Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's guest is Robi Ganguly.
Robi is the co founder and CEO of Appetentive, a SaaS platform that provides tools for mobile app makers to engage with customers for positive ratings, feedback and customer research.
Appetentive's customers include Urban Spoon, Overstock and Real Networks.
The company was founded in 2011 and to date has raised $6.5 million in funding.
In this episode we talk about how frustration with the App Store led to an idea for a new SaaS product, how the co founders waited another two years before they launched the business, the tactics that the co founders used to try and acquire new customers, how it took them about a year to get their first two paying customers, and the moment of insight that helped them get to over $100,000 a month in revenue.
Robey, welcome to the show.
Robi Ganguly (01:25.180)
Thanks.
Nice to talk to you, Omer.
Omer (01:27.980)
Now, I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is Robi when he's not working?
Robi Ganguly (01:38.459)
Well, so I think I'm a Seattleite at heart.
I grew up in Redmond, Washington, and despite leaving for a number of years to go to school in California and then to work in San Francisco, I've always been a Seattle Homer, cheering for the hometown teams and really love it here.
So I moved back in 2008 and you know, I love to run along the waterfront in Seattle.
I love to have friends over and cook and grill and barbecue, especially during our wonderful summers.
And I like to read and try to educate myself on a regular basis.
Omer (02:12.290)
Now, from what I understand, you've lived in Redmond for a long time, like way before even the Microsoft days, right?
Robi Ganguly (02:18.340)
Yeah.
So my parents moved from Portland to Redmond in 1981, and back when I was a kid, the company that was famous in Redmond was Nintendo.
Especially as a kid, Nintendo was awesome.
I used to actually test games for them, but it wasn't until like the 90s that Microsoft really became a thing.
So Redmond, not many people know this, but it used to be a small farm town.
We used to get milk delivered in glass bottles and it was a lot different than it is today.
Omer (02:44.140)
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, I arrived in the Seattle area.
I guess the first time was probably about 2000 and I think even Then when you arrived at Seattle Tacoma International Airport, it always seemed like this was an airport and a city that never expected anybody else to turn up, you know, and it's kind of like it's evolved over the last 10 years.
But it was really strange in those days.
Robi Ganguly (03:09.180)
I mean, we had so few people coming to visit that we had to actually build our own airline airplane company, Boeing, so that we could fly them in, you know.
Omer (03:19.270)
Cool.
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Robi Ganguly (03:28.870)
Well, so as an entrepreneur trying to work on an idea that in many ways is brand new and revolutionary and changing behaviors, I think a lot about long term thinking and how to make change in movement.
So one of my favorites along those lines is by a German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and his quote goes like this.
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self evident.
And I think about that a lot in terms of the battles we have to change behavior and the things that get set along the way and what signposts we have in terms of are we really making a difference and will this eventually become obvious to everybody when it seems obvious to us as a small team.
Omer (04:19.960)
So do you think that applies both in terms of entrepreneurs when they have ideas and people tell them that maybe it's a stupid idea, or working with customers and convincing them that this is the future?
I guess.
Is it a combination of those?
Robi Ganguly (04:38.450)
I think it is very much a combination of those.
And entrepreneurship is a big battle of persistence and stubbornness, I think, on the part of the early founding team in many different ways, but particularly in places where you're inventing, where you're creating something brand new or you're creating a way of doing something that is different?
A lot of people will eventually, if you're right, they will eventually accept it and say, oh, of course, it should have worked that way.
But the early days, most of the time people are saying no, here's all the reasons why no.
And I think that's one of the tough things about really founding and starting any venture on your own is how many people will basically tell you no, that's crazy.
Right.
Omer (05:20.860)
Now let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of App tentive.
Can you talk a little bit about who are your target customers and what, what's the pain point that you're trying to solve here?
Robi Ganguly (05:33.880)
Yeah.
So we work with thousands of people who make mobile apps.
Our service is built and priced in a way that if you're very small, you can start using it and just get benefits.
