The modern shopper looks very different from the consumer of just a decade ago. Not only can she buy just about anything she wants from any number of online stores, but now that she has a smartphone, she can buy those things from anywhere and at any time she chooses.
U.S. consumers spent over $4 trillion at retail last year, 95% of it at traditional brick and mortar stores. But each year, consumers shift more and more of their spending online.Â
The proliferation of smartphones has so far contributed to that shift, most notably with the rise of showrooming, when people find an item they like in a store and order it at a discount from an online retailer.
But smartphones can also fuse the online and real-world experiences in a way that makes in-store shopping better. There’s a large opportunity to help retailers influence shoppers as they’re considering purchases. Â
Shopular’s founders, Navneet and Tommy, worked at Google and Loopt—two Sequoia partner companies—and we’ve known them for years. They initially built a back-end service for push notifications on mobile, but soon realized that the best application of their technology was in mobile shopping.
Shopular helps people find great deals at the stores they already love. Someone selects his favorite stores, then Shopular uses his phone to detect when he's near a mall and pushes him the most relevant offers.
Shoppers love it because it’s an easy-to-use way to cut through the clutter of deals and promotions, standing out like a curated list amid a pile of junk mail. It helps retailers build loyalty and combat showrooming.
Navneet and Tommy launched Shopular less than a year ago, but it’s already a hit with early customers, receiving rave reviews the App Store and Google Play.
Meanwhile, Navneet and Tommy are always trying to make it better. You can often find them in the wee hours of the morning sitting at a picnic table in front of the Stanford Shopping Center testing new features. They’re there so often the security guards know to leave them alone.
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People are buying an ever-growing number of things through app stores, including music, games and productivity tools. Â This has given rise to a new digital economy that has emerged over the last several years with app stores at the epicenter.
There are whole companies that only sell through app stores and these days one would be hard pressed to find a large business that isn’t trying to reach customers that way, too. Airlines, banks, media companies and retailers all have their own mobile apps.
App Annie also synthesizes the data and uses statistical models to create extremely accurate estimates of revenues and downloads for apps that subscribers can use to do things like track competitors, identify fast-growing markets and figure out where to spend their advertising budgets. We’ve used App Annie for two and a half years to help research mobile companies. Many of the mobile developers we work with swear by App Annie, too.Â
We expect market intelligence and analytics for the app economy to become one of the most critical decision-making tools for businesses. In addition to their own apps, businesses are increasingly relying on apps built by others: retailers get business from shopping apps, restaurants from review apps, and so forth. And advertising in mobile apps is exploding.
Well-run companies need accurate information about all the apps and digital content in their ecosystem in order to make good business decisions. Given the rate at which people are embracing mobile, it will only become more important over time.Â
Bertrand and the rest of the team at App Annie had this vision from the get go.Â
App Annie started out as a tool a game developer used to track its own performance across app stores. Bertrand immediately saw the broad potential for such a service and helped spin App Annie off as a standalone company.Â
Thanks to their laser-like focus on the business problem companies have, the team has quickly turned App Annie into the industry’s gold standard. Their roadmap includes many exciting improvements that will enable mobile developers to better run their businesses going forward. We are only at the early days of the app economy and we are thrilled to be in business with the App Annie team.
