A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Moshe Vaknin, CEO of YouAppi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2012?

Moshe Vaknin: Yes, to the end of 2011. Then in 2012, I’m still in mobile. I knew that mobile apps is going to be a big market. I knew mobile apps were going to be a part of our lives. It was not easy at that time. I remember going to one of the investors. He told me, “Eventually, iPhone will become just another game device.” People didn’t really believe that you can do more than that. At the beginning of 2012, the world was still very skeptical about mobile apps.

Sramana Mitra: By 2012, mobile apps were mainstream. They were taking off. What was the pushback in 2012?

Moshe Vaknin: There were only 200,000 apps, but they were mainly games. The mobile device was considered as another device to play games. That’s the way they envisioned it. In any case, I had seen a problem in the ecosystem, which is the discovery issue. There are a million apps, how can you find what you’re looking for.

Sramana Mitra: That is what we’re living through right now. Not only users discovering apps, but also app producers and developers are finding it incredibly difficult now to get discovered. What did you do in 2012 to address this problem?

Moshe Vaknin: At that time itself I wanted to address it. I was thinking about having an app. I developed an app investing my own money. Through this app, we built a recommendation engine. The idea was, once a user installs our app, we can get their profile and start recommending apps that are suitable for the user.

Sramana Mitra: How would you do that? What was your hypothesis at that time on how you were going to do that?

Moshe Vaknin: At that time, if you install our app and we know your profile and you feed some data into the app like interests, we will recommend you suitable apps. Once you see the apps, we’ll do some analysis. For example, if we recommend you music apps and we see that you don’t like rock music but you like pop, then we’ll recommend similar music. It’s an ongoing learning. That is the idea behind it. Very soon, I realized that to do this concept in an app is very problematic. If I’ll do that, there will be a very big issue to create a big base of data.

We realized that it’s pretty complicated. Secondly, we came to the understanding that the users are sometimes lazy. They don’t like to go and feed data and try to look for apps. We needed to find a better mechanism and you need to be able to drive these users’ apps all the time. Users like to see the apps getting displayed and not go and do some work to discover. That was my conclusion. I’m glad that we realized it.

This segment is part 4 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Moshe Vaknin, CEO of YouAppi
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