But our real target customer, the place where we do the most business is with the world's largest brands, some of the largest retailers in the world, some of the largest shopping sites in the world.
Companies with some of the most popular mobile apps that have been downloaded tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of times use us as software inside their mobile apps to allow them to communicate with their customers.
And what that means is that if you're using a mobile app and you're frustrated if something's confusing, if a transaction goes awry, when that app is using App Tentive, there are really easy ways for you as the consumer to reach out and tell them, to ask them questions, to let them know something might be awry or you're confused.
But very importantly, from the company side, our tools make it very easy for them to start the conversation and to reach out to you and try and figure out, even before you get frustrated, how they can help you and serve you better.
And we think about that as analogous to the real world, where you might go to a store like Nordstrom, Nordstrom's, a famous Seattle company, and they're well known for their service in the store, and they treat you really well and they, they just make you feel special as a customer.
And we think that that's a phenomenal way to do business.
But inside of mobile apps, more often than not, it doesn't feel that way.
So we help companies do that.
We help them deliver that Nordstrom like experience in their mobile apps to millions of people at a time.
Omer (07:08.230)
Yeah, I guess the typical experience with a lot of apps is you get.
You get frustrated.
There's no way to kind of contact anybody or give any feedback.
Maybe you can go back, let's say if you're, you know, using an iPhone, maybe you can go back to itunes and figure out where the developer's website is.
Robi Ganguly (07:26.630)
Right.
Omer (07:27.910)
Some people like to leave kind of a crappy complaint as a feedback or a review of the product, which isn't helpful for anybody either.
Robi Ganguly (07:37.670)
And that's one of the big premises of our service, is that ratings and reviews in the app stores, all of them kind of stink.
They're not a great communication vehicle for the customer, and they're not a great communication vehicle for the company.
And being able to use your app to actually solve that problem makes more sense for both sides.
It's just easier.
It's more convenient.
You get Problem solved as opposed to just ranting.
Omer (08:04.990)
So let's talk about the early days because you guys have been in business for I guess, four years.
Robi Ganguly (08:10.750)
That's right, yeah, a little over four.
Omer (08:13.800)
How did you come up with the idea for this product?
Robi Ganguly (08:17.000)
Yeah, so I think many ideas are the confluence of experiences and different jobs and roles people have had and like that.
Our founding team, the four of us, saw a lot of different stuff over the past 15 years.
We worked at companies like Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Graystripe, WebEx.
We've seen a lot of different software being built, we've seen a lot of mobile software being built.
So we all had various experiences on what advertising and marketing and mobile and consumer engagement look like.
And what really spurred the idea after we'd gone through many of those experiences is that in 2008 when I moved back to Seattle, I drove up with one of our co founders and Andrew Wooster.
He and I drove up from San Francisco to Seattle in my U Haul and we both left our companies.
About nine months prior.
I left Yahoo, he left Apple.
And when we were driving up, all we talked about was really the App Store.
And this is December of 2008.
App store is about six months old.
Andrew left Apple just to build iPhone apps.
So at this point in time, he's been in market in the App Store for about six months and he was, he was doing pretty well.
He was selling 12 different apps to the tune of 400 or $500 a day in revenue, which was really pretty impressive six months in.
And as we were talking about it, it became really clear that a few things were really true.
So the first was he didn't know who his customers were.
He had no idea who was buying his apps.
He was just getting reports from Apple.
The second thing is that if somebody bought one of his apps, it was likely that they would be interested in some of his other apps.
There was enough similarity between them that that made sense.
But because he had no idea who his customers were, he didn't have any opportunity to try and talk to them and communicate that they might want his other apps.
And the third was that in the App Store he was starting to get negative feedback and he couldn't really do much to diagnose it.
Many times he would see something and people would say, hey, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work is not a helpful comment.
All it is is a sign that something is frustrating for an end consumer.
But it doesn't give details about where it doesn't work and why and what situations.
So as an engineer, as somebody who's buil the product, he didn't have any good ways to go find out more and he really wanted to.
So he and others like him were struggling to try and get in touch with consumers.
