bill tai - slides for the swipe conference - mobile app dev conf in sydney

Angel Investor & Partner, CRVAdjunct Professor, Curtin University

Bill Tai

The LaunchAdvice on Launching your App and your Company in

Today’s Mobile Web and Cloud EcosystemFrom the developers of:

Tuesday, September 11, 12

SWIPE CONFERENCE 2012

http://bit.ly/MaiTai-2012

http://onforb.es/20111207MaiTai7BillionFromKiters

An unconventional way to launch







Riding Overlapping Waves

1980 --> basic technology; microcomputers

2010 --> user interface to data; App Economy

1995 --> network services; origins of ‘the cloud’

1987 --> systems; routers, switches, hardware



Today’s Wave... Expressed• App Economy is

proving to be an EXPONENTIAL opportunity.

• Parabolic scalability enabled by ‘cloud infrastructure’ & massive distribution available via mobile

• Gear shift in opportunity to “User Interface to Data coming off the Cloud”



Exponential App Economy



Hyper Growth - AWS



Riding the Wave - My App Ecosystem



The Launch

What went right?



Jeff Chen & Karl Mattson#75 in Utilities - iTunes China (8/29/12)

Tabbed browsers that cloud synch across IOS, Mac, Windows, Android.

Top HTML5 rendering speed.

100M+ global reach monthly. Top markets - China, USA, Russia, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Brazil. 600M+ cumulative downloads.

New Developer Cloud Service with API - launching Q4 2012, includes cloud storage with 5x faster speed than leading services

.



Iain Dodsworth# 116 in Social (8/29/12)

TweetDeck aids in search, navigation, discovery as well as management of twitter and social media feeds

Dominates the “power user” customer set who loves our full screen power and functionality

After 3 years, $3.5m in funding, 15 employees, & growth to millions of high value users - TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter in May 2011.



Tweetdeck Launch Story“Just after launch, as I was adding more and more (unstable) functionality to it, I watched a piece on CNN about doctors tweeting live during an operation - it was late 2008 and this was a big deal.

All of a sudden I noticed they were using TweetDeck (wow how exciting! the software I'd written just for me whilst on the sofa). Then it hit me - "f**k, don't crash...on live tv...in the middle of a operation!" - worst few minutes of my life. It didn't crash.

Not long after that Ashton Kutcher used TweetDeck to secretly tweet a photo of Demi Moore's ass. I was more relaxed about that use of the app.”



Uri Raz & Eric Setton# 9 in Social; #86 overall (8/29/12)

Leader in mobile video calling; Now also includes voice, text, pictures and video messages. It works, it's simple, & your friends are already on Tango.

Amazing traction: 1M in first 10 days, now >> 60M in less than 2 years.

Focused on process and execution, we release faster than all our competitors ; we support the largest variety of phone models



Tango Launch Story - Eric“I also want to tell you a great story to share the enthusiasm for Tango when we launched:

With our phone number registration process, in order to allow people to register in each and every country we had to code up all the dialing rules for all the different numbering process of the 212 countries we run in.

A few hours after launch, we realized we had jumped a number for South Korea. South Korea is a well-known early adopter for video technologies and this is THE country you don't want to screw up!!

As we were rushing a fix (4 days to bring this out), a blogger in South Korea realized he could fix the issue by not entering the last digit of their number on our first day. 4 days later we already had 140k users in South Korea and our fix had to accommodate for all these early adopters :-) It was crazy!!”



Tom Katis & Gustaf Alstromer#10 in Social, #91 overall (8/29/12)

Voxer is one of the fastest growing voice applications in the world.We're re-inventing voice.

Voxer is a Walkie Talkie app for iOS and Android but it's a lot more than that.

People user Voxer in their work life, to talk to loved ones and to friends. No ringing or texting - just talk.

Voxer has the social etiquette of text but the immediacy and texture of voice.



Voxer Launch StoryGrowing from 20,000 downloads to 275,000 downloads a day in lessthan a week is one of the most amazing things I've done in myprofessional life.

Seeing "Voxer" trending above "Thanksgiving" and "Turkey" on Twitter on the actual thanksgiving weekend was mindblowing. Getting voice messages from people I hadn't heard from in 10 years is also a very special feeling.

*The funniest best day in the office was when this user-created videocame out and we blasted it throughout the office: www.bit.ly/VoxerSong


http://www.bit.ly/VoxerSong



Scribd - Trip Adler# 24 in reference (8/29/12)

Scribd is the world's largest social publishing and reading site, with100M+ monthly readers & 25M+ quality documents in its library.

Revenue from ads, premium accounts, and commerce.

