Interview with Oren Kaniel (CEO Appsflyer) about the mobile ecosystem, investments in technology and corporate culture
The CEO of Getloyal , Alexey Pisarevsky, as part of the Mobio Talks program, interviewed the CEO of Appsflyer , Oren Kaniel.
In an interview discussed:
- Corporate culture;
- Rounds of investments in Appsflyer;
- Product and company management;
- Appsflyer mobile ecosystem;
- Development of new technologies in mobile;
- Frod and how to deal with it;
- Attribution models;
- and much more.
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In the video there are Russian subtitles, and under the cut, you can read the text transcript.
Over the past couple of years, Appsflyer has developed very rapidly how many people are there in your team right now?
344 employees
How many of them do you know personally?
I try to know everyone. I try to communicate with each employee and I will definitely conduct an interview with newcomers. Many entrepreneurs and managers are surprised, but I advise everyone to get to know the people with whom you work. I totally trust the employees of our company. For me, communicating with everyone is a great experience. I interview all candidates before they become employees. Therefore, I do not meet strangers in the office. I like to be open: anyone can contact me on any question about the company's strategy, for example, or about the product, or about the market, about anything.
A big company is a big responsibility. Is it difficult to manage Appsflyer?
In terms of personal responsibility - I do not see much difference. Is it harder today than three years ago, I'm not sure. No, today is no more difficult than three or four years ago. Today I just solve completely different tasks.
What changed?
Let's go back say 4 years ago. We had very little money.
Then you had 7 million? This is not such a big problem.
I said 4 years ago? Before we got 7 million. Let's just say that in 2012 our budget was much less - only half a million dollars. I then led the table in excel: and at the bottom there was a line how much money we had left to maintain the company. With each new employee, the period was reduced: six months, five months, four months. This means you have enough money left to keep the company for only 4 months.
That kind of pressure.
Now it is different. Then we had to either look for money, or change something in the company - otherwise in less than 4 months we would have to close the company.
Recently you have received 56 million dollars of investments and you now have 340 employees. For how many months is this money enough?
Now we have to decide how fast we want to grow. We can control this process. Now that we have enough customers, we can already seriously talk about growth and rates. At first, there were customers too, but there was no steady stream of income to consistently pay employees, suppliers, and everything else.
Regarding investments: in round “C” you received $ 56 million, before that in round “B” - 20 million, and in round “A” - 7 million. Which round was the most difficult?
The very first sowing round. It is not written on Crunchbase. It was in 2012, and we then received those first half a million.
And it was the most difficult round?
Yes, the most difficult.
Why?
We started together with a partner - we developed a new technology, went to local investors here and talked about our technology. Nobody believed in us, everyone said: no, no, no. We communicated with many investors here in Tel Aviv. By the way, this is a very interesting question. It was a difficult time, because we did not feel any support from the market, there was no reason. Investors had to blindly trust our history, trust our knowledge, and they have no validation from the market. As soon as we gained experience and were able to show how our ideas really help companies, we were given money.
Round "A" was much easier. In the round “B” several investors came to us at once, and in the round “C” there were even more of them. Investors asked companies that they had already invested in, which tools they used, and thus found out about us. Investors were interested in what we do even earlier than we met with them.
When do you plan to achieve profitability?
We have a positive cash flow now, and as for profitability, everything depends on our decisions. Most resources go into development. If we want to reach profitability ...
Then you just cut down the state?
Yes, but we don't want to do this. Instead of 100 developers, we can only have 20 to maintain what we have. And tomorrow we will start making a profit. But this is not our strategy - for us it is now a priority to invest in product development.
Source: appsflyer.com
And if we talk about the future - in five or ten years? Amazon, for example, was not profitable for the first 20 years.
This is an Amazon culture. They invest all their income in new business ideas - such is the idea of ​​its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. We at Appsflyer are inspired by his example.
You have 13 offices around the world: in Israel, the USA, China, Germany, Great Britain, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Ukraine, Argentina and Brazil.
Which one was the hardest to open?
It's not so much in the country, but in people. If you managed to assemble a talented team and find a good leader - everything will go easy. I meet people, meet, talk with them. This is all networking.
The Chinese market in our industry is considered one of the most difficult. You managed not only to reach it, but also to achieve success. What's the secret?
First of all in the product. The fact is that Chinese customers know exactly what they need, and they directly say if something is not working. They are demanding. I think this is a positive side, because they are pushing us to develop the product and its new features. They know exactly what they want. We are lucky that we started working in China from the very beginning. How it all began, I do not know.
As it turned out, there is a great demand for our services. We did not expect that to happen, and at the same time tried to focus on other regions too. At some point, we started working with major Chinese companies and met wonderful people. They all speak excellent English and generally true professionals in the field of mobile application development. I then realized that it was with such companies that we were interested in cooperating.
