SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1546 $4.8M ARR, Bootstrapped, Major Media Brands and Games Use This To Optimzie App Store Apps
18 Oct 2019
Chapter 1: What is Gummy Cube and what services do they offer?
gummy cube founder app store optimization platform launched in 2010 today working with 150 enterprise brands doing north of 375 grand per month in revenue about doubling year over year so healthy growth again all bootstrap net revenue retention annually over 100 they've got nice pricing axes that allow them to drive that up spending call it you know payback period 16 to 20 months to acquire the customers again team of 35 in san jose and other remote locations
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Dave Bell. He's an entrepreneur and recognized pioneer in the fields of mobile entertainment and digital content distribution. He's been featured in and is a frequent contributor to Inc. Magazine, Newsweek, VentureBeat, Website Magazine, Mobile Marketer, and many others.
He's currently the co-founder and CEO of Gummy Cube, the leading global provider of data technology and services for app store optimization. Dave, are you ready to take us to the top?
Chapter 2: How does App Store Optimization (ASO) work and why is it important?
Ready. All right. What does app store optimization mean?
So app store optimization essentially means understanding how to acquire users and grow your app
across all channels using the best data possible, focusing on things like building organics, understanding what users are searching for in the store, understanding what influences conversion in the app store, and also across all of your channels and improving those metrics, having a plan in place to systematically test and systematically expand your presence and improve your conversion.
Interesting.
Chapter 3: What is the revenue model for Gummy Cube?
Okay. And what's your revenue model? Is it a pure place to ask company?
Yeah, it is a SaaS company. So we have a platform called Data Cube and a platform called Split Cube. Those platforms, one, Data Cube is used for keyword metadata optimization and market intelligence inside the store.
Split Cube is a platform kind of like Optimizely for apps that's used for an A-B testing solution, particularly for like Apple App Store, for example, where you can't run live A-B testing. What we can do is we can literally emulate App Store pages or search results, allow you to drive some traffic in and heat map what users are doing when they hit those pages.
Before you even go live in a store with changes, you can understand how they might impact your conversion and what variants of creative work better. When you combine that together with kind of targeting the right keywords and understanding what users intend to download when they search, for example, you end up with a much better funnel.
And of course, a lot of this activity, when you understand what converts really well, when you understand the way users search and what they hope to find, that also translates into optimization of any of your other marketing channels. Because at the end of the day, you're trying to create one big pipe or one big funnel that gets the right users to your app and maximizes your growth.
And so by leveraging ASO, not just for typical things like search optimization or conversion, but also leveraging that data to impact your other channels, you can have a much bigger impact. And that's what our technology allows people to do.
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Chapter 4: How has Gummy Cube scaled its customer base over the years?
And Dave, with that in mind, I know you have a bunch of different customer profiles, I imagine. But what does the average customer pay you per month, would you say?
So, I mean, it can vary. So our business model is dependent on the number of apps that you have live. It's dependent on the number of territories that you that you want to address. You know, typically for like an enterprise model, for example, you know, we could we could range anywhere from, you know, 1049 a month for pure self-service all the way up to.
$1,500 a month per application if you're looking for some help too. So Gummy Cube is unique in that we understand that one of the biggest problems with SaaS is that a team might sign up, use it once, and then other priorities might come up and you never use it again. Some people address that through customer success, kind of light touch.
We actually have a team that can go in and kind of help inform and educate customers and kind of help almost drive the next step to the optimization process to ensure that our customers are getting the best or the best results from our technology.
So again, Dave, just to focus the rest of the interview, because we're short on time, would you say like the appropriate average might be, you know, a thousand bucks a month typically, or is it less than that?
No, it's more than that. So most people that we work with are kind of at the $2,500 per month level.
Okay, got it.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Gummy Cube face in customer retention?
That's fair enough. That's helpful to understand. And so with that in mind, I'd love to learn, kind of put all this on a timeline. So when did you launch the company? What year?