Users range from authors to students to top publishers (Random House, Wiley) to media companies (Wired, New YorkTimes), to politicians (Obama, Romney) to large companies(like Ford, Facebook)



Zoom.us - Eric Yuan#150 Productivity (8/29/12)

zoom.us is a free HD video meeting service for high quality video conversations and screen sharing at work and at home

Walt Mossberg's review about zoom.us " my verdict is that Zoom.us is a very good product with lots of practical uses."

With zoom.us, “WE can see clearly now!”

http://bit.ly/zoomWSJ


http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/




Zoom.Us Launch StoryA day after our launch, we were discussing whether to spend $10k to create a video to share with our users on how people are using zoom.us.

In the middle of the meeting, someone stood up and said: "Hold our horses, the video is already on youtube!"

We were surprised to find a group of users test driving zoom.us on youtube!

www.bit.ly/ZoomUsTestDrive


http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://zoom.us/

http://www.bit.ly/ZoomUsTestDrive

http://www.bit.ly/ZoomUsTestDrive


Soundtracking - Steve Jang#226 in Music (8/29/12)

♥ Selected by Apple as "Best iPhone Music App of 2011"

Instantly identify the music playing around you and then share the song with a photo, location, and a comment. on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare

★ Discover New Music from Friends, Artists, and DJs - follow friends and celebrities on SoundTracking and learn about their music taste and exchange likes, loves and comments!



What Do Investors Look For?• Markets: BIG

• Management: “Force of Nature” & appropriate to the task

• Capital Requirement: Realistic to Fund

• Timing: “Being early is a lot like being Wrong”

• Sustainability: Barriers through technology or network effects



The Entreprenuer• “Force of nature”

• It’s a long road, many lives along the way• Flexibility• Passion• Strategic thinking combined with tactical smarts

• Management that can put themselves in the path of luck

• EXACTLY NONE of the great companies in technology do exactly what they set out to do…



Advice:from Developer

to Developer



Advice from Karl Mattson• Track the entire acquisition funnel and user life cycle. Map out CAC (customer acquisition cost) against LTV

(Lifetime Value)

• Commit to performance. Every millisecond gain in performance = more user engagement.

• Get your hands dirty with customer service. Customers actually want you to succeed. Make them a part of your success. Take the time to selectively respond to individual reviews and users. Thank them -- even the haters -- for the feedback. Humanize what you do with dialogue, straight answers and social media presence from all points of the team when possible.

• Cultivate a blogger/reporter influencer early on and ask for feedback. If you can't describe how differentiated your app is in one clear sentence, take a fresh look at what problem you're trying to solve.

• SEO optimize your app descriptions, landing pages and social media presence. There are 100’s of tweaks that can ratchet up your search presence in both iTunes and Google Play.

• Talent is everything. Take the time to find it. Test how well you communicate with each other in



Advice from IainDodsworth• Most obvious is execute and release, the pursuit of perfection will almost guarantee failure. Leave perfection for the

post launch iterations. Be very clear with your users that the release version is a 1.0 and that your vision is truly breathtaking.

• On iOS especially, make sure your app icon is gorgeous. Make me want to promote your app to my home screen just to see your icon.

• Once launched, set up a twitter search for your app name and app twitter account (if you don't have one get one) - respond to every single person who mentions your app ESPECIALLY those that complain about it - they are your future evangelists - you need them to spread the word. If no-one is talking about your app then search on competing apps and "enter the discussion".

• Cozy up to a (tech) blogger of some repute. Give them (and only them) exclusive access to your app. Make sure they know it's exclusive. Let them blog your launch, make sure it's a long form review NOT a paragraph. Don't worry if they're not the biggest blogger out there - if the review is in depth this will signal to other, bigger bloggers there's something interesting here. In the future your blogger will always write about your app - relationships.

• Keep iterating (obvious), blow the minds of your users with wonderfully frequent updates which encompass their feedback. They will love you for it.



Advice from Eric Setton• Build product that you will use every day. You will want to be the number 1 user, so you find all

the bugs and depend on that product more than anyone else

• Choose a co-founder that you can trust 100%. Two is a good number, it's good to be complementary too, but trust is always number one

• Try to knock down the tough technical challenges first. Before launch is the time to put in place a high technology barrier, to think and build things right. After that, you will be running even faster.

• Your initial team needs to be rock-star material. Don't compromise, this is the DNA of your company. Address hiring mistakes as soon as your stomach starts twitching.

• Don't worry about scalability before you launch. Scalability issues are high-class problems that you want to have, you'll find enough adrenaline to fix them



Advice from Gustaf Alstromer• There are radically different strategies depending on the nature of the app. If you're a social app try to focus on

engineered growth around invites and friend-finding. That is where you have the most leverage.

