How to build a billion dollar app pdf download

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On top of that, it turned out that taxi drivers were terribly inefficient — spending up to half their time driving empty cabs, searching for fares. Jay cofounded the company with Caspar Woolley the former chief operating officer at eCourier and Ron Zeghibe, a seasoned executive with experience in private equity and outdoor advertising.

Ron had even taken a company public. And so back to Charlotte Street — and what would turn out to be the genesis of Hailo. The strategy was to discount these longer rides and allow the drivers to earn some incremental income, while passing on a good deal to passengers. Jay loved the idea, but even more than that he loved the fact that TRG had already signed up London cabbies who wanted to take part in the programme — despite the fact they had no product or app to offer them.

It was at this meeting that Jay presented his idea — one bigger and more ambitious than anything the drivers could have possibly imagined — of a truly global taxi-hailing app.

The app would launch in London first, and then it would expand globally. Everyone around the table loved it. Hailo would have six cofounders — three seasoned entrepreneurs and three experienced taxi drivers.

The team possessed great collective experience — deep sector expertise, tried and tested technology, years in finance and even a previous working relationship. It was a powerful cofounder mix. For drivers, by drivers What became clear from those very early stages was that having the involvement of drivers at the very core of the business was indispensable. As the Head of Product for Hailo, my role was to figure out what we needed to build — and how to go about building it.

I, along with our designer, would work closely with drivers to determine what features should be included in the app, how the pricing should be structured and even the best way to message the drivers. We wanted to create a service that drivers would love. The app would provide free traffic information, driver-sourced information about where people are requesting cabs, the ability to securely process credit cards via their smartphones with no additional hardware and comprehensive stats and reporting on the fares they were picking up — all for free.

I also needed to build a product and engineering team that could actually build a robust mobile platform to support thousands of drivers — and millions of passengers. And I had only a few short months in which to do it. The penetration of smartphones was becoming significant — with broad mainstream adoption. Smartphones were no longer just for early adopters: more and more people owned them. By carefully modelling where smartphone prices were going, we could see that it would be very realistic for Hailo to focus solely on creating the app software — and leave it to drivers to buy their own smartphones.

This was a critical decision, as it would allow us to invest more time and money not only developing our software but also focusing more on expanding Hailo to more countries and cities. Had we instead focused on providing the hardware to drivers as some of our taxi competitors did we would have burned through a lot more money more quickly, which would have come at the cost of expanding to additional cities.

So it was a decision well made. Today this decision has resulted in further benefits for Hailo. This has actually become a selling point to drivers thinking of joining Hailo, since they can now get better phones, cheaper, and with better packages. It was this focus on building an app that drivers loved which would allow Hailo to get incredible initial traction. So why is the mobile sector growing so fast? And why have both the rollout and the usage of the mobile Internet grown so much faster than the desktop Internet?

Think about this for a second: the smartphone in your pocket today is about 15 times faster than a Cray-1 supercomputer vintage , and as powerful as the most powerful computer in the world in All it offered you was a keyboard and a screen — and the ability to perform millions of calculations per second.

Before computers became mainstream they needed to address a number of issues. They needed to be friendlier to use — the only way you could communicate with them was by a command line interface and complex instruction sets. The mouse, even though it first appeared in the s, only really gained broader traction in the s and 80s. But the market was still fragmented with IBM, Commodore, Atari and Apple all creating competing hardware, and software. It was Microsoft who pioneered a huge change in the mids with the arrival of Windows.

An OS is simply a big chunk of software that is the glue of any computer: it manages all the hardware on the computer such as the keyboard, screen and processor and manages all the other programs that run on the computer such as email, the Web browser, your calendar.

Windows exploded in popularity because it was simple to use and provided a visual interface, and banished the command-line interface to the annals of history.

The Windows OS was launched in November and in just three years it was running on 25 per cent of all computers. In addition to making computers more accessible to users, it also provided a powerful platform for developers.

With the Windows OS now managing the complex interface of dealing with any type of computer hardware, software developers were left with the much easier — and interesting — task of building software that could do cool things such as browse the Web, manage your email, generate visual maps and play games. Over the course of 20 years, the Windows OS allowed hundreds of millions of people to learn to use computers, and millions of developers to create innovative software programs that would generate billions of dollars of value.

Around the early to mids, mobile phones started to hit their stride. Mobile-phone handsets — along with mobile services — were now affordable, and a mobile infrastructure that enabled people to make calls and send text via SMS was rolling out rapidly around the world.

