just say, we’ve got a team of developers. They’ll build this mobile app for us, and maybe we’ll go to Alistair, maybe we’ll go to McCann to help think through how we could market it, but we’ve got the developers. Why you?

Alistair: This comes through then kind of to the next business point or lesson I often pass on to anybody that asks, but I guess it’s like stick to what you’re good at. Yeah, they are a software development house for sure. I have no doubt that any one of their thousands of super intelligent developers could have a good crack at creating something similar, but where Xbox make most of their money through their development and design teams is making world class games.

They don’t do applications. It doesn’t mean that they couldn’t. It just means that they wouldn’t. It’s like a lot of the auto manufacturers. They could build plans, too. Actually, they’re so busy making money out of cars that they just can’t stop.

Andrew: Why you? Help me understand how you won them over because I want my upstarts, people who are new, the people who have no business getting into business to do what you did, which is capture such a big client.

OK, now you’ve helped me understand why they wouldn’t want to create the mobile games themselves.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: Why you? A guy who hasn’t had a history of mobile games. How did you do it?

Alistair: Look, really good question and if I’m frank, there are two major parts. The first one is technical, and that is because we own… We’ve acquired this proprietary technology and there’s genuinely nobody else that could have built the app in the time frame and for the budget that they had. This tool lets us build applications so much faster because of the way it’s structured. You basically write one set of source codes and get all of your apps from one code base.

Andrew: I see. So, and this is still something that’s very powerful at your company today. At Grapple when you built an app for iPhone and then make the same app available for Blackberry, Android, Windows and so on, it’s easier because you’re not starting from scratch.

Alistair: Quite right, quite right. You’ve got the same code base, and the platform is taking care of the translation. But you know what? I can liken it back to a gun maker. The gun is only so deadly. You need somebody to fire it. So, really it’s about the team, the team as you read, the team of soldiers that you’ve got around you, right?

We went in there, of course, and explained about the technology. That set us aside from everybody else in terms of being a viable development partner, but really it’s the fact that we’ve got hordes of really driven talented young people that understand we…

Andrew: Where did the hordes come from? I thought it was just two people at first. Today, it’s at 70.

Alistair: Yeah. So, the hordes are now. Back then, scrap the word, hordes. You had a couple of super driven small people which I hope we still classify as young, since I had my 25th birthday the other weekend.

Andrew: You two guys didn’t code this up because you’re not a developer yourself, so who coded it?

Alistair: So, winning your first piece of business often means that you have to hire quicker than you first imagined, too. So, we had quite a dream position, actually. We had one more business than we budgeted we win in our first quarter, and this is in one deal. So, we needed to snap up pretty quickly. And that’s where I’ll kind of come back to my earlier explanation of where I used to be. That’s where working in a large company is super valuable.

So, anything out there thinking of starting their own business should really think about expanding their network as quickly as possible, and if you know what? If you haven’t been so nice to developers and you’re looking to go into tech, start buying all kinds of beer and pizza, the life blood, of course, of any technical business.

Andrew: And the developers you knew were from the days you spent at Nokia.

Alistair: Oh, Nokia and prior to that. So, there are people that I’ve been lucky enough to work with before and they’d always been people that had helped me out. You remember the people that were kind to you. You get two types of people. You get the people who will stay a little after six and put in the extra effort to help you win that deal when I was working the sales roles, and you get people who wouldn’t.

Of course, the people who would, just go in the book. They go in the book of people that you definitely would hire again when you have a new company or get on board in the early days if you start your own.

Andrew: You were head of media solutions at Nokia. If there was someone who went the extra mile and helped you out, you kept them in mind if you were set to hire.

Alistair: Totally, and actually there are probably close to a dozen people that I’ve worked with, either in other companies together or they were a client of mine or a supplier to me, whatever. They’re just good people. I was always aware that you can’t conquer the world by yourself, right? You need help.

Andrew: So, how do you connect with them? You see, the thing is I’m looking here and Blyk is the agency you worked in before from 2006 to 2008.

Alistair: They’re funded by advertising.

Andrew: Great company to come from. You worked there from 2006 to 2008. 2008 to 2009 you worked at Nokia. That’s a year of being out of touch with the people at Blyk for most people. How did you stay in touch with the developers so that when it was time to hire them, you had a relationship and a knowledge of how well they were doing.

Alistair: The thing is it’s actually quite a small world, the whole mobile and tech space. And also, I have an active interest. I’ve always had an active interest in what other people were doing. These are small people. They’ve got good futures wherever they go.