And so we drove from San Francisco to Seattle and we talked about this for of the 16 hour drive, we probably talked about it for 13 hours, talking about all the different ways that this seemed challenging and frustrating for a developer and all of the ways in which since he had worked at Apple, he knew Apple wasn't going to be interested in solving this problem.
And we talked about the fact that the Android App Store was clearly going to create similar issues.
So that's where the gem of the idea really started to take hold.
And then two days later when we were in Seattle, we met with our cto, our now cto, but then he was just another college friend of ours and talked to him, Mike.
And Mike was at Microsoft and Windows Mobile working on Windows Mobile devices.
So he had a perspective on mobile as well.
And it just was obvious to all three of us at that point in time.
So that's where the idea came from.
Omer (11:33.500)
But that was back in.
You said December 2008.
Robi Ganguly (11:38.140)
That's right.
Omer (11:39.020)
And you guys launched in 2011.
So what happened in between?
Robi Ganguly (11:46.060)
Well, I think many of my friends who have started companies have said there are similar fits and starts and they're similar conversations that happened before the real founding.
And what happened was when we were driving up, I was driving up to Seattle to come work on another idea with some other friends.
And Andrew was very happy working on his iOS apps and Mike was very happy in Windows Mobile at Microsoft.
So we talked about it and we said, hey, this is pretty good.
And we started emailing and kind of brainstorming ideas in fits and starts, nights and weekends, but we didn't really make progress.
And so the idea just kept sitting there, I think for all three of us.
And from time to time we'd chat about it.
And Mike and I, because we were in Seattle together, would actually get together from time to time and work on trying to build iPhone apps and just learning the framework and the process on our own.
In fact, we during that time probably made one of the worst iPhone games ever called Word Passer.
It was like similar to a catchphrase for the iPhone and it was just terrible.
But it was a test case for us.
Omer (12:49.760)
Is it still in the App Store?
Robi Ganguly (12:51.920)
I think we took it down because we weren't making the $99 a year to pay for it to keep it up, right?
So it didn't make any sense.
It was always amazing to us when people bought it because we also premium priced it and people were paying three or four dollars for this app that we thought could really be a lot better.
But two years later, in December of 2010, I was in San Francisco.
I was having a cup of coffee at Fisherman's Wharf, or actually the Ferry Building with Andrew, and we were both chatting about what the last two years had held for us.
And we were doing some consulting work, both of us, in different areas.
And I said, you know that idea we've been batting around this sort of mobile communications platform for apps first.
Don't you think we should be building that?
Isn't that what we really should be doing?
We should give it a shot.
And he said, yeah, you're right, we should.
I'm just going to fly up to Seattle, I'm going to stay with you.
Let's build an mvp, the three of us.
And it was as simple as that final conversation to be a catalyst.
And then we booked March, March of 2011.
He flew up and came into town on March 9th.
I still remember picking him up at the airport.
And March 10, we sat down on my couch, Mike, Andrew and I, and talked about what we needed to do in the next 30 days while we had Andrew in town sleeping on my couch.
And we mapped out what we were going to do and what we were going to build.
And 30 days later, we had an end to end prototype that worked and it was actual working software.
And so that's what it took to transition over a course of like a bit over two years from an idea to really starting to make something.
Omer (14:28.120)
What do you think happened that convinced you guys to get together and spend the next 30 days building this MVP when it hadn't been there hadn't been that sense of urgency for the last two years.
What changed?
Robi Ganguly (14:48.710)
I think it was two things.
I think one was it was becoming obvious year over year that mobile apps were growing at a pace that was unprecedented.
I mean, in 2008 when the app store came out, it might be hard to remember now, but when that App store came out, there were less than, I believe, 10 million iPhones in circulation.
So people were not thinking, oh my God, this is huge.
Everybody's going to have one of these and we can make software for hundreds of millions of people.
But two years later, they'd sold probably 50, 70, 100 million iPhones, and they were on the second and third versions of the iPhones.
And people were just really ecstatic about it.
