Breaking the Norm: Maxine Manafy, CEO of Bunndle (Part 2)

Sramana: How did you view the competition when you were starting Bunndle?

Maxine Manafy: When I started Bunndle there were a couple of competitors in the market. They were not so much concerned about performance, activation and retention. They were really just trying to get as much money as they could from smaller guys. As an end user, as a customer, I wanted to see that experience improved. I wanted something that worked so I built Bunndle as an ad network for applications. Big or small, you can have the same amount of distribution with the same quality afforded to the big guys.

Sramana: Walk me through your use case. I have tons of small apps in my portfolio. I have an autism app that sells for 99 dollars. How do we increase distribution of this through your platform?

Maxine Manafy: With any app the first thing we do is run you in the network and try to understand it. We try to figure out which categories your app fits best. We also look at the application to determine what the right audience is. We would partner your app and match your app with somebody else who has the same price point. We are not going to put a 99 dollar app with a 99 cent game. It would probably not be the same person pulling out their wallet for both of those apps.

In addition to that, we would want to target the types of end users who would use the app. For an autism app you are probably looking at an adult segment who would make the purchase on behalf of someone else, or a business. We would have to go and find the apps where adults and businesses purchase those types of things and we would intentionally match you there and run you over time. Sometimes we find good fits in categories that you would not expect. For example, we find that banking is a great match for security, yet gaming is a good fit as well. We would run your app for a while and let the app learn. Once it learns where you are best matched we would put you in front of end users who are best matched.

Sramana: Do you have access to the end users?

Maxine Manafy: We don’t. We only have information from the publishers. We don’t know anything about them. We have no personal information. We only know what they download.

Sramana: Does that information come from the publishers?

Maxine Manafy: Yes, exactly. Over time we learn what is matching well. Machine learning is iterative and improves over time.

Sramana: In this case that we just discussed, you would put this app in your network. What is are the mechanics of that? For the app to gain adoption other apps are going to need to be relevant?

Maxine Manafy: Yes.

Sramana: So your network works only with apps?

Maxine Manafy: Yes, we work with mobile apps and desktop apps.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Breaking the Norm: Maxine Manafy, CEO of Bunndle
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