Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it is a fairly immature industry, both on the targeting and the tracking sides. What is happening is quite inaccurate.

Gil Dudkiewicz: It is an industry that is booming in an unbelievable way. When I started this company three years ago, I did presentations and looked at projections – usually when you look at forecasts, the reality is less than the forecast. Here the reality surpassed any of the projections in the marketplace by far in terms of how fast the mobile market would evolve. A lot of the basics of it didn’t evolve as fast.

SM: In a way that is very surprising to me, given how much startup activity goes on in each of these spaces, whether it is analytics or tracking. Tracking is also a kind of analytics. It is very surprising to me that those two are the ones you are saying are not mature enough.

GD: It depends what we are talking about. There are parts of it that are solved. If you want to see how many people use your applications, that you can see. You can see how many people use your application and how much usage there was. But if you look from the perspective of advertisement, that is much harder to do when you collect the data from different applications, especially when you are looking into the download side of it. It is not totally surprising, because if you are in the business of founding companies, it takes time. We are probably one of the fastest companies you can see around, and it still takes a year to come to an initial product – it does take time.

SM: I agree with you – it does take time. Typically what happens in the startup space, especially in the spaces that are very innovation heavy, there are some companies that work specifically and precisely on one problem. It is surprising to me that these are problems that don’t have more precise innovation activity going on. I understand that you are running an ad network, and evolving and being able to innovate precisely on the tracking or analytics side is going to take longer for you because you have a core business you are supporting. But often what we see are vendors that focus on specific niche problems, and that is all they do. That is where innovation happens.

GD: I agree with you in general. I wish this applied for this specific situation. Unfortunately, solutions we see in the marketplace are not yet sufficient. In theory, you should be right, and I don’t think it should be that complicated. On the other hand, we are continuously looking, and we didn’t find any solution that we can use and we feel totally good about.

SM: That is interesting. These are two areas where, if there were compelling solutions, it would make life a lot easier.

GD: Absolutely. Targeting and re-targeting are things that are built inside, and we are working on it internally. If there was a great solution on the marketplace I would use it; I wouldn’t have to build it. The other issue related to it is that you work with app developers, and they need to integrate too many details of different tracking companies. That also doesn’t make life easier.

SM: Is there anything you would like to add?

GD: I think it is an exciting industry, and we are still seeing the tip of the iceberg. I am very optimistic about the industry.

SM: Thank you Gil. Goodbye.

GD: Thank you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp
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