And then Android had started to really pick up speed.
So you could see over the course of that two years that what we had assumed might be possible was actually way below what actually was happening.
We thought, oh, maybe this will be like a pretty meaningful phenomenon for 100 million people.
But it was obvious that it was growing faster than we could have expected.
We always, I think, thought that mobile would eventually be a worldwide phenomenon, that every human being on the face of the planet would be connected through mobile devices.
But I think the data said it was going to happen faster than anybody could have predicted.
Omer (16:07.470)
Okay, so did you guys get the MVP built at the end of those 30 days?
Robi Ganguly (16:12.320)
We did.
Not only did we get it built, we had named the company, we had a logo, we had an actual website for marketing purposes.
We had our first slide decks that we were talking about.
I had six blog posts up on the blog.
We started to feel like a real company.
We had incorporated, named it, actually done all the legal work.
It was an intense 30 days.
We just sat down and cranked out all the things that were necessary to build a basic business online.
Omer (16:40.700)
Had any of you guys, Was this the first business for all of you?
Robi Ganguly (16:46.620)
No, all three of us had done in our own time, our own project.
So I had worked on a couple of different projects with several friends.
You know, one was around fantasy sports, one was around online education.
Mike and I have known each other since 1998 when we were interns at Real Networks.
And he and I had prototyped and built a number of different things before, but never this intensely in this much focus on a near term goal.
And Andrew, for years, in addition to his consulting, he'd obviously built his own iPhone app business.
And he had also maintained several web projects over the years and built several pieces of open source software that are interesting.
So we'd all had a process of thinking about releasing stuff to the world, putting it out there, making software, testing it.
Omer (17:42.130)
Got it.
Okay, all right, so you've got the mvp, you've got a company, as you said, it's starting to feel like a real company as well.
What happened next?
Robi Ganguly (17:53.490)
So put Andrew back on plane, he went back to San Francisco and we had, we had polish to do, we had bugs to fix, we had use cases we hadn't thought of that became obvious that we should be building for.
So we continue to make progress.
And so this is about April of 2011 and we were looking forward a month and a half and Apple's worldwide developer conference was coming up.
So we Made that like a stake in the ground to go out and really start to get true customer feedback and put it in front of people.
And we made kind of a little dummy test app that we could put appetentive into.
And then we put appetentive into one of Andrew's early iPhone apps.
And so In June of 2011, I flew down San Francisco, stayed at a friend's place for the week, and then basically went to all the activities around the worldwide Developer Conference.
I didn't actually go to the conference, it was $1,600.
We were, we are not going to spend money for me to go into the conference, but instead I went to the events, the happy hours, and just shook hands with anybody I could and asked them if they were working on an app and if they were working on an app.
I asked them what it was and how they talked to their customers.
And I just did customer development basically over the course of six or seven days, meeting as many people as possible, creating coffee meetings, handing out my business card.
And by the end of that I had, I think it was 20 or 22 pages of notes in Word docs about all the people I'd met and the things they'd said about what I'd shown them and their use cases and what might be interesting, what might not, and what's confusing.
And I think that in combination with something else that happened that week, which is I spent time with sky, who is our fourth co founder.
He was a friend of Andrew's and now is a friend of all of ours.
But that week he and I were talking about what we were doing and he said, well, I can work on the Android side of this.
Do you want Android support?
You've got iOS, do you want Android?
And we said, absolutely, that's very important.
And so he was excited about what we were doing, so he started to join us that week as well.
So it felt like we came out of WWDC in 2011 with Momentum, with customer development, with traction, and we really haven't stopped since then.
Omer (20:16.430)
So the feedback that you got when you went out and talked to folks, what were some of the sort of the high level insights you got from that?
Did it, did it kind of.
Was it as easy as, wow, this is just validating everything that we're doing or was there some feedback that you got which told you guys that, you know, maybe you were moving in the right direction, but not quite?
Robi Ganguly (20:40.760)
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I mean, ideal would have been to show them the demo and talk about what you're doing and have them say, here's my card, you need to contact me.