Andrew: What’s your personal style like or personal method? Would you just shoot them an e-mail? Would you just send an e-mail out of nowhere, and just, hey, you guys, what are you working on? Do you have drinks with them? Did you be something that would attach them on IM, on Xbox?

Alistair: This is a problem my fiancée would touch on in far more details, but I do like a good beer. So, I’ll be more than happy to go and drink beer with people anyway, just to hear about what they’re doing. So I don’t even necessarily have to have an opportunity for them.

Andrew: Would you just randomly check in with some developers, some old friends? Let’s go find a beer.

Alistair: Oh, that’s fine. I just want to hear what they’re up to. It’s not necessarily just their day job, but I wanted to hear people’s thoughts and why .. What was the industry perception on what Nokia was doing at the time, or what was [??] doing at the time? Whatever you do, number one, it’s nice to just see people that you like, of course. Number two, you can learn so much by just tapping base with people that are doing the daily grind.

Andrew: This is such a small question, but I get curious about small things sometimes. Who would buy the beer? You would?

Alistair: Always me. If you’re a sales person in a sales role, you become accustomed to picking up the check, for sure. It’s almost your job.

Andrew: I see. Ultimately, can you pass it on to Nokia, or do you have to pay for the expense?

Alistair: No, I’m afraid their expensing system is far too small for that, but you know what? I see a couple of beers are a small price to pay for these guys, who are essentially teaching me about something that I had no knowledge of. It must be quite irritating for people at the start when guys like me understand the commercials and how does Nokia communication work again? What is BBM? The [??], how does it work?

Andrew: What’s your personal style in these kinds of conversations? Are you like me, the person who will just go in here and ask questions like what you’re seeing right here. I feel like I do sometimes at bars with people over drinks. I ask them, so what is going on with BBM? What do you think of this new iPhone app that’s going on? What do you think of Grapple? Do they have a chance? Is that your style? Are you more smooth? Teach me. I want to learn how to be a little bit smooth.

Alistair: I’m not. I’m definitely not smooth. You can ask anyone who knows me. I’m probably quite the opposite. I’m probably abrasive.

Andrew: Do you just go in and fire away questions? I want to learn, I want to learn.

Alistair: I find the best thing actually is if I don’t go in with a selfish perspective of me picking the topic or try and find something that the guys are interested in, and then you just get way more out of it than just number one, they’re more knowledgeable, number two, they’re more talkative. So, you know what? You can just try and find a sweet spot. My first question might be, what are you interested in right now? What’s hot for you? And then, they’ll tell you and they’ll go in infinite amounts of more detail without me asking another question.

Andrew: I see.

Alistair: Whereas if I come in with my shopping list, 9 out of 10 items might be totally irrelevant in their opinion, and it will be more like a grueling sit down with one of their parents, or someone sitting down with a friend and wanting to understand a little bit more about the tech side of the industry.

Andrew: It’s so interesting that you said that. I recently met with Rametse [sp] for the first time. He happened to be in town. He’s a friend of mine who’s really good at online marketing. I made a note to myself actually with a couple of different goals that I had for the session, what I was looking to learn from it. Every time I tried to guide the conversation towards that, it felt a little awkward so I passed on it. I said, “Maybe, I can’t come into a personal conversation with an ulterior motive like that.” That’s just what you’re saying.

Alistair: Sure thing.

Andrew: All right. So, I see now how you get the first client. I see how you got the first employees to come in there and help you take them on. How about the next big milestone? What was that?

Alistair: I guess the next big milestone was starting to hit quite significant targets in a month, so when you do your first 200,000 pound month, 300,000 pound month, that kind of thing. That was probably our next benchmark, and to do that it’s interesting. It’s that age old balance between scaling your sales effort but directly proportional to revenue. So, I said scaling your sales effort, scaling any kind of recruitment but directly in line with revenue.

It’s about as a leader of business, having your finger get totally on the pulse in terms of what money will come in. You have to honest with yourself. This is now your business that we’re going to dream or bust.

Andrew: What do you mean you have to be honest with yourself? Do you find yourself sometimes trying to overestimate it?

Alistair: Yes, I think anybody in a commercial role has in the past said something will happen, when actually they’re not 100% sure of that. So, it’s about just being real, just going through in your head. Even if these people are your friends or they’ve told you that you’ve been selected or whatever, for me it’s not happening until the money is in the bank account. I actually just go through and factor. I actually say, “I’ve got 500,000 worth pending, of which I think 200,000 is super realistic” but actually just go through there and say, “What could happen? What would knock it out?”

