Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 2)

Sramana: When was the official beginning of appssavvy?

Chris Cunningham: It officially started in November  2007. This was pre-Apple commercials. We were one of the first companies to create a name that had “apps” in it. There was not an application conversation market in those days. I did have an important lesson I learned during those days. If you have a vision or idea that you firmly believe in and it has buy-in from your close network, then you need to go for it.

Sramana: When you decided to leave your job based on the appssavvy idea, what steps did you take? How did you validate your idea when the concept of apps was still in its infancy?

Chris Cunningham: I validated the idea by reaching out to the advertising community first. I had 10 years of relationships with media executives whom I had grown up with. I brought them the idea and asked them if they would be interested if I were to successfully launch the business and provide their agency with a platform through my company to advertise in games and social communities in a context relevant manner. Sure enough, there was an overwhelming amount of interest and excitement.

Next I called on a number of application developers who built on Facebook early on. We flew to San Francisco and attended one of the first app developer classes at Stanford. To be completely honest, we did not feel that welcome. We were two guys from New York pitching a business idea. At that stage the undergrads at Stanford were already spending time understanding how to build businesses. We brought them the concept and the promise that we could facilitate a monetization engine. There was validation there.

At that early stage, RockYou was a company that was out in the market. Some of their executives facilitated introductions early on with Presidio Media before they were called Zynga. We were talking to Hungry Machine, Playfish, and others before they were acquired. I share that to illustrate that we were very early in the marketplace. Some of those companies evolved into massive, publicly traded companies. That is how we validated interest.

Sramana: What was your business model when you launched the company?

Chris Cunningham: At that time appssavvy was a sales and service business that provided contextually relevant brand integration into existing and developed social applications. We believed very early on that it did not make sense to build custom applications. That was a bet that we made that did pay off. We essentially were a rep firm for existing social applications.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham
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