What about the Russian mobile advertising market?
We love him. We adore the Russian market! One of our first and largest clients was a game development company from Russia. So the history of our company is closely connected with this market - it can be said that everything started from there.
What do you think about the success of Yandex AppMetrica? This product is free, and it seems that this is why many companies use it.
When something is offered for free, there is always cause for concern, especially when it comes to analytical services. Any company stores data, not only its own, but also the client: who bought what, how much was spent, and so on. After all, it would not occur to anyone to share with competitors information about their own customers - using such data, any company will find a way to lead these customers to themselves. Suppose you are a game developer, and you have one percent of users paying. Would you give them to a competitor just to save on the analytics tool?
It turns out, if the tracking tool is free, most likely, it transmits client data somewhere else?
I mean, companies need to be more careful with data. When they give something for free, there is a reason. After all, to create a tool, you need money. In the case of Appsflyer, money does not flow to us from the sky. Some companies actually monetize data - this is their business. Others charge for a service or product. We have chosen to be independent and impartial - this is the only way we can guarantee our customers the safety of their data in a world where data is being hunted. This is a potential threat to any company.
The word "fraud" has become the word of the year in the industry of tracking systems. According to your estimates, what is the proportion of frod traffic in the total volume?
Good, but difficult question. I will explain why. All you see is the Appsflyer ecosystem. Within our ecosystem, we fight fraud in two ways. First, with the help of technology. Appsflyer's market share is 60 percent, which means we process huge amounts of data. Every day we see 30 billion events in mobile applications that are installed on 4 billion active devices - about as many smartphones exist on our planet. We constantly analyze these data and reveal fraud in them.
Another way is through dialogue with partners. We ask them to make sure that our customers do not receive frod traffic from them. Otherwise, we will spot him and demand action. The fraud situation in mobile advertising illustrates the so-called “prisoner's dilemma”. I wrote about this in a blog post . The bottom line is that with the general connivance of fraud everyone will be bad. Trying to be competitive, many market players drive fraud traffic or close their eyes to it for the sake of beautiful ROI. Developing our ecosystem, we motivate all its participants to fight fraud for the benefit of customers.
Do you believe in such an ecosystem?
Yes. For example, we stopped cooperating with two partners who, to our knowledge, did not make enough efforts to clean out fraud. In general, it is wrong to call such companies “partners” - their entire business is built on frode. We simply blocked their accounts by denying access to the platform.
What do you think about the attribution models of Facebook and Google, which are distributed according to their own algorithms? Is the system transparent enough for the market?
In my opinion, misunderstanding reigns on this issue in the market. Competition between companies is not only in terms of value, but also on other grounds, for example, price. There are different stories. As for the so-called self-reporting-networks, one of our competitors recently said that they could not get all the data for creating multi-touch attributions from Google and Facebook, because they do not receive all the data on self-reporting networks. This is wrong, because both we and they have all the necessary data for this. We have multi-attribution has been working for the third year, and for any networks. In Appsflyer, you can flexibly customize the retrospective attribution window both by show and by click.
What do you think are the prospects for retargeting technology?
From the very beginning, we knew that targeting has a great future and relied on the fact that sooner or later, from measuring the number of users and installations, the market will come to such notions as genuine involvement and re-engagement. It took more time than we expected, but now this concept, fortunately, has finally begun to gain popularity. We have invested a lot of effort in developing opportunities for retargeting and engaging in our product: for example, in our solution for mobile retargeting based on OneLink technology based on deeplinks.
“Deep links” provide an opportunity to direct users to a particular page, depending on whether they have an application installed or not. This year we have developed a new mechanism for consistent segmentation of the audience, which allows you to segment users based on first-hand data and transfer them to partners for retargeting and re-engagement. In 2017, this tool was a great success - many customers immediately began to actively use it.
As a leader, what are you focused on first? What are your everyday tasks?
I think about everything. Tasks are different. Product development, promotion strategy, company structure, negotiations with colleagues. I communicate with each person in the team, be it a manager or a developer. I think about everything. If you ask me what matters most, I will tell people. People are the main thing in our company, and I consider it important to invest in their development and professional growth. Culture I would like for everyone who works with us or worked before, experience at Appsflyer was a reason for pride. I am sure that when you make a product and you are proud of it, everything turns out.
And the last question: what is the main goal of Appsflyer for 2018?
Continue to maintain market leadership. There is nothing difficult here - the main thing is to please customers and partners with the capabilities of our platform and useful services. We want everyone to be happy. Customers need two things - to make it faster and cheaper. We understand this and will move in this direction in 2018. We also hope that fraud will be finished, and everyone will forget about him as a terrible dream, and start talking about such useful things as retargeting. When people or companies are afraid that they will be deceived - this is bad. Thanks to technology, you can cure this fear and instead create new opportunities for growth. I hope that this will happen next year.