Often, you will find that about 50% of that starts to disintegrate. It doesn’t have such a steady argument. You can just be real. You can say, “I really think I’m going to do 100 of that five this month. If I do that, the margin will allow me to bring on these new people.”

Post, I must admit my business partner and also our board were super supportive in the early days and still are. In the early days, super supportive of us scaling to own a trunk of the market, so there weren’t necessarily all of the leads right there and then to justify hiring the people, but we went for it because we knew it would return after a certain set of time. We hired some really smart guys, brought across people from big businesses like Alcatel, Lucent, people who had been at AOL [??], all of these kind of places because we knew we needed to grow up fast.

It’s fine running a team of like five or even ten people because you can do it almost as friends. You have daily interactions. You sit in the same [??] in the same bank of desks. You get to 70 people in three different offices, and now it’s a very different kettle of fish. You need to be able to actually manage, or you need managers to be feeding you all the right information. You can’t all do it as one kind of flat lined aggregate of people.

Andrew: What’s your challenge as a manager? I mean, when you’re trying to talk to people, is it correcting them, maybe, when they’re not getting something right? What is it?

Alistair: I’ll tell you something. Only recently I was shuffled off into my own office because people decided that, and quite rightfully so, I was probably spending too much time on granular points kind of whizzing around the office

. You know what? Like deals, individual deals that were set to happen, that’s how I know there’s something there that I’m interested in. This is something I’m personally interested in, and actually it wasn’t right for the business, and it wasn’t really fair on the person trying to do that deal because I’ve done that job for so long that I wanted to be involved.

It’s far better now. So, I know about things when they’re in the final stages of being done, or if they’re going to go really, really wrong. And that’s actually when a really good leader will shine, when he can step in with stuff’s bad, not just when it’s good. It’s not about taking credit, it’s about being of assistance. I’m able to draw on basically decades worth of sales time when deals are looking a little shakier than we prefer, and I’ll take the responsibility of making sure they go really well. So, that’s a good use of my time.

To be frank, if you sat on the edge of a bank of desks, you’ll get all sorts of stuff. I can’t find my phone charger. Can you smell gas? Someone’s taken my shoes and all that kind of stuff. It’s probably not as productive as you need it to be.

Andrew: I see. You’re saying when you’re out there on the floor with everyone else, all of those little issues start to distract.

Alistair: Yeah, totally, totally.

Andrew: All right. Before we started, you told me that when you’re on the other side of an interview, I mean, when you’re out in the audience listening, what you like is to hear something sincere. You want to know when the person admits mistakes, and you’ve said that you yourself as a first time entrepreneur and as the guy who runs the show, you have an opportunity to talk about mistakes.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: Let’s talk about them now. What are some of the mistakes that you’ve made?

Alistair: OK. They are too numerous to go into, and you know what the best thing is, I don’t feel like… I’ve got a really understanding team around me, the best management team on board. So, I don’t feel bad for anything that has gone on with the business. It’s been wildly successful until now, but let me say something here. Actually, the importance of prioritizing your time, these are the kind of crap-ons that candidates give me in an interview, but I can tell you for real that it’s really vital to anyone starting their own business to understand that’s when it becomes infinitely more valuable…

Andrew: Tell me about a mistake that you made with your time. Where did you direct it wrong, and how did you learn to adjust?

Alistair: So, you know what? You get to a size like ours now. You get to 60-70 people. There’s no need to interview every candidate any more. You don’t have to interview every project manager.

Andrew: So, you were going out there interviewing everybody. You wanted to know anyone before they take them on.

Alistair: I wanted to know who I was going to be working with. And actually when you sit back and take stock for a second, I realize that the people that I already had on board had delivered fantastic results, that I had a huge amount of trust within them across the rest of the business, so why wouldn’t I entrust them with this responsibility as well? Actually, we got a dozen positions open right now, and let’s say you have to phone interview ten candidates and face-to-face interview five. So, that’s 15 interviews. So, you’re running at 150-160 interviews more than that for 12, 15, 20 positions.

Andrew: How did you come to the realization that that’s too much?

Alistair: Well, by turning around and realizing that your inbox isn’t getting answered and the things that really matter, like the big clients aren’t being handled in the way that they should be. So, I was fortunate enough that it wasn’t just me realizing this. We’ve got a real open policy whereby any of us can just reach out to any others and say, “Look, I think this can be done better.” So it doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO, anyone can turn around and say, “Actually, I’ve seen these things occurring. There’s a pattern. It’s affecting my work, and I’d really like it to be corrected.”

