Peter Mühlmann: It takes 10 years. it takes two years or three years usually just even to know if you’re right about it and if it actually works. Stephen Cummins:  Yeah. Peter Muhlmann: Like you’re not going to figure out if it worked or not in five or six months. If you think you do, then… then that’s usually not enough time. And then you’re just failing by default. And so, so you need to mentally prepare yourself for that. And then, I will say that… the market beats the team, beats the product. In the sense that picking the right market is often more important than anything else. But th ..read more

Peter Mühlmann: It’s ok to get negative reviews. A Actually negative reviews can be more valuable for you than positive reviews. Stephen Cummins: Sure. Peter Muhlmann: So for two reasons, first of all, we… we did an AB split test where we’re… we’re showing consumers a page with one negative review. Stephen Cummins: Yeah. Peter Muhlmann: And the other page has zero reviews. And then we do a split test that says “so which one are people more likely to buy from?” Stephen Cummins: Okay. Peter Muhlmann: And people are far, far more likely to buy from the one with one negative review. Stephen Cummin ..read more

Peter Mühlmann: I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also, because of that’s what I saw other people did. So I did that and I thought lots of people were just going to buy automatically. The trouble was, we did get some visitors but nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics. And the trouble with that was it was actually true. And I didn’t want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all my competitors were there. So I thought, why is ..read more

Bill Magnuson: Lean startup methodology has an important role to play It helps you with… with financing realities. It helps you learn things but it doesn’t necessarily get you to the best, you know, product solution or the best innovation or the best revolution. Be observant. Like get your head up and look around you and critically think about everything that you see around you. Things that are around you are a certain way because someone decided to make them that way, you know, by and large. “Why did they do that? How did they organize it? You know, what were the things that went into play? W ..read more

BILL MAGNUSON TRANSCRIPT: Bill Magnuson: walking down an alleyway and you come up to a big wall and you can’t see what’s on the other side. And sometimes in life, you gotta just take off your baseball cap and throw it over the wall if for no other reason than to force you to climb over and see what’s on the other side. Fundamentally, this problem that we’re trying to solve which is; “How do we understand people better while they’re interacting with the brand in order to, kind of, communicate with them in a way that’s more valuable to them?” Stephen Cummins: Okay. Bill Magnuson: That’s a fundam ..read more

Ted Krantz App Annie CEO Stephen Cummins: Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS! The show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS scale-ups! This is episode 117 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the final instalment of a 3 episode chat with Ted Krantz, CEO of App Annie. This kicks off with some fascinating insights into the thinking behind App Annie’s brand metamorphosis – embodied by a completely altered logo. And, as is traditional for 14 Minutes of SaaS, we’ll receive some great advice from our guest. This time it’s more career advice for those who want ..read more

Ted Krantz App Annie CEO : We’re taking our domain as the industry standard for market data on mobile, and marrying that with first party data. So that you have insights into your own performance on the advertising side, both ad spend and monetization. So you have the full footprint of mobile performance. Then what we’re doing is we’re moving from metrics that we do traditionally like downloads, revenue, monthly active users, daily active users; to strategic C-Suite metrics that we can now calculate with these two datasets … that get us to customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, return on ..read more

Transcript Ted Krantz, App Annie CEO : Yeah, honestly, I was fortunate because I got put in a global role.. Stephen Cummins: Okay. Of course. Ted Krantz: And it was Global Accounts at Peoplesoft and I had Craig Conway in my accounts. Stephen Cummins: Yeah. Ted Krantz: So I’m this, you know, mid thirties, young executive, flying around the world and having Craig, like, sitting in meetings with me. So I got indoctrinated in the C-Suite hard and heavy…very early on. We had some big global accounts and Craig was intimately involved in those accounts. That’s one thing I really learned from him. I t ..read more

Bob Moore:  What percentage of companies use the word “platform.” It’s massive. It’s like 80 percent of companies “we are a platform.”  We can’t all be platforms, right? A platform is like the baseline thing on which everything here should be built. And if you go …  it’s like platforms all the way down. It’s platforms on platforms on platforms. The real word of the day should be “ecosystem.” Stephen Cummins: Yes Bob Moore: Because all of these companies that view themselves as platforms, they see it in that way because they see that “Oh, there are 50 companies connected to us; a ..read more

Bob Moore:  And have an open mind and be curious and and don’t don’t allow yourself to be defensive about anything, like you being wrong is maybe one of those powerful things can happen to you, especially at that at that stage. So start with something that you know and you’ve empathy for and you think you can have some success behind, and that success will propel you potentially into that thing being great and huge. And you can do it forever, but it might give you the ability to see something you couldn’t see before because of the momentum behind you and the access that you get. And maybe ..read more