There was, however, no clear mobile operating system. All the leading handset manufacturers, such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony and Ericsson, had their own proprietary — and closed — systems. As a result there was no simple or effective way for developers to write software that would work on handsets from different manufacturers. There were a few attempts to try to create common platforms — but none managed to get traction. The opportunity to develop an OS for mobile phones was there.

But it would be a few years before a winner emerged. That day he unveiled one of the most highly anticipated consumer technology devices in history: the iPhone. Over the preceding years Apple had been clawing back its reputation as a true leader in product innovation. The iPod — along with iTunes — had changed the way people discovered, listened to and stored music, displacing CD and MP3 players and providing consumers with a new way to purchase music.

The iPhone would continue the disruption: it collapsed the power of a desktop computer into a device that fitted into your hand; it integrated wi-fi and mobile Internet access; and it allowed virtually anyone to write software that would operate on it — all within a beautifully designed handset.

The iPhone delivered such a punch because it combined a number of very significant innovations. First, it packed the power of a desktop computer into a mobile phone. Why was that critical? Because all that computing power would allow it to run a powerful operating system — or OS.

That opened the door for Windows-like domination. Second, Apple introduced the concept of the App Store. The iPhone was no phone: it was a true mobile computer — and developers were encouraged to create cool apps for it.

Third, the iPhone set a new benchmark for mobile hardware. Not only did Apple do away with the clunky method of entering letters via a numeric keypad, but they also replaced the pokey BlackBerry keyboard with a virtual one, thus freeing up more space for a larger screen and more engaging apps. They also filled the iPhone with sensors such as GPS Global Positioning System, to tell you where you are , a magnetometer to tell you which direction is north , and accelerometers to detect whether the iPhone is moving, and, if so, which way.

It was through the combination of all these innovations, launched at the same time, that Apple was able to set the stage for what would be a multibillion-dollar-per-year app industry. Since he had been talking to a developer called Andy Rubin about a rather secretive project called Android — a new mobile OS. After only a handful of meetings Page was so impressed by Rubin — and the technology — that he was ready to buy the fledging company and inject massive internal investments into the project.

Android would run on open-source software. That meant that anyone in the world — from an individual developer all the way to a giant smartphone manufacturer — was allowed to use the Android software and tailor it to their own specific purpose. The Android OS could therefore be used, adapted and optimised for use on smartphones produced by competitors such as Samsung and BlackBerry. Apple, on the other hand, had taken a highly controlled, walled-garden approach with iOS its mobile operating system.

Apple would not allow anyone else to use the system, and iOS would run only on Apple-made hardware. The diagram below shows how dramatically things have changed.

When Microsoft launched Windows in the s, it took 12—15 years for it to dominate 96 per cent of all desktop computers. People have adopted mobile computing more than three times faster than they did the desktop. In fact, the data suggests that people want their computers to be as mobile as they are. And herein lies the massive opportunity with mobile — and, more specifically, with mobile apps.

China ended with million Internet users, of which million were mobile Internet users. If the above trend continues, then mobile is going to represent the majority of all personal computing platforms by In , the number of smartphone users is expected to hit 2 billion. This makes for a huge momentum shift towards mobile. What are we doing on our smartphones? A typical smartphone user looks at their phone about times per day.

Try ruthlessly logging your own smartphone activity for a couple of days. I tried it, and was astonished when I exceeded that number. All this activity means that we are spending an incredible amount of time interacting with our smartphones. In , the average US consumer spent an average of 2 hours and 38 minutes per day on their smartphone and tablet. Apps offer the better mobile experience — and as a result hold four times more of our daily attention than the mobile Web.

So, now that we know that people love their apps, the question begs to be asked: which apps are hoovering up so much of our attention?

Time spent on iOS and Android connected devices As you can see from this diagram, there are two apps so significant in their ability to capture and retain our attention that they deserve a direct mention. The Facebook app galvanises our attention so much that it represents 18 per cent of all time spent by Americans on smartphones. Social is clearly playing an increasing role our lives, especially on mobile. Given the rather fragmented and competitive mobile browser space, this is a big achievement which represents another nail driven into the coffin of desktop browsing.

Generating Billions of Dollars via Smartphones All this incredible app engagement is already generating billions of dollars in revenue for all the players in the mobile ecosystem. As the pace of innovation continues to increase, so do the opportunities to generate revenues. In-App Revenues Are Growing Fast As you can see from the graph above, the first and best-known revenue stream comes from selling apps through an app store paid for. This is big business for Apple and Google, who were the middle men for about 90 per cent of the billion apps that were downloaded in App stores are so popular with developers because they have built up massive audiences, and they make it very easy for users to make real monetary purchases with the credit-card details that are attached to their appstore accounts.