And so, there’s hierarchy in the sense of management, but there’s no hierarchy in the sense of communications and people are all just very open and very honest and really constructive with each other.

Andrew: You know how it helps you to understand the motivations of the people who are working for you and of the clients who are hiring you so that you know how to get others on. I’m curious about your motivation. It just occurred to me. It’s late in the evening on a Friday night, and here you are talking not to the Financial Times late in the evening where you are, not talking to the Financial Times, not talking to the Wall Street Journal, you’re talking to me here.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: What’s your motivation for being on Mixergy right now and taking an evening out to do it?

Alistair: Well, for me that’s really simple. I think that the people that want the book standard, the press release stuff will pick up main street media or go where everybody else goes. I think it’s great to speak to some of the lesser known media because I think you’ll get a lot more frank commentary from people like me. I think you probably give… You don’t have to have such an agenda and also I think that actually… How can I put it? It’s not so much about audience size. It’s more about reputation. It’s about our ability to get our message out there to whoever’s listening. So, I think anybody who turns down any kind of interview is nuts. Jesus, we do stuff with university students who are kind of building up a blog in the digital media space.

Andrew: How does helping… You were just telling me about the importance of saving your time. You’re not meeting people who are potentially going to be working and determining the future of your company, but you’re willing to do an interview with a college student. The reason I’m asking you is because what I’ve noticed about you in the 46-odd minutes that you and I have talked together is that you’re very thought out. There is a plan there, that you hired a PR person not because everyone was doing it but because you had a strategy in mind for her. And you actually used her to find a new way to get media, one that most people wouldn’t do. Tell me about these smaller interviews.

Alistair: Well, the key to the student thing is… Well, I think what the student example with the blog aspired to do was attract business leaders. They wanted Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to read their blog. In reality, they have a bunch of other students reading that blog. So, Amy was real quick to identify these kind of opportunities. Students will graduate. Students have graduated and potential employees need first jobs. First jobs tend to employ people at a decent rate not wildly expensive.

So, actually they could be a really valued influx of hot young talent.

Andrew: I see.

Alistair: And it’s a great way to address them, just to let them know the cool stuff you’re doing. Also, you know what? Business metrics aside, sometimes it’s just good to do good things, do you know what I mean? There was a time when I was 18, and I needed a leg up, or I needed some kind of break or some kind of exposure to people that had been around the block a couple of times.

Andrew: What gave you a break back then?

Alistair: Actually, I was really fortunate. There were two people that I give credit for a lot of the stuff I’ve been able to do. Number one was a guy called John Nutley. He ran the sales at the national newspaper where I started out at, The Daily Express, here in the UK. He employed me when I was 16 and told me that I was the age of a school boy and, therefore, I would probably make school boy errors. If I turned up late on my first day, I was fired. And those words have always rung in my ears, and I try to be as on-time as I can. Punctuality is important.

If I’m being perfectly frank and not get too sentimental, my dad he started his own business when he was super young. He left school at like 15, got into media off line. I was born into the kind of entrepreneurial mindset. It just seemed right to run your own business. It seemed OK to work funny hours, to travel a lot. It’s quite exciting, too. You’re the master of your own destiny.

You know this, Andrew, better than most. It’s like, you can do the stuff you want to do when you want to do it. And people take that to mean you can go drinking earlier. Actually, it means that sometimes you aren’t going to go drinking at all, but it’s that whole ability to control your outcome, how much you earn, the people that you meet with, the way people view you in terms of commercial success. That’s all yours. You don’t have to go through an HR review process. That’s the thing that really appealed to me.

Andrew: I’ve got one other note here that I want to circle back and find out about. What’s your process for getting new customers? You told me about the first customers that you got and about how you worked the friendships. What do you do to get new customers?

Alistair: Great. That’s a really good question. We’re quite fortunate. Everybody in our space is fortunate, but you make your own luck, too. So, we’re mobile as a sector, one that’s growing so quickly and mobile applications and mobile web are right at the epicenter of that. They’re responsible for driving the growth in mobile for sure in terms of revenue and attention and all this other kind of stuff.

What do you have to do to win new customers? Actually, in this space you just have to deliver good work for your existing ones because number one, they’ll recommend you because they’re being asked right now by all their other buddies, all the other companies, where did they get their stuff done. And number two, people will check it out anyway. The number of applications that we demonstrate, the number of references we get from people who have downloaded our applications because they read a press release about them and then saw who the developer was and came to us. It’s great.