Subscribe to our youtube channel to watch more interviews with mobile industry experts. And also on our channel in Telegram , where we write notes on product marketing.
In an interview discussed:
- Corporate culture;
- Rounds of investments in Appsflyer;
- Product and company management;
- Appsflyer mobile ecosystem;
- Development of new technologies in mobile;
- Frod and how to deal with it;
- Attribution models;
- and much more.
')
In the video there are Russian subtitles, and under the cut, you can read the text transcript.
Over the past couple of years, Appsflyer has developed very rapidly how many people are there in your team right now?
344 employees
How many of them do you know personally?
I try to know everyone. I try to communicate with each employee and I will definitely conduct an interview with newcomers. Many entrepreneurs and managers are surprised, but I advise everyone to get to know the people with whom you work. I totally trust the employees of our company. For me, communicating with everyone is a great experience. I interview all candidates before they become employees. Therefore, I do not meet strangers in the office. I like to be open: anyone can contact me on any question about the company's strategy, for example, or about the product, or about the market, about anything.
A big company is a big responsibility. Is it difficult to manage Appsflyer?
In terms of personal responsibility - I do not see much difference. Is it harder today than three years ago, I'm not sure. No, today is no more difficult than three or four years ago. Today I just solve completely different tasks.
What changed?
Let's go back say 4 years ago. We had very little money.
Then you had 7 million? This is not such a big problem.
I said 4 years ago? Before we got 7 million. Let's just say that in 2012 our budget was much less - only half a million dollars. I then led the table in excel: and at the bottom there was a line how much money we had left to maintain the company. With each new employee, the period was reduced: six months, five months, four months. This means you have enough money left to keep the company for only 4 months.
That kind of pressure.
Now it is different. Then we had to either look for money, or change something in the company - otherwise in less than 4 months we would have to close the company.
Recently you have received 56 million dollars of investments and you now have 340 employees. For how many months is this money enough?
Now we have to decide how fast we want to grow. We can control this process. Now that we have enough customers, we can already seriously talk about growth and rates. At first, there were customers too, but there was no steady stream of income to consistently pay employees, suppliers, and everything else.
Regarding investments: in round “C” you received $ 56 million, before that in round “B” - 20 million, and in round “A” - 7 million. Which round was the most difficult?
The very first sowing round. It is not written on Crunchbase. It was in 2012, and we then received those first half a million.
And it was the most difficult round?
Yes, the most difficult.
Why?
We started together with a partner - we developed a new technology, went to local investors here and talked about our technology. Nobody believed in us, everyone said: no, no, no. We communicated with many investors here in Tel Aviv. By the way, this is a very interesting question. It was a difficult time, because we did not feel any support from the market, there was no reason. Investors had to blindly trust our history, trust our knowledge, and they have no validation from the market. As soon as we gained experience and were able to show how our ideas really help companies, we were given money.
Round "A" was much easier. In the round “B” several investors came to us at once, and in the round “C” there were even more of them. Investors asked companies that they had already invested in, which tools they used, and thus found out about us. Investors were interested in what we do even earlier than we met with them.
When do you plan to achieve profitability?
We have a positive cash flow now, and as for profitability, everything depends on our decisions. Most resources go into development. If we want to reach profitability ...
Then you just cut down the state?
Yes, but we don't want to do this. Instead of 100 developers, we can only have 20 to maintain what we have. And tomorrow we will start making a profit. But this is not our strategy - for us it is now a priority to invest in product development.
Source: appsflyer.com
And if we talk about the future - in five or ten years? Amazon, for example, was not profitable for the first 20 years.
This is an Amazon culture. They invest all their income in new business ideas - such is the idea of ​​its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. We at Appsflyer are inspired by his example.
You have 13 offices around the world: in Israel, the USA, China, Germany, Great Britain, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Ukraine, Argentina and Brazil.
Which one was the hardest to open?
It's not so much in the country, but in people. If you managed to assemble a talented team and find a good leader - everything will go easy. I meet people, meet, talk with them. This is all networking.
The Chinese market in our industry is considered one of the most difficult. You managed not only to reach it, but also to achieve success. What's the secret?
First of all in the product. The fact is that Chinese customers know exactly what they need, and they directly say if something is not working. They are demanding. I think this is a positive side, because they are pushing us to develop the product and its new features. They know exactly what they want. We are lucky that we started working in China from the very beginning. How it all began, I do not know.
As it turned out, there is a great demand for our services. We did not expect that to happen, and at the same time tried to focus on other regions too. At some point, we started working with major Chinese companies and met wonderful people. They all speak excellent English and generally true professionals in the field of mobile application development. I then realized that it was with such companies that we were interested in cooperating.
What about the Russian mobile advertising market?
We love him. We adore the Russian market! One of our first and largest clients was a game development company from Russia. So the history of our company is closely connected with this market - it can be said that everything started from there.