I will pay you to do this.
That was not what happened.
There were a lot of people who said things like, I freaking hate the App Store.
I hate ratings and reviews.
It's so frustrating.
There are a bunch of people who said, oh, my gosh, I really should think about this.
How long does it take to integrate?
How big is it?
Because at the time, again, this is going way back.
At the time, the over the air limit for downloading apps onto the iPhone was, I think it was 25 megabytes.
So everybody's very concerned about adding extra code to their apps.
There are a number of SDK providers out there that had already started to take hold, that were in some ways polluting the landscape because they'd done bad things, they'd caused crashes, and people were starting to get wary.
So.
So we got a lot of questions around, hey, how would this work?
What size is it?
How much time does it take to integrate?
What do I need to do?
How do I manage the volume?
But what we really heard over and over again was, there's got to be a better way than what we're doing today.
It's really frustrating dealing with ratings and reviews in the App Store.
And fundamentally, I do see what you're saying.
I think we probably should listen to and talk to our customers.
And so that was enough for us to say, okay, well, we've got a bunch of people to keep conversations going with and to try and push on.
And there's enough of an interest here that we think we can continue to learn and iterate around what we need to build.
Because the first version we had was essentially a feedback form that if you hit give feedback or contact us or some button in your app that brought up app Tena, a feedback form would show up and you could attach a screenshot and you could give your email address and you could send a note, and then all the conversation went into an inbox that we manage for the customer.
And then that triggered emails back and forth.
That version was super, super simple.
It wasn't everything that customers wanted.
Customers wanted to respond back in the app.
They wanted to be able to send messages back in the app.
They wanted to be able to start conversations, not just wait until customers reached out to them.
So we got a lot of feedback about the things that people thought would be really awesome and exciting.
So we started to develop a roadmap.
Omer (22:57.380)
So, I mean, presumably you guys had a vision which was much bigger than the initial product, that you built.
And I guess there's always a tendency for many of us to try and perfect the product before we go out and show it to people and get some feedback.
What advice would you have for other entrepreneurs maybe, who are struggling with that right now, who maybe have something, but they just don't feel it's kind of as far along as they want it to be before they show it to people?
Robi Ganguly (23:35.140)
Yeah, I mean, this is pretty common.
And in some places we've done this ourselves.
I think there are two things that I would say to anybody facing that challenge or thinking about that.
So the number one regret we probably have as a business is that we didn't start earlier when we started talking about it in 2008, but that we had this idea and we should have probably just started making progress and figured it out along the way because we'd be so much further along in terms of what we learned and who we talk to.
And time is really important.
So anytime you can get stuff done and moving along, that's great.
And the really important part about that is that it's in people's hands so they can react to it.
And I think a lot of people use the excuse, while it's not ready for people to see, in order to not have to face the music, not have to actually put it in front of somebody and have them tear your baby apart.
And so it's just one more feature, just one more capability, just this, just that.
But I think what they're really doing is kind of hiding behind that in order to not hear what's going on.
And the most important thing that can happen for any business is to hear from potential customers and to hear from your actual customers.
Customers to figure out what's good and what's bad and how you can get better.
And if you're waiting and you think that one more feature is going to really get you the difference between somebody using it and somebody not more often.
Not.
You're wrong.
You probably don't even actually know what the customers are going to care about the most.
Omer (25:06.030)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's great advice.
Okay, let's talk about how you went about acquiring customers.
So you've got this great feedback now maybe that's helping you to go back and refine the product a little bit.
What were some of the tactical things that you guys did to start getting customers and how long did it take you to get your first paying customer?
Robi Ganguly (25:29.590)
Right, right.
So the belief, ever since the early days of the company, in that first month when I was sitting down and writing our blog post and we were creating the name and all that stuff.
The belief was what we were talking about was something new.
It was the idea that companies could use software to be more communicative and they could actually be proactive about it and that that would be really powerful and empowering.
And it was a new idea.
And because we believed that it was something that was going to lead to change, we also believed that we could be a leader of that change.