Word of mouth is massive. We actually have a sales team. We’re very lucky. I don’t joke about this often. They don’t have to be on the phone 24/7 or anything like that. They just have to make sure that they give good, impartial advice to the people that get in touch and act in the best interest of any businesses that they work with because really people can’t get enough of this stuff we’re doing right now. We’re building. It’s like we’re selling buckets and spades in a gold rush, right? People are out there trying to generate millions and billions of end commerce and we’re just helping them do it right now. It’s about helping them sift for the gold, for sure.

Andrew: Yeah, this is one of those industries that’s just really hot because everyone needs to have a mobile app, and companies didn’t have mobile apps five years ago, a year ago even. They need to get started.

Alistair: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. We end it with a piece of actionable advice. People keep telling me, Andrew, these interviews are great, but what do I do Monday after I watch these interviews? What do I do tomorrow morning? What’s one thing that they could do tomorrow morning based on your experience?

Alistair: OK, so the best piece of advice I’d give because I’d take it myself. Do something. Nothing will happen if you don’t do something. So, if you do nothing, nothing will happen. Actually, don’t be afraid to fail. You hear all this kind of stuff. It’s very, very cliché, but it’s so true.

Actually, no fear of failure. In fact, it’s the best thing that can happen because I’ll learn from it.

Andrew: You just got through saying you just got engaged. If I fail and this whole business goes away, we’re in trouble as a couple.

Alistair: We got engaged on the grounds of fear and worry and for the wrong reasons. Actually, I’m very fortunate in terms of my fiancée. Lizzie’s been wildly supportive, and we don’t look at the stuff in terms of what would happen if it’s bad. How bad can it be? How bad can it be? You just start again. We’ll just…

Andrew: What could happen? Worst case, you’re not going to but…

Alistair: Worst case is everything could go bust tomorrow. I lose all of my share holdings, and the company disappears, and I don’t have a job. And you know what? I’ll go out and I’ll get another job, and I’ll go and I’ll rent an apartment and I’ll sell a decent car, and we won’t go eat in fancy restaurants. And we won’t go on that holiday we wanted to take, and we’ll do it again. We’ll just start from the start because, again, another one of the clichés but I’m loving it. I’m totally in love with the journey right now. I’m not sure I’m going to go back to the personal thing.

I’m not sure my fiancée and friends are so in love with the journey because I’m kind of off the radar for most of the day and most of the week, but it really shapes you. You start to learn where your strengths and weaknesses are and also what you really care about.

I started the business thinking I really wanted to be filthy rich. I wanted to make millions and millions and millions, and actually what I found is money is fun. It’s great. We’re doing really well. We’re making money. It’s a good feeling, but also you’ve got these dozens and dozens of smart people, less experienced smart people around that all look for advice and inspiration. It’s like giving Christmas presents. I get a bigger kick by helping to shape someone’s career, even if it’s just in a small way.

I certainly have no major impact on any one person, just kind of small hints and tips and not just in the right directions. I get a bigger kick from that than I do from taking home tens of thousands of dollars or whatever. Actually, I think it means more in the world because money comes and it goes, but of all these people ultimately one of these guys–put money on this, for sure–one of these guys will go on to do something bigger and better than me for sure, unquestionably.

If they can turn around at the end of it and give credit like I did to John Nutley and my father, if one of them can turn around and go, “That was Al Crane. He gave me my first job. Actually, I really enjoyed it. It helped me to go on and build this thing and beat Google, and that’s awesome. That’s the thing that I find really inspiring for sure.

Andrew: I love that, and I do hope that we’ve contributed to somebody’s future success here. In fact, I know we have. I want to hear about it, just like I heard about it from this guy right here. Mixergy listener, Howard Kingston, recently tweeted out that he downloaded over 250 Mixergy interviews, and he says he can’t wait to listen to them all. I saw that out on Twitter. I said I’ve got to say, “Howard, thanks for listening to all these interviews. These guys take this stuff really seriously, and I appreciate it.

What I want though is if you got something out of this, e-mail Alistair, tweet him, e-mail, me, tweet to me. Find a way to let us know because we’re always curious about what you guys are up to. I don’t want you guys to just spend an hour watching us talk about our lives or in this case, Alistair’s life. I want to hear about you guys listening to us.

Alistair Crane, thanks for doing the interview.

Alistair: Thanks very much, Andrew. My pleasure.

Andrew: Thank you all for watching, including you, Howard Kingston. Bye.

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