Users know best how to make applications.

March 28 at TechCrunch came the news about Runa Capital 's investment in Capptain , a unique SaaS platform that provides new opportunities for mobile analytics and marketing. Today we announce it officially. The volume of investments will amount to $ 1.5 million, and the board will include Dmitry Chikhachev , the managing partner of our foundation, who has 15 years of experience in managing start-ups and high-tech projects.

In an interview with EWDN CEO Cappitan, Lawrence Latier commented on the deal:

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Did you notice differences in the approach of Runa Capital compared to France or other Western countries?

I can say that Runa Capital was an unusual venture fund by French standards, and this was evident from the first meeting: Runa turned out to be smart, fast, straightforward and useful. Some differences? I would say that this is just another world! To put it mildly, after talking with Runa Capital, I am ready to subscribe to the words of Fred Destin - the European venture capital industry needs a revolution, not an evolution.

By and large, Capptain has no analogues on the market, it has a full set of tools. It combines analytical functions, real-time monitoring service and efficient CRM and marketing system. It collects and provides all relevant information about the process of using mobile applications, allowing you to track their performance and study user behavior. The obtained data is analyzed in real time and used to develop a successful marketing strategy. In addition, Capptain provides an opportunity to send users notifications and receive feedback, which is a great way to get in touch with consumers, conduct a targeted marketing campaign and get valuable feedback. Capptain is a cross-platform solution (iOS, Android, Html5, Web OS, Samsung Smart TV, Blackberry / RIM and WP7) and supports various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, IPTV devices).

A startup is predicted to have a great future - it is designed for mobile application developers, mobile operators and mobile device manufacturers - it will allow them to better understand the needs of the end user.


J'son & Partners estimates, numbers in millions of US dollars.

The market of mobile software is growing at an avalanche rate - its current volume is more than 9 billion US dollars, and its annual growth is about 32%. But it intensifies the competition on it, and the higher the competition, the more important in the development of marketing analysis. Analysis is a loud word, often covering a simple view of one’s own needs. Every time you think what you or your customers are missing and find a solution, this is marketing. If we look back on successful startups of recent years, we will see that all of them were created with the aim of satisfying the vital needs of their particular groups of people.


YouTube Video Awards 2010 (photo by Tony Avelar, AP)

One day, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen shot a funny video at a party that their friend Javed Karim missed. It was 2004, and it turned out to be too painful to throw him a video over the network, and it dawned on friends here. They bought youtube.com domain and ... made a video dating site. Dating turned out to be not very popular, and then the youtube authors again turned to marketing - they thought what they themselves would have wanted from the site and ... just decided to donate a random user to the iPod every day.


The man who launched a chain reaction of social networks

In 1999, Brad Fitzpatrick found that keeping a diary, following updates from friends, is much more interesting. And he created LiveJournal, which after five years already used hundreds of thousands of people, among whom was Mark Zuckerberg who noticed the flaws of LJ. For example, someone wants to get acquainted with a girl in LJ - he will have to spend a fair amount of time to understand if she is suitable for dating. Having created new opportunities for communication, LJ was nevertheless a limited system, because it’s not really a profile page, and the very idea of ​​keeping a public diary is not close to everyone. For this reason, on Facebook you can at first glance create an impression of a person by her profile - from marital status, to addiction in music.


Jack Dorsey with his buddy

Less than a year, Jack Dorsey thought about the limitations of Facebook, which does not give a "feeling of elbow," instant information sharing. Then he decided to drop all the functions of Facebook and leave one input field with the question “What are you doing now?” - the answer to it would be sent to the general tape of friends. However, the system was not popular until in 2007 its authors decided to show the goods face.

At the largest South America Southwest music festival in America, twitter authors posted 60-inch plasma panels throughout the festival and broadcast messages from Twitter, everyone could send their message to the screen in a second — suddenly, thousands of people were close to each other. Within a couple of hours, Twitter became the main event of the festival and became famous throughout the world.


Igor has something to be proud of

When Igor Sysoev worked at Rambler and struggled with server overloads, he himself added the necessary modules for Apache, but at some point he decided not to patch holes, but to write his own server from scratch specifically for high-load systems. NGINX currently has 50 million sites, and NGINX Inc is a portfolio company Runa Capital.

Another example is Angry Birds. Its authors made 51 failed games and were on the verge of ruin, until in desperation Peter Westerbaka decided not to spit on all the rules and make a game that could suit a person in his position - to shoot a slingshot with birds on the windows.


Hmm, somewhere this blue bird we have already seen ...

All these start-ups have arisen almost by chance, now the innovative stage of the history of the Internet is ending, now the sober calculation and the bet for the user's needs will win. I think it’s enough to look at marketing giants like Apple to see how effective this approach is.

In 2001, Steve Jobs was delighted with Napster - users had the opportunity in one click to get music and video. A few months of research on user behavior and the world has received the iTunes music store that takes into account all needs at once. Now you could get the music right inside the audio player, in one click and ... without thinking about the price - all the tracks cost the same. Customers wanted to get the music as simple as possible, and Apple only followed the “customer is always right” principle. Many people argue about the secret of Jobs’s success, but he’s lying on the surface — he was more pedantic about marketing.

Just listening to his clients, Jobs overtook the whole world for decades, the ipad and iphone were already in his hands in 1988. Open the journal “Science and Life”, 1988, 12th number, on page 36, the heading “Bureau of Foreign Scientific and Technical Information”. We read:

“WHAT WILL BE THE PERSONAL COMPUTER OF 2000?

The competition of ideas on this topic was held by the American firm Apple, which created the first personal computers in 1976.

The competition was won by a group of students at the University of Illinois. The winners imagine the computer of the near future as a box the size of a thick common notebook. On one side of the box - a color screen on liquid crystals. There are no keys or buttons other than the power button ... ".

“Radio communication with the navigation satellite system and the transport data bank will allow the owner of such a computer to find out his location on the planet with an accuracy of several meters at any time and quickly calculate the shortest and most convenient route to any other point. And if such a computer is kidnapped, you can immediately find out where he is, by broadcasting his personal callsign. Creating such a personal computer will not require new breakthroughs in technology or scientific discoveries. Practically everything necessary for it already exists. ”

1983, a device called “Bashful” was just a “design mock-up” created by the results of the research of the interests of the audience, but it clearly showed what people were expecting from Apple.

Why is Apple ahead of its competitors by twenty years? Because she knows what her customers would like to receive in two decades. Apple's only ever-growing budget item is research. If in 2006 there were 700 million, then in 2010 development and innovation costs approached 2 billion.

But what about small companies developing mobile apps if they want to be as effective as Apple or Facebook without having two billion dollars to research? Just use Capptain and you will know everything about your users. Practice shows that this is a key factor in the most successful technology companies.