What do you think about the success of Yandex AppMetrica? This product is free, and it seems that this is why many companies use it.
When something is offered for free, there is always cause for concern, especially when it comes to analytical services. Any company stores data, not only its own, but also the client: who bought what, how much was spent, and so on. After all, it would not occur to anyone to share with competitors information about their own customers - using such data, any company will find a way to lead these customers to themselves. Suppose you are a game developer, and you have one percent of users paying. Would you give them to a competitor just to save on the analytics tool?
It turns out, if the tracking tool is free, most likely, it transmits client data somewhere else?
I mean, companies need to be more careful with data. When they give something for free, there is a reason. After all, to create a tool, you need money. In the case of Appsflyer, money does not flow to us from the sky. Some companies actually monetize data - this is their business. Others charge for a service or product. We have chosen to be independent and impartial - this is the only way we can guarantee our customers the safety of their data in a world where data is being hunted. This is a potential threat to any company.
The word "fraud" has become the word of the year in the industry of tracking systems. According to your estimates, what is the proportion of frod traffic in the total volume?
Good, but difficult question. I will explain why. All you see is the Appsflyer ecosystem. Within our ecosystem, we fight fraud in two ways. First, with the help of technology. Appsflyer's market share is 60 percent, which means we process huge amounts of data. Every day we see 30 billion events in mobile applications that are installed on 4 billion active devices - about as many smartphones exist on our planet. We constantly analyze these data and reveal fraud in them.
Another way is through dialogue with partners. We ask them to make sure that our customers do not receive frod traffic from them. Otherwise, we will spot him and demand action. The fraud situation in mobile advertising illustrates the so-called “prisoner's dilemma”. I wrote about this in a blog post . The bottom line is that with the general connivance of fraud everyone will be bad. Trying to be competitive, many market players drive fraud traffic or close their eyes to it for the sake of beautiful ROI. Developing our ecosystem, we motivate all its participants to fight fraud for the benefit of customers.
Do you believe in such an ecosystem?
Yes. For example, we stopped cooperating with two partners who, to our knowledge, did not make enough efforts to clean out fraud. In general, it is wrong to call such companies “partners” - their entire business is built on frode. We simply blocked their accounts by denying access to the platform.
What do you think about the attribution models of Facebook and Google, which are distributed according to their own algorithms? Is the system transparent enough for the market?
In my opinion, misunderstanding reigns on this issue in the market. Competition between companies is not only in terms of value, but also on other grounds, for example, price. There are different stories. As for the so-called self-reporting-networks, one of our competitors recently said that they could not get all the data for creating multi-touch attributions from Google and Facebook, because they do not receive all the data on self-reporting networks. This is wrong, because both we and they have all the necessary data for this. We have multi-attribution has been working for the third year, and for any networks. In Appsflyer, you can flexibly customize the retrospective attribution window both by show and by click.
What do you think are the prospects for retargeting technology?
From the very beginning, we knew that targeting has a great future and relied on the fact that sooner or later, from measuring the number of users and installations, the market will come to such notions as genuine involvement and re-engagement. It took more time than we expected, but now this concept, fortunately, has finally begun to gain popularity. We have invested a lot of effort in developing opportunities for retargeting and engaging in our product: for example, in our solution for mobile retargeting based on OneLink technology based on deeplinks.
“Deep links” provide an opportunity to direct users to a particular page, depending on whether they have an application installed or not. This year we have developed a new mechanism for consistent segmentation of the audience, which allows you to segment users based on first-hand data and transfer them to partners for retargeting and re-engagement. In 2017, this tool was a great success - many customers immediately began to actively use it.
As a leader, what are you focused on first? What are your everyday tasks?
I think about everything. Tasks are different. Product development, promotion strategy, company structure, negotiations with colleagues. I communicate with each person in the team, be it a manager or a developer. I think about everything. If you ask me what matters most, I will tell people. People are the main thing in our company, and I consider it important to invest in their development and professional growth. Culture I would like for everyone who works with us or worked before, experience at Appsflyer was a reason for pride. I am sure that when you make a product and you are proud of it, everything turns out.
And the last question: what is the main goal of Appsflyer for 2018?
Continue to maintain market leadership. There is nothing difficult here - the main thing is to please customers and partners with the capabilities of our platform and useful services. We want everyone to be happy. Customers need two things - to make it faster and cheaper. We understand this and will move in this direction in 2018. We also hope that fraud will be finished, and everyone will forget about him as a terrible dream, and start talking about such useful things as retargeting. When people or companies are afraid that they will be deceived - this is bad. Thanks to technology, you can cure this fear and instead create new opportunities for growth. I hope that this will happen next year.
Subscribe to our youtube channel to watch more interviews with mobile industry experts. And also on our channel in Telegram , where we write notes on product marketing.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/346922/
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