That means that getting a user to part with real money is as simple as a single click for the developer. The app-store owner manages everything to do with accounts, payments and any hassles associated such as fraud and charge-backs. The second major revenue channel is in-app purchases.

This has become an increasingly popular topic in the media because numerous apps have seduced children into spending thousands of dollars via apps, unaware that they are doing so. Effectively, it makes downloading the app free thus encouraging more people to download it , and then gives the app developer the opportunity to sell virtual services or products very simply within the app.

As you can see from the diagram on page 27, in-app payments are projected to be the main source of app-store revenues by But there are two ways. One of our billiondollar-app role models, Flipboard, successfully executed an advertising strategy via its app magazine to reach its billion-dollar valuation — and has now augmented that model with an e-commerce channel as well.

Instagram, the social photography app purchased by Facebook in , is the perfect example of a highly engaging app that is now rolling out advertising. Apps Make Us Feel Good! But our spending via mobile has not at the time of writing yet caught up to desktop levels — suggesting a huge migration that has only just begun. We are also at a rather fascinating inflexion point: marked the worst decline in global PC shipments in history, marking seven quarters of decreasing demand.

In Facebook completed a study21 of American smartphone users with some rather fascinating results outlined in the diagram below. Leading apps capitalise on this by focusing exceptional effort on design, usability, performance and things like the tone of voice used in their copy. Smartphones Elicit Strong Emotions How do social and communications activities on a smartphone make you feel? This strong emotional reaction means that smartphones can have a gripping effect on people.

For our purposes we can go with the latter. What Are Apps, Anyway? Understanding technology is a crucial advantage, especially in a world where things are changing at an ever-increasing rate. Companies like Apple have done a brilliant job burying technical complexity beneath stunningly elegant and intuitive interfaces, thus delivering value immediately to novice and advanced users alike.

After all, Apple pretty much single-handedly created the app ecosystem as we know it today. This simplicity of interfaces is mirrored on the software development side as well. The barrier to get your own simple app into an app store and into the hands of users is not very complex — opening the world of app development to anyone. But, in order to build a billion-dollar app, we need to dig deeper into the details.

By understanding the very core of what makes apps so powerful, you will possess the insight to develop something equally powerful. An app or application and a software program are the same thing. Thanks to Apple, though, the word has been adopted by the mobile world, and means either a smartphone app or a tablet app. When Apple was developing the iPhone, Jobs was initially not too enamoured with the idea that third-party developers should be able to create software to run directly on his beautiful, sleek device — and potentially mess it up.

In July , the App Store was finally launched to the public. Among the first apps were the New York Times news app, BeeJiveIM one of the first mobile instant messengers , games such as Crash Bandicoot, Rolando and — one that I loved — PhoneSaber, an app that would make a light-sabre noise every time you waved around your phone.

Needless to say, a lot of progress has been made since. That means it renders graphics more efficiently and accesses sensors more reliably and quickly.

To see this for yourself, compare how well Google Maps via a mobile browser works compared with the native app: the native app is faster to load and move and easier to interact with, and generally performs better with complex tasks such as directions. User experience is key to keeping users happy. Native apps are generally easy to arrange and access on a smartphone Web apps are clunky to manage. It is not particularly easy to integrate the various app-store payment systems into Web apps.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants There are two more geeky subjects that you need to be aware of, because they are key factors contributing to the accelerating pace of innovation in mobile. Open-source software is software that has been made freely available not only to use, but also to change, improve and distribute, and to run your business. A huge part of the opensource movement is about working on computer code in a public and collaborative fashion.

Because anyone can access open-source software, anyone can also improve it. And a lot of people do. As a result, those improvements are pooled, and the quality and performance of the software improves.

This translates into real benefits for app companies, because it means that you no longer have to build your app from a blank page. App developers can go out onto the Internet and find freely available code that allows them to build photo albums, to play music files, to manage user accounts — and, frankly, do a huge amount of tasks in software that previously took a lot of time to write.

By sharing and collaborating in this way, inexperienced developers can build new apps with features that have been refined by numerous developers before them. It means that building an app is many times faster — and more robust.

When you think about the snowball effect this has, it gets very exciting, as it is constantly lowering the barriers to entry into the software world, and at the same time improving the quality of software. In boring language, this is a common interface that specifies how one computer application can talk to another computer application in a way that can be understood by both sides.

