#askimagine

Today we met Pepe Agell. Happy entrepreneur and Head of International at Chartboost.

The company that is today the largest only game platform with 60k games (new numbers to be released soon), was founded in 2011 by Maria Alegre and Sean Fannan, at Pier 38, a former accelerator in San Francisco. After an incredible growth, the team got funded with 21m lead by Seqouia in 2013, and they just moved in their new office in downtown San Francisco. Say hi to the large T-Rex that greets you after walking through the door.

Pepe shared some very inspiring insight with us.

GLOBAL AND LOCAL

Everything is global today. The AppStores are global and you should be global, too.

If you want to become a global company, start speaking English from moment one, even though there are mainly Spaniards in the team.

And always make sure you still shake hands. 

AT CHARTBOOST CLIENTS ARE PARNTERS

Surprise, Chartboost, just are Waze, doesn’t have a head of marketing. Their best marketing is actually when their clientes = partners recommend them. “You are not selling, you are creating fans”. By solving real problems for the developers and helping them to monetize, their users are massive ambassadors for the brand.

To help the indie community, they have even integrated tools so developers can connect, chat and exchange data and experience.

It’s all about the "developers first” approach: did you know the SDK Burger Challenge? You can actually install the Chartboost SDK faster than eating a burger and they invite developers to proof that. 

TEAM CULTURE & VALUES

As the company was growing they were becoming aware of the importance of values and the culture of the company. Because there should be always just one team. By defining their values, they were defining what it meant to be a Chartbooster. 

Values like “getting shit done” and that “numbers don’t lie” are important lemas that everybody in the company knows.

What is Chartboost’s vision?

They are a revenue platform for developers. They develop ad-technology and are developers helping with in-app purchases. They want to be the company that pays the first check to the developer. 

One last thing?

Passionate storytelling by angelikab

What makes Isabell Allende's story so compelling? Why can't you stop listening?

Have you ever met a real-life super heroine?

I was so much looking forward to finally meeting Di-Ann Eisnor, I had seen her speak at several conferences and I had been waiting for this moment. Today I could finally ask her my question.

Di-Ann is the Vice President of Waze, a crowdsourced navigation system that outperforms Google maps and any TomTom by far. Plus it has new cool features like live traffic updates that saves you time and money.

She joined Waze in 2009 after the CEO had tricked her to come on a trip to Israel to speak at a conference. They were offering her quite some money to speak in Tel-Aviv but really he wanted to convince her to join Waze. A week later, she came back from the trip having resigned as the CEO of her own company because she was fascinated by the team’s ability to execute and build a great product. Since then, she and her team grew Waze from 100k to 50m active users in 2013 when Waze was acquired by Google for 1.3bn USD.

Di-Ann always says that their best marketing is their product. So I was curious to find out how their teams are organized and how they managed to get such amazing traction without any (traditional) marketing.

Make your product your marketing. Waze didn’t hire a marketing person until 2013. Their product was good enough to get massive attention from the media and the users. 60 TV stations are using their app today for their morning traffic report.

Get your product recommended. Ask blogs and media for reviews. Get recommended on the AppStore, tell the story at conferences and to the press.

Know your data. Engagement is key and you need to dig into the numbers to find out what your users are doing and what they are not doing.