So Gummy Cube has been around for almost a decade. We launched Gummy Cube in 2010. We are actually the oldest ASO company in North America. We were founded three years before Sensor Tower, for example, even existed as a technology or a tool. So we've been doing this for a long time.
Is App Annie in your space?
Kind of. So App Annie has one function inside of a broader tool that lets you understand some of the keywords that your app ranks for. But the reality is that app store optimization is very nuanced. It's not the same thing as chart boosting in the stores.
Chapter 6: How does Gummy Cube's business development strategy differ from others?
The data that you get in terms of how you understand search volumes can vary depending on the tool that you're using, some very accurate, some not accurate. And one of the things that Gummy Cube really set out to do was create technology that from the ground up was mobile.
So not just importing the Google Keyword Planner into mobile, but looking at how the algorithms work, kind of reverse engineering them.
Okay, so App Annie is not a competitor.
Some people view them as a competitor. Some people try to use them for the purpose of ASO, but the features and functionality aren't really a perfect replica of what we have with DataCube.
Okay, interesting. What's your team size today? How many people?
And so we have 35 to 40 people in San Jose. We also have offices in Berlin, uh, in Tokyo and, uh, in Portland where we do a lot of our technology.
Oh, great. Okay. So San Jose remote locations, 35 folks. And, uh, over the past decade, how many customers have you scaled to?
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Chapter 7: What are the key metrics for measuring success in a SaaS company?
Yeah. So we, uh, you know, we have a lot of customers, uh, generally our customers range from what I call kind of startups that are very serious about their business. So they're investing in growth all the way up to, uh, to enterprise right now.
know we serve upwards of 150 enterprise customers um so you know uh you know folks like your news corp for example uh you know uh in their subsidiary so uh we also work with you know great startups like you know wine bike and folks like that so um that's the type of company that uh that we typically work with so dave can i take kind of that 150 enterprise times the average enterprise you know monthly payment you said earlier 2500 you guys are doing about 370 per month right now something like that
Um, so it's not that straightforward. It's, it's, it's, it might actually be a little higher than that. I don't reveal revenue numbers publicly.
However, you know, what I can say, Dave, one of those, by the way, one of those has to be wrong, because I'm just taking I'm just multiplying. So either your ARPU is lower or higher, or your customer count is higher or lower.
Yeah. So here's, here's where the variable is. The variable is we don't charge per customer. We charge per app or per territory that they want to, uh, that they want to target. So, um, it's a little bit higher than what you said. Uh, and then that's because most of our customers have more than one app.
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Chapter 8: What insights can be gained from Gummy Cube's growth and future plans?
Got it. Fair enough. And then take me back. You know, if you're doing north of that today, you know, what's growth look like year over year? What were you doing a year ago?
Yeah. So we've, uh, we've almost doubled since last year. Oh, great. Or realistically in the last 18 months, we've almost doubled.
That's great. So call it maybe November, 2017 doing half of 400 K per month, maybe 200 K per month, something like that. Where's most of that growth coming from? Is it adding new apps to the same customers or is it brand new customers altogether?
Uh, it's, it's both. So we've, we've added, uh, we've added a lot of new customers, but a lot of, uh, a lot of folks, uh, have also been adding apps. So like, When you work with game publishers, for example, they have an entire portfolio and you kind of will land one and then have good results and other product managers will come to you.
So there's been some land and expand, but there's also a lot of business development that goes on. I mean, we have a lot of great inbound. We have a great business development team that we built.
And have you been able to resist the temptation to raise and bootstrap the company or did you decide to raise?
No, we bootstrapped the company.
Oh, great. I love that.
Yeah. So this is my third mobile startup, fourth mobile startup, actually. My last one, I was a co-founder of Playphone where we raised $60 or $70 million. This one, we decided that we were going to, you know, we already had a lot of great relationships and a lot of great developers that we knew. So we built the product.
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