So we've always taken the approach that we will share our thoughts and content and try to educate people and be a thought leader.
And so our blog was a big area of emphasis, continues to be where we put out a really, really high quality product on a regular basis.
We try to have great writing.
One of our first real hires on the marketing side was somebody focused on writing on a regular basis for us named Ezra.
And he did a great job.
And now our content marketing manager, Alex does an amazing job on our blog.
And if you go there, what you see is high quality writing, great advice.
And it's not, it's not advice that's just like technical or tactical.
It's also thinking about strategic, thinking about the value of customer relationships to business, how to actually prove roi, how to make your business grow.
And so early days, what we were doing was writing a lot of content that we thought could help us acquire customers because we were thought leaders and get links and be part of an online conversation.
And that's a long, slow process you have to invest in.
So it didn't show results immediately, but from time to time we would pop up, we would show up in hacker news or somebody would share us in an influential forum and then more people would find us.
And then we did buy some AdWords.
We tested some of the different paid channels, but we ultimately, early days weren't successful with that.
More often than not, it was elbow grease and time to just go to events to shake hands and meet as many mobile developers as we could.
So we went to Seattle events on a regular basis.
We actually started hosting informal API hours in 2011 in Seattle and when I was in San Francisco and other places where we just buy developers and people in the mobile space beers in exchange for picking their brains.
And every time we did that, we got new contacts and new people we could talk to about using us.
And it was just, it was a real manual effort day after day, month after month, week after week.
And I remember because we didn't have an office sitting in my apartment and sending out 2550100 emails a day and hearing back from somebody I really hope to hear back from and then getting a no and just being really dejected.
But that's how we went about it.
And it took us about six months from when we started working on the MVP, I think September of 2011, we had our first paying customer and then we quickly after that got our second paying customer.
We were really excited.
That was awesome.
And then it took probably seven more months to get another paying customer.
Wow.
Yeah, it's challenging making software that people have to integrate.
And especially in the mobile arena, SDKs are viewed as a attacks.
Right.
They're sort of costly in order to put stuff in.
And so early days we were really trying to convince people that we mattered at all and that they should do the work required to put us in and then ship a new update with us.
Omer (29:12.200)
So in the first year of business, you guys had what, two customers?
Robi Ganguly (29:17.080)
Two paying customers?
Yeah, we had hundreds of people who were on our free plan.
We've always had the approach and viewpoint that there are a lot of people out there who are essentially experimenting in the mobile app development space.
They're working on a side project or they're cutting their teeth or they're getting up to speed.
And we always wanted to make the tools to communicate and listen to customers available to everybody.
Because early days, we think listening to your customers is super powerful.
It can really mean the difference between getting success or not.
And we knew, we always really believed that the largest companies in the world were going to be the target audience because they have such big consumer audiences.
We knew that we were going to go there.
So we felt like making sure that it was easy for people to get up and running for free was part of our strategy.
And so we had hundreds of people who were using us for free.
But the people who had graduated to a size with our existing pricing plans where it warranted paying us money, that was a small group.
Omer (30:14.350)
Now, a lot of people maybe in your situation who have been working on a product for, for the amount of time that you guys had, and you've only got two paying customers to show for that would probably have said, maybe it's time to kind of call it quits.
What kept you guys going?
Robi Ganguly (30:33.540)
Me, I mean, so over this whole period of time, 2011, I was the only one who was really full time.
You know, sky had a full time job, Mike had a full time job, and Andrew Wooster had a very busy consulting schedule.
So all three of those guys were getting income in other places.
And when I left Yahoo.
I had saved up for years from WebEx and Yahoo in order to try and go and do something on my own.
So I was fortunate to be in a place where I planned and I had money stocked away for my own personal burn.
And because I was on it every day, it didn't matter if we had one customer, two customers, or five customers.
If all four of us believed that this is the right way to go and we were making progress at end the, the best pace that we could, we had time to keep pushing and keep making progress.
And I think that, I think that was a big part of it.
