AppGoGo Background

AppGoGo was founded in early 2010 to help social game developers on Facebook send email. In March 2010, Facebook eliminated the notification channel which developers used to drive viral growth and keep their users engaged. This resulted in tens of millions of lost monthly active users (MAUs). The AppGoGo founders saw a huge opportunity to provide email services and picked up where Facebook left off. Development of the first product began and the alpha product was available soon thereafter. Email notifications which are one-to-one transactional emails such as neighbor/friend requests, sending gifts, unlocking virtual goods, completing levels, etc are not commonplace for existing email service providers (ESP’s) like Silverpop, Exacttarget, or even MailChimp. These traditional ESPs send mass emails to lists not one-to-one emails like Facebook game developers needed. AppGoGo built and released a simple API in spring 2010 that allowed game developers to send email notifications triggered by events within the games. AppGoGo got initial customers right away to start using the API, send emails, and share feedback about our product.

Going Lean and Maximizing Customer Development

Customers were happy with the API but as the social gaming industry grew and a gaming company of four developers turned into a company of 50 after a few big hits on Facebook, clients wanted a more robust platform to see reports and send email campaigns (along with the API to send triggered email notifications). This was also the time in late 2010 that the social gaming industry was maturing and new user acquisition costs were on the rise. Gaming companies realized that user retention and engagement needed to be a more important part of their marketing and business strategy. Instead of building our own email campaign platform we decided to be a lean startup and white-label and tweak an existing open-source one. This way we could get to market almost immediately, get user feedback, and then build our own platform tailored to the needs of the gaming industry. Email (and SMS) for social and mobile gaming companies have unique characteristics which is why traditional services don’t work. Game developers could potentially use an existing service, and some do, but to compete in the gaming industry and maximize results you need a customized tailored product.

Next Steps

Fast forward to today and we have dozens of games/apps using our product. We are now combining our knowledge-base of everything we’ve learned over the past year to build the next generation messaging platform for social and mobile gaming with built in tools for email, sms, and notifications. We’ve received tons of feedback from customers and prospects and are working closely with them while building our next version. We are growing from a simple API for Facebook developers to a complete platform for any social gaming, mobile gaming, MMORPG, or traditional gaming company.

A few other things to note

- We have clients/prospects providing feedback all around the world from US, Europe, and Asia.
- We charged for our product from day one.
- The revenues generated from the beginning has helped grow the company without any major funding.
- We did receive $25k from Meng Wong’s Joyful Frog Incubator (part of the TechStars Network) and that’s it.
- Email server infrastructure is cloud hosted to reduce started costs
- Our email expertise and consulting provided a lot of extra value to our customers early on when our product was still in very early stage
- We have over 50 prospects in the sales pipeline, many of which are starting to test our platform next month.
- We are on pace to send over 100 million emails a month by end Q2.

The SXSW Lean AppSumo Bundle

AppGoGo LOVES the SXSW Lean Startup bundle. This is how we are using it…

Our Developers are researching and working on integrating Twilio International SMS into our new platform.

Starting to use Pivitol Tracker since we have a distributed team with people in 4 different locations.

I’ve already read Startup Lesson Learned and I am stoked to read the Lean Startup Book.

Super stoked to attend the next StartupWeekend!

I just setup HipChat and we are going to use it like crazy, thankfully no more gTalk!

Working on a survey on AYTM and will be using this a bunch as we iterate our new platform and collect constant feedback from customers.

Setting up GinzaMetrics, wish I knew about this earlier.

Setting Crazyegg on homepage.

Developers will be setting up a bad ass Geckoboard for internal metrics, can’t wait to see it.

Going to be using Chargify now, no more Quickbooks, yeeeah!

Love SnapEngage, it’s already up and running on our website. Stoked it was in the bundle!

Just added UserVoice to our platform to manage feedback and support.

Cant wait to read Running Lean, Andrew Chen and Sean Ellis ebooks, VentureHacks book, and Hacker monthly.

Already watched “Startup and Go.” I am a huge fan of Udemey and StartupDigest.

I’m sure we’ll be using all the other awesome Lean Startup Bundle tools soon including; uTest, Pandaform, Slidedeck, FeeFighters, Sauce Labs, LessAccounting, 99Designs, BatchBook, texting.ly, Infochimps, WP Engine, Server Density, Trada, and Zencoder

Winning the Startup Challenge

AppGoGo is #wining the Startup Challenge! We have a great Lean Startup story and want to continue to be a lean mean startup machine. The cash, prizes, and mentorship will help accelerate our growth and build out our company. The 500 Startups investment and access to their incubator program would be monumental.  We have an exciting success story in the making and proof that being agile and learning from your customers is key to developing a great product and service. Vote for us!!