One app story

For quite a long time I was sure that most of my University skills could hardly be used in my business. Just try to think of any use for military- KGB-ideology kind of stuff, taught for 5 years, mixed with development courses in rare devices. No, I didn’t think so either.

I like to think though, that the first part has helped me to deal with complex situations. Next to that, the ideological stuff put me in a lot of very funny situations and they say laugh extends one’s lifetime span, so… The surprise was that my knowledge of development of very specific devices became very helpful. Even better; that knowledge led to a new app creation. Continue reading

Mobile Apps UX optimisation with Google Analytics

Probably one of the most popular terms in mobile business is MVP. Numerous evangelists, advocates, consultants and mentors work with startups and help them apply the Lean Startup ethos. They push them towards building an MVP and going further with incremental updates. The main goal of this activity is to find a product market match and understand financial characteristics. To put things simply, these are preliminary steps to build a real business plan and scale the business. If you scale an unprofitable business model, then you scale losses. There are a lot of materials on this topic, but there is not so much information on how to actually do that, or how to get actionable data. This is not a problem, though. I’ll show you how to make it using Google Analytics, which is both simple and free. To make it more fun and more interesting I’ll use PhotoSuerte app as a case study. Continue reading

Google Analytics for Pirates

Google Analytics for Pirates

Pirate Metrics is a simple growth hacking (business development) framework by Dave McClure. In this article, I provide a detailed guide for startup founders on how we use Google Analytics to track Pirate Metrics. The framework is based on the assumption that every startup needs to get customers through 5 key stages, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue. (AARRR)

Google Analytics, for us, is the best tool to gather actionable data among all our apps and websites. But Google Analytics’ flexibility and power comes at a cost of complexity. It is so not obvious how to get needed insight, even when you completely understand how to aggregate needed information. Here I will provide some very useful recipes, which you could start using while reading the article. Most of the data will be based on our flagship Together app which is a kind of mobile video editor with organizing capabilities. In most common use cases, you just import a recently shot set of videos, splice them into one short video story, add a music soundtrack to set the right mood and impress all of your friends and family with a nice video story. Download it and have some fun. Continue reading

Year summary / Reflecting on 2013

2013 is almost over now, so this is a great time to reflect on its results.

First of all, we launched Together for iPhone and for Android. It was a hard task; it took us almost 2 years to make the product! Now we are happy to polish the User eXperience and realize how useful it is for our users. They create amazing things with the product and I hope next year will bring even more creativity with the tools we made. Continue reading

One startup prerelease growth

startup growth

In this post, I will tell you the story of our early prerelease growth approach we took with Together Video Camera. Nowadays, there are lots of ways to attract early users. We took our path and I believe, we have our say here. I spent days and weeks studying the best existing practices, and after that spent even more so proceeding my way and applying the newly learned principles. So, let’s start and check some of the steps I took and the outcome I have finally got. Continue reading

Video Portals

Video player

Online video is growing increasingly popular every day. Many Internet portals offer online video features to their users. We would like to offer you the list of popular video portal so you can get familiar with the online video strategies of the largest Web, telecom and media companies. We hope that this will possibly inspire you to implementing new features in your own projects. Continue reading

More on OpenX Features

OpenX

In this post, we continue our overview of the OpenX ad server. This time, let us consider the basic features of this product in depth. When preparing and launching our campaign, we should focus at advertising formats, targeting options, and statistics. For all these aspects of online advertising, OpenX has implemented the most demanded features and more specific options. Moreover, it offers a flexible developer framework to extend the server functionality and meet the customer specific requirements. Continue reading

Netflix: Online Video Business Specifics

reed-hastings-netflix-ceo

In early June, AllThingsDigital held a great D9 conference, bringing together the most famous experts in the Internet industry and beyond, including Eric Schmidt (Google), and Reed Hastings (Netflix). The full video recordings of their interviews are published at the AllThingsD website, featuring very insightful and valuable ideas. In this article, we will discuss Reed Hastings views of the Netflix video business, the clues to its success and development strategy. Continue reading

Over The Top (OTT): Pay TV services and platforms

multiple screens video

Over The Top (OTT) TV has become increasingly popular now. Many companies across the globe are offering their products and services related to OTT platforms. Generally speaking, this term is likely to have emerged within the telecommunications industry, as a way for ISPs to avoid becoming wide pipes. At the same time, traditional Internet companies have no idea that Web multimedia can be built otherwise, i.e., not over-the-top, but using a private IP network). In this article, we will discuss OTT, TV and the Internet, and how they all get along together. Continue reading