Imagine you wanted to include a map in a new app you are building. You want the app to show the best places to grab a drink in your city. You already have a list of all the great bars you want to include, but you think it would create a good user experience if you could press a button and see the location of the bar on a map. Today, thanks to companies like Google, you can use a mapping API.

The whole process takes a few hours to integrate. And — shazam! Well, the only option would be to create your own mapping software. That — actually — is a gargantuan task. So large, in fact, that only a handful of companies have even tried. Google, Apple, Microsoft and even Nokia have all invested billions of dollars in research and development as well as acquisitions and taken years to get their respective services up and running.

And yet this is only one example of communication between apps and other computer applications made possible via APIs. Billion-dollar apps are increasingly depending on APIs: the Uber and Hailo apps use mapping APIs to show you where your driver is, and payment APIs to securely store your details and charge your credit card; Flipboard uses the Facebook and Twitter APIs so that you can log into their app and share content via those sites with a single tap; gaming apps such as Angry Birds, Clash of Clans and Candy Crush rely per cent on the app-store payment APIs to generate their revenues.

And, naturally, apps can take advantage of APIs in other ways. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. So I hope you can see that understanding the details about the underlying technology can not only save you time and money when developing an app, but can potentially make your app, and the experience it offers users, a lot more creative and attractive. If history is anything to go by, mobile is going to evolve even faster than any of us could imagine, which makes it even more important to watch your blind spot.

The future of mobile is already here. The last few decades have laid a robust foundation: smartphones — massively powerful, affordable computers that fit into a pocket — are close to ubiquitous; unimaginably powerful services — from global positioning, to voice recognition, to instant knowledge search — are available for free; and people have invited this technology into the most intimate part of their lives — relationships and financial transactions.

We are finally at a point in history where technology is adapting to the way we live our lives. No longer is a computer a desk-centric destination: it is a mobile companion.

With services like the personal-assistant app Google Now, technology is starting to anticipate what we need and want, rather than merely reacting to a request.

As the miniaturisation of technology steadily advances, the age of powerful, helpful, life-changing, wearable computers is upon us. Samsung launched its Galaxy Gear smartwatch in September Despite dismal reviews — and low sales projections — the company announced it had sold , devices in the first two months. And that number is expected to triple by Say hello or OK to Google Glass. Google Glass is 63 grams of hardware — a modern-looking set of glass frames without lenses sporting a microdisplay that projects an interface which appears as a floating inch display into your field of vision.

Think of it as an advanced — and heavily miniaturised — version of the Heads Up Display HUD systems that fighter pilots use. By the end of over 20, people were using it. It is slated for broader public release in This is what I meant by interface. And it gets spookier. There are projects under way that will enable features like Google Glass to be packed into a contact lens. If we go back to the beginning of the last technology cycle — that of the smartphone, kicked off by the iPhone in — we can see how quickly a touchscreen interface, a powerful operating system, integrated sensors and a ubiquitous mobile Internet connection changed our lives.

It was just a matter of years. When the next technology cycle begins — and it will undoubtedly be something more wearable — it will begin with huge swathes of the ecosystem already in place. The time to get 1 billion active users of a gizmo like Google Glass will be a lot shorter than the eight years it took the smartphone to smash that milestone.

It is called Oculus VR and it might just be the first company to bring virtual reality to the masses. He launched a campaign on crowd-funding website kickstarter back in to build the Oculus Rift — a groundbreaking virtual reality headset for immersive gaming.

While virtual reality headsets are very desktopcentric today, the experience they could deliver in a mobile environment, combined with the pace of miniaturisation, might see them become part of the mobile app ecosystem more rapidly than anybody might expect.

But I wanted to help you to think big in a structured, realistic way. So it makes complete sense to start with the biggest possible vision, so that you stretch yourself from the very onset.

Start with Big Problems Any big idea is going to take a while to get there. You have to be willing to be in some murky territory, and be prepared to invest, if you really want to do something different. Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and friend of Evan Williams, explains the story of how his mobile app Square came to be. The buyer then asked whether he accepted credit cards. And as a result he lost the sale. After all, smartphones had way more processing power than typical credit-card terminals; they also had superior screens and already had mobile Internet connections.

The only component missing was the actual card reader. And so the idea for the Square app — along with its card-reader attachment — was born. Jan Koum was a ten-year Yahoo! In that time he developed a deep distrust of how ads corrupt the relationship between a company and its users.