I think if all four of us had been full time without drawing a salary, it might have been a lot harder.
But at the same time, if we had all been full time without drawing salary, the product might have progressed a lot faster.
We might have gotten to more paying customers sooner.
Omer (31:42.120)
Okay, so you've got these two paying customers and then you said you had to wait another, what was it, seven months?
Robi Ganguly (31:47.920)
Yeah, probably.
Omer (31:49.520)
At what point did you feel like you were getting some meaningful traction?
At what point do you feel that this was going to become a serious business?
Because at this point you guys hadn't even thought about looking for funding.
Right.
Robi Ganguly (32:02.400)
Well, so end of that year, October, November, December, I started talking to some people in Seattle about raising money for it and I started giving some pitches and then in early 2012, actually did do some more presentations and pitches.
And, and ultimately what was happening when I was doing that in Seattle was people were just starting to wake up and reinvest and they wanted to see more traction.
And we had interesting conversations, but nobody was biting.
So we just kept our heads down and kept trying to get customers.
And I think that meant we were most focused on what our customers who are actually getting up and running were saying.
And early customers, the first ones who were getting live, were coming back and saying really nice things.
Basically they're like, wow, I didn't think it was gonna be this good.
I didn't think it'd be this helpful.
Like it's pretty simple, but it's very helpful.
And then I think the first time we really felt like maybe we're onto something was we'd had a couple kind of meaningful size companies organically sign up, but out of the blue, Yahoo emailed us.
I think it was like April 2012, maybe it was March, but right around then Yahoo emailed us.
And I hadn't used my network, I hadn't gone inside and talked to people I used to work with, tried to find mobile People in order to encourage them to use us.
I sort of thought we weren't quite ready for that size of company, but Yahoo found us and emailed us and said, hey, we'd like to learn more.
This is really interesting.
We have a bunch of mobile apps and mobile is an increasing part of the strategy.
And so, yeah, this was March.
This is March of 2012.
And so Mike and I went down and actually met with eight execs in a room on their mobile search team and started to plan out a pilot with them.
And we went home and they kept following up with us and it moved forward.
And that's when we were like, oh, okay, all right.
This is important.
This is important to large companies.
This is important to lots of people who are sophisticated in the space.
And I think that was the first time we really thought this is going to be meaningful.
Omer (34:07.450)
And then at some point when we were talking earlier, you said you guys sort of shifted strategy and started to focus more on these bigger companies and bigger brands.
What did you need to change about the product to be able to go in that direction?
Because it sounds like you already had what somebody like Yahoo needed.
Robi Ganguly (34:32.820)
Yeah, well, so the place we were at and what Yahoo needed at that point in time, we were satisfying, we were helping, it was sufficient, but it wasn't very sophisticated in terms of reporting and complexity and segmentation, targeting.
And there were a lot of wish lists coming from companies like Yahoo and other ones.
And so when they came in the door, we quite frankly, were not ready to price for them.
We hadn't thought about.
We thought about it, but we hadn't put it on our website and we hadn't really put proposals in front of people.
So we had to really think about our pricing and try to change that in order to move upstream and get to a place where it made more sense for companies of their size.
And then we had to really think about some of the capabilities around targeting and personalization and reporting that would help larger companies talk about ROI internally and justify spending not hundreds of dollars a month with us, but thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month.
And that really started to take hold at the end of 2012.
We went through the Techstars accelerator.
We started to really move up market and started to present deals to people that were $1,000, $2,000 a month.
And over the course of that year, we were starting to really make the transition and the investment into building out a more capable product that was going to be robust, especially for the enterprise.
And.
And joining techstars meant that we transitioned from three nights and weekends, people and me, to all four of us being able to really be on it every day.
And all of that together allowed us to, by the end of the year, get to a place where we were actually ready to sell to the enterprise in a more meaningful way.
Omer (36:13.880)
Got it.
Okay, so let's talk about the business today.
What sort of revenue are you guys doing?
Robi Ganguly (36:19.720)
We don't disclose that we've definitely passed the.
