We were at the Mobile Applications Conference last week and the keynote was delivered by Arvind Rao – Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder of Onmobile. Arvind spoke on various things that are relevant to mobile startups looking to make it in the mobile space. Here is a summary of what he spoke:
The Problem Of Distribution
40-45 million have caller ring back tones and it generates 40 rupees per subscriber for operators. The biggest challenge for mobile application providers is reach and distribution. This distribution is in the hands of the telecom operators.
Telecom operators never entertained mobile application players a decade ago and many skeletons of mobile app players are hanging outside the door of telecom operators.
How to sell to operators?
As a mobile app player you need to make sure that the telecom operator sees the value that your application provides. The app that did it for Onmobile was a voice based cricket app which was liked by the folks at Hutch and they helped us roll it out. We never got paid for the application but did a revenue share that also in a few circles.
Learnings from Onmobile experience
What we learnt from this is that as a mobile application player its important to just get your app live on any network as once you get one success story then the world will be at your feet.
App Store – A boon for developers
The app stores that we see are an Industry altering event. Any developer sitting in any nook and corner of the world can now get a ready distribution channel.
Advice on kinds of apps to develop
Me too apps dont work. So dont try to replicate what has been done in the west. Also dont get caught up in software coding and not give time to UI. UI and UE i.e. user interface and user experience are the two most important aspects of a mobile application
Business Model
We at Onmobile are not big fans of the ad funded model and believe that if the user doesn’t pay for the app then it probably isn’t worth it in the first place.
We also believe that one shouldn’t compromise on software management skills and companies to work towards bringing in developers that have deep domain knowledge and can build robust apps.
As a CEO you need to keep your team invested and hence one should be generous with ESOPs.
What is Onmobile doing to help developers?
Onmobile has launched an app developer network wherein we provide our reach through operators and voice based platform to app developers to build their apps upon.
We have also launched an incubation fund and we shall be looking at funding companies that are in the mobile applications space and we shall get VC’s to fund them as well if required. One such deal we did was with Verse which recently got funding from Matrix Partners.
