What is your biggest achievement? AKA building a Billion Dollar App Part 1
It was a Friday afternoon and I had a meeting with a company in Sandton.
My meeting was for 13:30 pm but i always like to arrive early to give a good first impression, plus I am terrible with directions so arriving early makes sure i get there on time and African time doesn’t work for me.
This was supposed to be a casual meeting where we talk about myself, history, future, projects, experience and achievements. This is what you would call an “interview” and when it comes to interviews I am the Mohamed Salah of interviews. I know what questions will be asked and what responses are expected to reveal what qualities and traits.
Questions and rationale behind question
1-Tell us more about yourself : This shows how well you can sell yourself, this is the equivalent of an elevator pitch for funding. Sell Sell Sell
2-Tell us about some of the initiatives you have worked on : This shows how resilient, innovative, disciplined you are. Are you a team player?
3-What is been your biggest achievement : This shows how efficient you are at getting things done? How ambitious are you? Do you stay in the background and let others do or do you drive?
What is been your biggest achievement : This is the question that sent me in a 5 year retrospective, as i was asked this question over and over it seemed like the achievements listed on my resume where not enough. The certificates, awards, medals, product launches where not enough.
But there is one achievement which hasn’t made its way to my resume yet — The Grate App
The Grate App started as an idea, there is nothing that excites me more then bringing an idea to life and into peoples hands.
This idea was simple — create a food rating App that focused on the food and not the restaurant. Restaurant ratings can be misleading and you can get a 5 star rated restaurant that has excellent steak but terrible fish dishes. The idea was to create an App that allows people to rate, review and share the dishes they are having at a restaurant.
So now I had this idea, there a couple of things i had to do to make it a reality
1-Develop a Wire-frame that shows the App flow — done
2-Develop a business plan — If it doesn’t make money it doesn’t make sense
3-Find a Co-Founder/ App Developer
4-Define the User experience and Value Proposition
5-Develop a Goto market plan
6-Build a community around social media engagement
7-Launch
We did all this in 3 weeks, with My Co-founder managing the tech and myself managing everything else.
We used ionic to develop the Web-app (big mistake) for both iOS and Android and used Digital Ocean to host the Apps. We had both Apps up on the App stores in under 3 weeks
“ If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman”
Version 1
This is the first version of the Grate App and boy oh boy was it embarrassing.
Images came out skew, Google login didn’t work, it was slow and twitchy and would just crash.
But it worked!
And we had user feedback from the early adopters. In less then a week we had version two out, then another week later version three out. If we waited until it was perfect it would still be a figment of our imagination
As you can see on the image above, the picture was Squashed and resolution wasn’t the greatest, so we embarked on finding a solution and the cloudinary CDN was just it.
Version 2
Now we are talking
This was version two with improved UX, Push Notifications, Likes, Social Sharing, In-App Messages and Events
If you look at the difference between the two you will see chalk and cheese, had we not had a product out in the market we wouldn’t have pushed to have this version out in the market so quickly
This now brings me my biggest Hack
I manged to convince the Organizers of the DStv delicious festival for the Grate App to be the App behind the event. This involved cold-calling the organizers, emailing and finally pitching the App to them. They finally agreed after 2 months of convincing.
That was supposed to the moment that catapults us up the 500,000 Downloads mark but that didn’t happen, we barely made it to 5000 downloads.
Team moral went down but we pushed on. We launched a monetized YouTube channel where food bloggers could video blog and earn revenue and a Blog where we feature celebrities and foodies. All this went into version 3
As time went on I did allot of Growth Hacking and managed to get the App engagement up. I developed metrics to measure our progress and targeted a 30% MoM User Growth figure.
We ran into speed and device compatibility challenges with Web-app’s and I decided that the time for Web-app’s is over. We played around with typescript and native-script but those where like artificial sweeteners and didn’t compare to the real thing.
I needed two things
1-A Native developer
2-A new business model
I had called it quits and was preparing the dreaded — “We have shut down our services message to our users”
But i waited and one day, out of the blue, I received an email from John who was based in the USA and liked the App and thought of developing something similar but that centered around servers(what we call waiters here in South Africa) and thought there could be a collaboration opportunity. I got on a Skype call with him at 9pm on a Saturday night. We discussed the global problem businesses face — “How can I better know and connect with my customer” and how the Grate App solves just that by offering customer engagement, insight, acquisition and retention.
We shut down shop in South Africa and steered our ship towards the USA. I felt like Columbus at that point, exploring new lands, a bigger market size and the opportunity to start again.
There a couple of things i had to do to make it a reality
1-Get a Native developer(iOS or Android)
2-Get a Backend Ninja who is willing to rebuild from Scratch
3-Setup a New Hosting Account(Amazon or Azure)
4-Define a New Value Proposition
5-Find a UX Ninja
6-Change the Name(If required)
7-Develop a Sales and Marketing strategy with John and sell restaurants the solution before we build it.
Recruitment
Now i needed to recruit, i needed to find like minded Ninjas who have an appetite to execute projects. There are Five qualities i looked for in a new recruit: 1-Self Starter, 2-Drive and Ambition, 3-Good sense of Humor, 4-Enjoys coffee, 5-Credible Portfolio
Below is the job post i created on Angelist.
The one thing i didn’t care much about was experience, what matters to me is a portfolio of developed products. I didn’t care if you had 3 days or 30 years development experience. Portfolio, Portfolio, Portfolio.
I was looking for developers across the world, if you didn’t have a github repo then i wouldn’t even look twice. I only had Skype calls with serious candidates who want to work in a Global team.
First recruit
My first recruit was Manas in India. In the “interview” I asked him what his favorite dish was and he said Breyani, we discussed technology and what is happening globally. He was initially worried about the market size potential and competitors in this space. This was the first time any developer has questioned the market size for a product, i knew immediately that this was our guy.
Second Recruit
My second recruit was Maina in Kenya. We spent about an hour talking technologies and the Software development scene in Kenya. He has a fascination for new technologies and likes implementing new things, I knew immediately that this was our guy.
Third Recruit
Our third recruit was Mr Jones, I had worked with Craig on the previous Grate App and he delivered some mockups that blew me away. Never have i seen such elegance and attention to detail. A true artist. I knew immediately back then that this was our guy.
I also interviewed Olev from Russia, but we just couldnt gel
We have been working as a remote team and have calls on Skype, hangouts and communicate on slack. Its beautiful. A truly internet-only company. If it weren’t for the internet none of this would be possible. Below are our pre-launched the fruits of our labor.
Fudos is coming, you can goto the website now and enter your email address and get notified when we launch along with other cool updates
Are you ready?
