#01 Learnings from a Corporate Entrepreneur
In Episode #1 of the Growth Show Podcast we had the pleasure to talk to Jonas Thiemann, Co-Founder and CEO of the app discovery platform AppLike. As of today, AppLike counts 60 employees from 12 nationalities and is operating in 27 countries.
In this article, we will share our insights and learnings from our conversation in our podcast with Jonas.
When you found a company there are three kinds of setups you can choose from:
1. Being a bootstrapped founder with your own money. This is nice when you already have had an exit or are backed by family and friends.
If you do not have enough money in your bootstrapped startup, you have no room to do anything.
2. You start with your startup and try to find an investor/external equity money/loan. This is external money that you will have to pay pack in some kind of way sooner or later. This gives you a lot of resources but there will be other people involved that tell you what you should be doing.
If you have money from other people they will have a strong opinion on what should be done with this money.
3. You can become a corporate startup. However, a lot of Corporate companies fail in giving startups the room for innovation. If you have a shareholder round of 10+ people that all want to help you solve a problem, this can become very exhausting.
In order to create something innovative such as Applike, freedom and space from your shareholders is necessary. Jonas and his Co-Founder Carlo were happy to have this setup within the Gruner + Jahr / Bertelsmann ecosystem.
“If you want to earn a lot of money you rather become an investment banker than a founder.”
We asked Jonas why he decided to become a corporate Entrepreneur.
“It was not an active decision. Telling a story afterwards always sound reasonable but looking at my own life things progressed on a daily/weekly level. There is no “Life-Plan” to follow. The first startup was terrible. The business idea was terrible. But we still went for it because we wanted to found our own company. We wanted to distribute online shop vouchers in coffee shops to bring people that buy expensive Latte Macchiato to the online shop world because we thought: “Someone who spends 4€ on a Latte is an attractive client for Zalando.” This made sense on the paper and the business model sounded very smart. The plan was that the coffee shops pay us for the voucher and the online shop pays us if the voucher is redeemed and we thus get a life time commission.
“The main issue was: In reality things look different.”
Getting the POS under control is a very tough challenge and very tough to tackle with a team of 2–3 people. After one year we found out that this did not make sense and decided to stop this project.
It was luck — but in the end of the day also a lot of work”
By giving Jonas and Carlo freedom, they achieved to become the fastest growing digital startup of the Gruner + Jahr Portfolio.
“If you want to do an advertising business digitally it is not enough to do it in one country — you need to do it globally. You need to do it on scale and you better do it with a strong USP and tech platform in the middle.”
Jonas had a friend back then who worked at Payback and he learned about the payback loyalty system which is one of the biggest reward loyalty system in the world.
“Loyalty is what keeps the customers engaged.”
Example: You just bought nappies at the POC so a company specialized in baby products can use this information for up-selling purposes.
Jonas found out about using customer data to do specifically tailored advertisements in a more traditional space (same as Facebook). He and his Co-Founder Carlo sat together for 3 months and Carlo developed a way to determine that data through app downloads and usage and they still use this basis for the profitable business of AppLike.
The idea of a targeted CPI (Cost-Per-Install) business model was born.
“A lot of these things sound like all the stuff that you read in those American Startup books but the following helps a lot;
It is really really good to have a buddy.
This is someone that you become friends with while working. He is an addition to my personality and vice versa. This is highly enriching for the company to have this special combination. This combination helps you to go through a lot of pain and tough phases. Fighting alone can be very tough at some point. The sooner you find a buddy that is good at something that you are not and is a different person than you are the more stability, inspiration and drive you get in the long-term.”
“We did not put a lot of effort into making the product sexy. We put a lot of effort into building the business.”
“Before you launch a product — ASK PEOPLE.
We called advertisers and asked them what they think about the idea. There was not one app advertiser that said that is a good idea. Right now those are the clients that are spending millions with us every year.”
We asked Jonas for his advice for founding a startup within a big company.
“It will not feel fancy. You will not be celebrated for what you are doing. People might not even understand why you do this because all other colleagues are doing their job in the traditional business of the company. There will be a few supporters which were in our case high level which is why we got the funding. Still, in the beginning, you are just a decentralized project somewhere where people will not give you that nice feeling that you usually have. People basically just do not care what you are doing.
“It will not feel like you are going to be in the Top-Line of TechCrunch.”
It’s your intrinsic motivation that drives you forward. Not the feedback/appreciation from other people. If you focus on attention then you are already lost because the focus needs to be on product-market fit.”
Want to hear more about Jonas’ entrepreneurial journey and why he developed a hate towards instant noodles? Then check out the first episode here:
