George Berkowski > Quotes

“Three key roles need owners: someone must lead the product vision; someone needs to build the technology; and someone needs to be focused on getting users and generating money.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“Don’t ever listen to people who say it’s good enough, because it never will be. Building a great product is a fluid, ongoing process.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“Don’t try to do everything. Don’t try to tackle multiple business problems. Focus on one core problem and deliver one great solution.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“you have a 1-in-1,538 chance of reaching the Billion-Dollar App Club, once you have secured professional investment.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“WhatsApp decided to launch on iOS first. Its logic was that iPhone users also disliked mobile advertising – and didn’t want their app experience to be junked up with intrusive ads. WhatsApp also reasoned that iPhone users spend more on premium apps – in fact they were spending 2.7 times more than Android users.1 Apple users accounted for 73 per cent of the total spent on the App Store and Google Play as of mid-2013. The WhatsApp go-to-market business model was to charge users $0.99 for the download and offer free messaging for ever. It worked: iPhone users were happy to pay $0.99 for the download – and did so in the tens of millions. With big revenues rolling through the door, WhatsApp was ready to launch an Android app. WhatsApp launched on Android with precisely the same business model: a $0.99 download and free messaging for ever. In a complete surprise, download numbers struggled to such an extent that the team ended up quickly ditching the $0.99 price point for Android users, and made the app free. Downloads rocketed, the user base continued to grow and amazed iPhone users were still happy to keep paying $0.99 to download the app.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Today the expectation is very much that your app should generate revenue from the start. Why is that? Mainly, because it is perfectly simple to do so. In addition to services provided by Apple’s App Store and Google Play to allow your users to pay with a single tap from their iTunes or Google accounts, there are numerous other ways to make money. We’ll go through the most powerful ones right now.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Rookie Mistakes PUTTING IN ANALYTICS TOO LATE. Installing an analytics solution before you launch your V1.0 is the golden rule – hopefully you’ve followed my advice back in the section on the million-dollar app. Your website or app is nothing without analytics – you’re going to be flying blind with no idea about how many people are even using your app – so make sure you get the code in there immediately. There’s no debate on this one. RELYING ON A SINGLE ANALYTICS SOLUTION. As we saw earlier, it’s very helpful, especially in the early days, to put in two analytics solutions rather than one. With recent performance increases, having two (or three) solutions in either your app or website is not going to either slow down or overcomplicate things. And, given how much of a pain it is to transfer data between systems, there is very little cost. NOT ATTRIBUTING MARKETING OR REFERRAL SOURCE. This is perhaps the biggest mistake you can make. From the start, you really want to know the source of a user. Did a new user come to your app organically? Did they come from your website? Another app? Or from a PR or partner campaign? Facebook or Twitter, perhaps? Or a specific, paid-for marketing or affiliate campaign? You can get pretty much 99 per cent accurate attribution these days for apps. You can do it by working with a partner such as mobileapptracking.com. So do it from Day One. From the get-go you will have visibility and the ability to invest super-efficiently. NOT PLUGGING IN REVENUE METRICS. Useful metrics such as average transaction value (ATV), annual revenue per user (ARPU) and lifetime value (LTV) can be easily calculated by a number of leading analytics solutions. It’s definitely worth investing the time early on to track this. Otherwise you tend to make excuses, and it can become hard to calculate (and often less accurate) via spreadsheets.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“In 2012 there were about 4,000 unique devices running Android; in 2015 it was around 24,000. That’s 1,300 different brands of devices’ #BILLIONDOLLARAPP”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“It’s Bloody Hard ‘0.07 per cent of funded startups become billion-dollar companies’ #BILLIONDOLLARAPP”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“You can track how many times you prompt people via your analytics solution – and you can also track how many ratings you’re getting on a daily basis with app-store analytics tools such as AppAnnie or Distimo. And, second, keep your ratings fresh. While you shouldn’t annoy your users, do make sure that you prompt them to update their rating of your app every six months or so. Again, this should be an automatic prompt that is built into your app. Make sure that you make it as simple and pleasurable for your users to tell everyone how great an experience they are having with your app.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“There are ten top mobile-advertising platforms that you’ll want to pay attention to – Google’s AdMob, Millennial Media, iAd (from Apple), Flurry (in addition to a free analytics solution, it also has a big ad network), inMobi, Chartboost, MoPub, Amobee, HasOffers and Euclid Analytics.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“indistinguishable”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“The concept revolves around the fact that professional investors want assurances that you and your cofounders are going to hang around in the future. A founder-vesting schedule is basically a timeline of your earning full ownership of your shares in the company. Typically this means you will need to stay and work with your own company for four years (a normal period in the United States, in Europe it tends to be three years) for all your founder shares in the company to vest (i.e. effectively become your property), at which point you own them outright.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“ACQUISITION. Acquisition isn’t just getting a download. It’s about acquiring a user – so you need to set the bar higher. A user should be someone who downloads your app, opens it and clicks at least one button, or has a session length of more than 10 seconds. Counting someone who abandons your app as an acquisition isn’t particularly useful (and nor is the channel that brought them to your app).”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“DO THE LEGWORK. Reach out to journalists yourself. Just like the rest of us, they are lazy. If you present them with a good story, and a personalised email outlining what you’re doing, there is a good chance you’ll be picked up. In the process, pull together a list of blogs in your relevant sector (technology and app news) as well as popular blogs that love reviewing apps (there’s a myriad of those), and then spend a few days writing a lot of emails – and be prepared to reply to a lot (and also get ready for a lot of interviews – it’s increasingly common to do them over Skype and Google Hangouts). So get out there!”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“a perfect time for the greatest of Silicon Valley euphemisms – the pivot. Pivoting your business is admitting the failure of your current (and currently funded) idea, clinging on to whatever remaining investor money you have, and trying your next new idea. Funnily enough, investors (at least in the Valley) aren’t too upset about this strategy. At the seed stage it’s much more about investing in people, and accepting that adjustments to business models or core product strategies are inevitable (and may, as in this case, lead to a great ‘new’ idea).”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Hunting Designers So you have your wireframes sorted out, you know you want a well-designed app, but where do you find a great designer? Designers are elusive creatures who can be hard to recruit at the best of times. The great ones are always booked months in advance; most don’t want a permanent job (they’re happy doing contract work – going from new project to newer project); and, when you do find someone, you usually find that a combination of very strong design opinions and outrageous day rates will make it hard to get the designs you need. A great approach is to trawl two websites in particular – dribbble.com and behance.net. I’ve experienced great success with Dribbble (yes, three Bs in its name and in its URL). In fact, that’s where we found Hailo’s head of design. The great thing about these portfolio sites is that you can see a designer’s style, often with a lot of their historic work. Also, Dribbble has added the ability to search for designers who are actively looking for full- and part-time work (and, despite its being a paid-for feature, I thoroughly recommend using it). Once again, I would also suggest checking out AngelList: it attracts the most entrepreneurial cross-section of people, across all areas, whether in design or engineering.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“When Facebook did finally IPO, the final value of the deal was $736.5 million because of the initial drop in Facebook’s stock price, but, in the period since the IPO, Facebook’s stock price has bounced back to the IPO level and proceeded to rise even further, so Kevin Systrom did indeed make a fantastically good deal. Andreessen Horowitz, the firm who invested the first $250,000 in Burbn, made a return of $78 million when Facebook bought the app. That’s a rather healthy 31,000 per cent return. Nice.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“You can definitely feel when you haven’t quite reached the point of perfect product–market fit. Your users don’t seem to get the value out of your app, there doesn’t seem to be much word-of-mouth growth, usage isn’t growing that fast, and you’re receiving rather flat publicity (no one is getting to the point of wow). You’re still stuck in the limbo world of the ‘me-too product’.