The first meaningful milestone in the SaaS industry, which is over 100k a month in MRR.
But that's all we really talk about.
And I think the thing that's useful and interesting to know about our revenue, if you know the SaaS business at all, the retention.
Customer retention rate for our services in the enterprise is really high.
In fact, we experience what is referred to as negative churn.
That is our customers upsell at a rate greater than they cancel or downsell, meaning that we make more money from our existing customers on the enterprise side.
Omer (36:58.160)
Wow, that's pretty impressive.
Robi Ganguly (37:02.800)
It's good to be at a place where the entire ecosystem is growing.
Mobile audiences are growing really fast.
So we definitely benefit from that.
Omer (37:10.560)
And how big is the company now?
How many employees do you have?
Robi Ganguly (37:14.240)
About 28.
Omer (37:15.815)
28.
Wow.
So just looking back at this journey that you've taken from back in December 2008, where you guys started to talk about the frustrations with the App Store and to where you are today, what do you wish you had known back then about building this business that maybe would have sort of helped you tackle this a little differently?
Robi Ganguly (37:46.920)
Yeah, I think so.
I touched on one.
I wish that we had started earlier.
I just wish we had realized much more early on that making progress every day against this was going to be a smart move and it was be helpful.
And starting earlier would have been big.
But this transition to enterprise has definitely taught us a lot about how to approach and market to the enterprise.
And over time we've gotten more sophisticated at it.
But I think we underestimated the value of just standing up and saying, we're an enterprise company, we help companies of all sizes.
But the place we're awesome is getting a large brand, a very, maybe a Fortune 100 retailer on board, teaching them how to use our tools and communicate with their customers, and driving business value internally.
I think we maybe shied away from that for too long.
Omer (38:37.610)
Okay, Robbie, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Robi Ganguly (38:44.650)
Yeah.
Omer (38:45.930)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Robi Ganguly (38:50.970)
Every day get up and work on the most important thing that you can get done that day.
Omer (38:55.530)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Robi Ganguly (38:59.530)
There's a great but little bit, let alone book about the early days of Apple by Michael Moritz, who is a very famous venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.
Now it's called Return to the Little Kingdom, Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple and it's from the early 80s and it's exceptionally enlightening.
Omer (39:16.670)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Robi Ganguly (39:23.950)
Healthy mix of incredible stubbornness mixed with the ability to listen and ask really great questions and change their thinking.
Omer (39:36.030)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit list making?
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or problem would you want to go and tackle?
Robi Ganguly (39:50.590)
So we live here in Washington state, you and I and I think it would be really interesting just because there's so much green space literally to learn more about the legal marijuana recreational industry.
I just think that actually it's a brand new industry.
It'd be fun to learn about it and see what's going on.
Omer (40:07.020)
Yeah, I mean we're totally legal now, right?
Robi Ganguly (40:09.100)
Yeah, it would be fascinating.
Omer (40:12.300)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Robi Ganguly (40:17.020)
I was a second degree black belt in taekwondo.
Well, not was.
I am a second degree black belt in taekwondo and I competed nationally for a very long time.
Time.
Omer (40:24.980)
Wow.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Robi Ganguly (40:32.340)
Spending really quality time with my deep friends.
I think it's very easy to work, work, work and think that that's the most important thing.
But this, this life is about people and the people who matter to you.
And trying to make sure that I have lots of time for that is very important today.
Omer (40:48.180)
Great answers, Rabi.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for let you a little better personally as well.
Robi Ganguly (40:58.320)
My pleasure.
Omer (40:59.840)
If folks want to find out more about app tentive, they can go to apptentive.com if they want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way for them to do that?
Robi Ganguly (41:09.920)
The best way is on Twitter.
I amguly.
That's R G A N G U L Y.
It's definitely a great way to get to me.
Omer (41:19.760)
Awesome Robby, thanks again and I wish you continued success.
Robi Ganguly (41:23.200)
Thanks so much Omer.
Take care.
Omer (41:24.560)
Cheers.