• At Voxer we did zero PR and zero advertising after the first million users. Unless you have a recurring revenue source those two channels won't scale to tens of millions of users

• Do your homework and instrument all critical flows in the app. You need to know conversion rates on invite, activation etc. Understand where people drop off. It's easy to integrate something like Mixpanel

• Most app conversion funnels are hard to track. You can't use referral tracking in the app store and some times the app store will appear as a black box. You can get around this with homegrown analytics and surveys. Make an effort to understand where your users are coming from. It's worth it

• Move fast. Because of the app store cycles many app developers only release monthly or bi-monthly. Make an effort to get your iOS release schedule to 3 weeks and push Android weekly. It's good for morale, forproduct progress and make you have to prioritize



Advice from Trip’s team• For a mobile app to succeed, it has to either a) do something that no one else has done before or

b) do something better than everyone else. The purpose of your app should be very clear to the user. If you can't clearly state what your app does in one quick sentence, your users probably won't be able to figure it out either.

• Competition is fierce, so time to market is extremely important. For new ideas, start with the minimum viable product and iterate quickly. Polish, speed, and tiny details that most people never notice are what separates good apps from great apps.

• Have realistic expectations. Success in the app store is rare.

• iOS is popular all over the world, localize your app.

• If you take shortcuts, for example by trying to wrap a web app in a native shell, your users will notice. Look at Facebook's iOS app as an example.



Advice from Eric Yuan• Find a team who is passionate about building a world class product. Passion is the ultimate

adrenaline hormone when it comes to product development

• Keep the user experience as simple as you can. Simplicity is sexy but hard to pursue. You need to build a "simplicity culture" on day one.

• Leverage product usage data to become your decision-making "advisor". Have your product usage metrics ready when you launch a product. Data-driven decision is more relevant.

• Understand your competitors. Have a clear competitive understanding to know every competitor's strength and weakness. Capitalize on your competitor's mistakes.

• Work as hard as you can. When you sleep, your competitors do not. Whoever can execute, better and faster, will win.


Emergence Creative will take place following the oZAPP Awards in Perth. The events will link emerging creative technologies and digital innovation. Significant judges from the oZAPP Awards will also take part in the Emergence program.

Emergence is a unique 3 day opportunity to explore the inter-relationship between technology, communication and creativity with high profile digital dignitaries.

It’s an anti-conference. Sure, we’ll have talks and the odd Powerpoint presentation. But also out-of-the-ordinary masterclasses, workshops and forums where you’ll learn from the best, and network with creative people, techies, entrepreneurs and investors.

There’ll be screenings of some great creative work, collaborative sessions, beach breakfasts, live music and winery dinners all set in the stunning surroundings of Australia’s South-West creative corner.

So if you work in advertising, film, music, communications, design or anything vaguely digital, Emergence is definitely for you.

EMERGENCE CREATIVE| Navigating the Creative Planet The anti-conference for those who think digitally and differently.



www.OzApp.Com.Au


http://www.OzApp.Com.Au

http://www.OzApp.Com.Au


Appendix and Backup Links•www.about.me/BillTai

• http://bit.ly/IKA2016OlympicAmbassadors

• http://onforb.es/20111207MaiTai7BillionFromKiters

• http://bit.ly/MaiTai-2012

• http://bit.ly/MaiTai2012SNOW

•www.ozapp.com.au

•www.skatelescope.org

• http://bit.ly/BigHelpMobWapps

•www.latamstartupchallenge.com

•www.bit.ly/VoxerSong


http://www.about.me/BillTai

http://www.about.me/BillTai

http://bit.ly/IKA2016OlympicAmbassadors

http://bit.ly/IKA2016OlympicAmbassadors





http://bit.ly/MaiTai2012SNOW

http://bit.ly/MaiTai2012SNOW

http://www.ozapp.com.au

http://www.ozapp.com.au

http://www.skatelescope.org

http://www.skatelescope.org

http://bit.ly/BigHelpMobWapps

http://bit.ly/BigHelpMobWapps

http://www.latamstartupchallenge.com

http://www.latamstartupchallenge.com




Sippy DownsMonday,September 3, 2012

12:00 noon - 2:00 PM

90 Sippy Downs Drive



BrisbaneMonday,September 3, 2012

6:00 PM

282 Wickham Street



MelbourneTuesday, September 4

6:00 PM

Room EN102

Swinburne University of Technology

Wakefield Street, Hawthorn



MelbourneWednesday, September 5

5:00 PM

66 King Street, Melbourne



SydneyThursday, September 6

Hoyts Entertinment Quarter

3:15 PM SWIPE Conference



SydneyThursday, September 6

4:30 PM

608 Harris Street, Ultimo



PerthFriday, September 7

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

45 ST Georges Terrace



SydneyMonday, September 10

12:20 PM

Sydney Convention Center

Darling Harbour, Sydney


bill tai - slides for the swipe conference - mobile app dev conf in sydney

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