Skip to main content

Disruptive Cloud Start-Ups - Part 2: AppDirect

Check out the first post of this series on NimbusDB, if you haven't already seen it. This post is about AppDirect. I met with Nicolas Desmarais, a co-founder and the CEO of AppDirect and had a long discussion regarding their current solutions and future strategy. AppDirect is an app store for small businesses. The developers can integrate their applications with AppDirect and AppDirect manages the experience of selling, provisioning, and billing with a 70-30 revenue split with the developers. They also have a white label app store solution that they sell to large customers such as ISPs who can sell these same applications to their customers.

Let's get the things out of the way that I didn't like about them.

The downside:

The target market that comprises of small businesses is extremely difficult to reach to and to market to. This gets even more difficult when the company trying to market is a young start-up and the customers are "S" in SMB. These customers have very different kind of requirements. They look for simple solutions that are not very expensive and have predictable SLA with a clear local support model and not the ones that come with enterprise grade features such as end-to-end integration, single sign on etc. Intuit has owned this channel for a while via Quickbooks and their SMB marketplace (the partner platform) is a great example of selling go-to-market services to other ISVs. AppDirect will have to work much harder if they want to work this channel.

So, why do I think they are disruptive?

The upside:

AppDirect is platform-agnostic. The developers can write applications in any language and run it on any platform as long as they integrate with AppDirect's end points (the APIs). The ISVs or PaaS providers have traditionally locked developers into their platform. That lock-in now goes away.

Even though the telcos are not the most innovative companies, they are laggards with a pile of cash, a ton of customers, and good margins. I believe that telcos can be great enterprise software vendors for SMB. Instead of spending money on the marketing efforts, if AppDirect can convince the Telcos and ISPs to bundle their white label solution, it's a win-win situation. This business alone can make them profitable. What you need is a small number of large customers. Long tail can always be an added bonus.

The team is talented and they have got a good product with some early customers. If they can execute on their vision and pivot as necessary, they're on to something,

Check out their slides and presentation:
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emergent Cloud Computing Business Models

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reveiw: Celluon Epic Laser Keyboard

The Celluon Epic is a Bluetooth laser keyboard. The compact device projects a QWERTY keyboard onto most flat surfaces. (Glass tabletops being the exception) You can connect the Epic to vertically any device that supports Bluetooth keyboards including devices running iOS , Android , Windows Phone, and Blackberry 10. On the back of the device there is a charging port and pairing button. Once you have the Epic paired with your device it acts the same as any other keyboard. For any keyboard the most important consideration is the typing experience that it provides. The virtual keyboard brightness is adjustable and is easy to see in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately the brightness does not automatically adjust based on ambient light. With each keystroke a beeping sound is played which can be turned down. The typing experience on the Epic is mediocre at best. Inadvertently activating the wrong key can make typing frustrating and tiring. Even if you are a touch typist you'll still ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Focus On Your Customers And Not Competitors

A lorry is a symbol of Indian logistics and the person who is posing against it is about to rethink infrastructure and logistics in India. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his trip to India charting Amazon’s growth plan where competitors like Flipkart have been aggressively growing and have satisfied customer base. This is not the first time Bezos has been to India and he seems to understand Indian market far better than many CEOs of American companies. His interview with a leading Indian publication didn’t get much attention in the US where he discusses Amazon’s growth strategy in India. When asked whether he is in panic mode: For 19 years we have succeeded by staying heads down, focused on our customers. For better or for worse, we spend very little time looking at our competitors. It is better to stay focused on customers as they are the ones paying for your services. Competitors are never going to give you any money. I always believe in focusing on customers, especially on their latent unme...
Post a Comment
Read more