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“IT’S ABOUT GOING PUBLIC. Of the 10 companies that have been acquired, the average valuation was $1.3 billion. For app companies this amount was $1.67 billion (not including Whatsapp’s outrageous acquisition amount as it skews the average). This represents the lower end of valuations, which makes sense, since acquirers want to get them at a lower price. So the majority of companies are exiting via an IPO. This is a great sign, because it means that entrepreneurs are focused on building companies that last – rather than just building and flipping them for a quick sale.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“In terms of URLs, here are some golden rules. •   Owning the dotcom version of your name is ideal. It confers credibility, trust and a clear leadership position. Launching with a ‘national’ domain (such as .co.uk or .fr) is fine if you have small ambitions but won’t cut it if you’re serious about billion-dollar status. •   Get as close as you can to the pure version of your domain. Starting with variants is perfectly fine: Twitter operated on twittr.com for many years before having the money to purchase twitter.com; similarly Facebook was thefacebook.com for many years; and Uber had ubercab.com before it acquired the sleek uber.com domain. •   Starting out with a domain name like ‘[companyname]app.com’ is great strategy if you’re focused just on the mobile side of things. •   Other alternatives such as ‘get[companyname].com’ and ‘get[companyname]app.com’ are also good ideas to get the ball rolling (ideally, you’ll be able to purchase a cleaner version down the line). •   And, if you’re serious, start the process of communicating with the person who owns your ‘dream domain’ – it may take months, or even years, to eventually acquire it. It used to be true that you could find a great domain name for $10,000, but that’s frankly pretty hard. Fred Wilson, a very seasoned investor behind companies such as Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy (he also invested in Hailo), has revised his guidance to startups about how much they should commit to finding a good domain. In today’s market, he thinks it’s appropriate to fork out up to $50,000.1”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“One big reason I wanted to write this book is to encourage people to think big. But I wanted to help you to think big in a structured, realistic way. We can all certainly imagine how we’d spend a billion dollars, but it’s a lot harder to put a plan together about how to realistically generate a billion dollars. There aren’t any guides out there about how to think at a big – a truly huge – scale from the beginning. I’m going to change that. No matter what happens in life, you probably won’t hit your precise goal, but the higher you aim, the higher you are likely to hit. So it makes complete sense to start with the biggest possible vision, so that you stretch yourself from the very onset. Why not shoot for a billion-dollar idea, and then have reality thrust you back to a $500 million one? ‘You will only have one great idea in your life – make it count!’ wrote Eric Jackson in a Forbes article.1 While I’m not sure if Jackson has ever run a company, he is right: truly great ideas don’t come around that often. So, when your number is called, make sure that you’re so well equipped and prepared that you can really belt it out of the park. That’s the goal of this book – to prepare you for your chance to build a billion-dollar app.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Quality assurance (QA) – also called quality engineering (QE) – is tasked with making sure that the app your engineers are building is working as designed and specified. A large part of your QA team’s responsibility is to ensure the app you’re about to release to the public is bug-free – namely that there are no obvious areas where the software crashes or doesn’t act as expected, or that the user interface doesn’t look weird or wonky.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“edX”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time

“Given that people want to be ‘excited’ and ‘connected’, it makes sense that anything that is done to maximise those sentiments is only going to make an app more popular.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“How to hire a VP of marketing I have been lucky to have hired and worked with two truly amazing marketing guys. The first was Steven Sesar, who joined the team at WooMe having previously led the marketing for Shopzilla (which was acquired for a cool $560 million).1 He was a numbers guy through and through – and a huge part of our success was his ability to cost-efficiently acquire and retain users. Carl Lyons is, at the time of writing, the VP of marketing at Hailo. Before joining Hailo he had led a variety of great digital-marketing teams – namely at Lastminute.com, Capital Radio and the Guardian – but is equally a brand man. Brand is increasingly important in a noisy, highly competitive app ecosystem.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“So why is this clever? It’s worth investing the time in tracking all your advertising and referral in this way because few startups do it well in the early stages. That means that you can take advantage of the situation and grow faster, with a more efficient marketing spend early on. Let’s use a real-world example from Uber – the chauffeur app. It used very detailed referral tracking from the onset. What did this do for Uber? Detailed tracking allowed Uber to see that some users were referring a higher calibre of user; there was a clear segment of high spenders referring other high spenders. So what did Uber do in response? It increased the value of the referral codes for these users. This increased conversion substantially. Uber consistently offers $20 referrals for some users – and $50 for others. This drove better conversions and faster adoption early on – and was replicated across all its cities. It doesn’t cost you anything to get a powerful tracking solution like this in place – so why not do it? It can only give you better visibility.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“Start with a big problem, a novel solution and a huge market ready to adopt it. Then build a great product that users love, and then prove they love it with data showing they are willing to pay for it. Combine that with a robust strategy that attracts users systematically and at a cost that is less than what users will potentially generate in revenue for your app. Combine all of this with a diehard team sprinkled with people who have built companies before, and you’re going to maximise the chances of building an app business that is going to last. The formula is not magic, it is simple, and it’s about how religiously you adhere to the tactics and the calibre of people you attract to join you on the journey. One of the most amazing things to appreciate – and what is a huge driving force behind billion-dollar success – is these entrepreneurs not only possess ridiculous long-term vision but also have the ability to learn on the spot, be constantly aware of their surroundings and then adapt to the market nimbly.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“10. GREAT PRESS KIT. Make sure you have at least a mini section on your website for press – and a press kit. Include all the info about your app and company: photos, logos, screenshots, ‘about us’ pages. The simpler you make it for journalists and bloggers to find information about your company, the more likely it is that they will write about you. Don’t make it hard to find all the information that they are looking for.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App

“The Clauses that Can Screw You Having worked with a lot of investors over my last few startups, and having completed an exit as well, I can attest at first hand to the importance of understanding all the major legal and contractual details that will directly affect you, the control you have of your company and how much you will earn in the event of an exit. Here is a list of the most contentious clauses, what they mean and what to watch out for. It’s all quite legal – but you’ll be a happy person if you get these negotiated in your favour. •   LIQUIDATION PREFERENCE. This is one of those clauses you don’t need to get stung by. It’s standard for investors to get a 1x liquidation preference. •   ANTIDILUTION RIGHTS. Investors will ask for this in the Series A funding round. Basically it means that an investor has the right to maintain the same percentage ownership of your company automatically if the value of the company goes down. This is really tough on the founders. It means losing more of your company’s equity automatically in a down period. It’s unlikely that you will be able to remove this provision – but you need to be aware of it. •   NON-PARTICIPATING LIQUIDATION PREFERENCE. Liquidation preference determines how the pie is shared in a liquidation (or exit) event. A founder should always seek to have a non-participating liquidation preference for investors. Without going into too much detail, a ‘participating’ liquidation preference allows an investor to double-dip in terms of the slices of pie that they are entitled to. You’ll find a more detailed explanation on mybilliondollarapp.com. •   DRAG ALONG RIGHTS. This provision grants the investors the right to compel the founders (and other shareholders) to agree the sale, merger or liquidation of the company or block a sale, merger or liquidation. As a founder you do not want to be dragged along in this case. Ideally you should be able to negotiate that investors would only have the right to block the sale if the return was below a certain level. •   WARRANTIES. In investment agreements in Europe it is very common for founders to personally give basic assurances that everything the company is doing is proper and correct, these are known as warranties. In other countries, like the USA, founders don’t give warranties at all. Again, do check out mybilliondollarapp.com for more details, because this is definitely a complex area. That said, there are always going to be numerous details that are specific to your company and situation. The best possible advice here: make good friends with a few lawyers so that you always have someone to call on with a specific question.”
― George Berkowski, How to Build a Billion Dollar App