He believed that advertising was so invasive — and disliked by consumers — that he wanted to build an app that would allow anyone in the world to SMS for close to nothing. Koum wanted to shun advertising entirely, and focus exclusively on utility and user experience. Within five short years, in early , WhatsApp had million users across just about every country in the world.

It was clearly solving a big problem in way that users loved. When the iPhone arrived and started changing our mobile lives, gaming companies took time to adapt. No one was focused on developing a game tailored for the touch interface of the iPhone. Sure, there were successes such as Tap Tap Revolution co-founded by Andrew Lacy, a fellow Australian and friend , but the market was lacking something truly novel, international and just plain great. Angry Birds was very specifically designed to scratch that itch.

It took advantage of the iPhone as a brand-new gaming platform and became a global phenomenon. Mike McCue and Evan Doll wanted to make content on the Internet more beautiful; they wanted to consume it more as one would a beautiful, visual magazine. When Apple launched the iPad in early , McCue and Doll knew that this was the platform to realise their vision.

Everything snapped into place, and they rushed to build a gorgeous social magazine platform: Flipboard. They wanted a real-time, reliable way to report and share traffic information when they were stuck in the middle of it. They created a clever app that allowed users to do just that. Within a few years their app, Waze, amassed 30 million super-engaged users around the world, and developed its own unique mapping technology.

Privacy and anonymity have more or less gone out of the window with our increasingly online lives. Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy created an app whereby you could share annotated photos with your friends — but, once read, the messages would disappear for ever.

The app is called Snapchat. A lot of people dismissed the idea — but then something happened. Teenagers found the idea brilliant. Suddenly they could be themselves, share whatever photos they wanted, and rest assured that each photo would be seen once and then disappear in 10 seconds. In just a couple of years the app attracted millions of users sending hundreds of millions of snaps every day.

All these are great examples of apps that tackled big problems felt by millions of users. They all pinpointed a real need — and then went ahead to address it. While each app started with a single user, they all built large, engaged user bases by focusing on one major issue. What People Love, What People Need One approach to coming up with a big idea is to understand what people love to do, and what people need to do.

For those elements, patterns, traits, and institutions that are common to all human cultures worldwide. My point here is that if your idea resonates with a human universal, you will maximise the universal appeal of your app. On the flipside, not every human universal maps to a billion-dollar idea. When I was doing this exercise, I came across a fascinating example. I discovered a free app that, despite having more than million downloads5 and massive daily usage numbers, has garnered very little media attention.

It is called YouVersion. He publishes an annual Mobile Almanac, and one of the most interesting things he uncovers is precisely what each one of us is doing on our smartphones.

According to his research, the average person checks their mobile phone an astounding times per day. Everyone from Facebook to Google has a messaging app. But, as a number of players have shown, it is an area ripe for disruption.

WhatsApp, Tango and Viber have both built billion-dollar propositions here. Asian apps — such as Line and WeChat — have created massive multi-hundred-million user bases here. And in just a couple of years Snapchat turned messaging on its head — and turned down billion-dollar buyout offers — by making messages more interactive you can scribble and comment on your photos and then send them to friends and, as we saw earlier, they disappear after 10 seconds — all for free.

The takeaway here is that, if the app offers an experience that hits a nerve — a latent psychological or behavioural need I want to be anonymous with my messages — then it explodes.

If Snapchat can disrupt the market, then clearly so can others. As mobile carriers realise that their future lies in data, they have offered unlimited national calling packages, removing revenue opportunities for apps that want to compete.

The majority of the opportunity here is in international voice calls, but that domain has been rich with competition for decades, so the opportunity is no longer clear-cut. What is clear, though, is that voice calls are becoming absorbed into the broader messaging category, with people sending SMSs, chat messages, photos, MMSs, video and audio calls, and even recorded voice messages, interchangeably.

What would make the killer clock app? There is clearly a captive, global audience here. Music lives as a larger ecosystem — from the discovery of good music to the purchase, to the playback and organisation. Is there a big, new, fresh opportunity here? But having to deal with record labels and international licensing agreements is going to be a challenge. It has a long history of working with new and mobile platforms, from consoles to the Nintendo Game Boy, the Sega Game Gear and the Sony PSP, so it was no surprise when the industry jumped on board iPhone so quickly.

There are also huge players in Asia, with the likes of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo owning their own markets. Given that the dominant social media have been increasingly integrated into the operating systems at a native level, displacing these guys will be hard. But as new players keep springing up — and blurring the lines between messaging and social media — there is a good chance this will be disrupted.

One innovation that has appeared in this sector is sleep-related alarm apps, such as Sleep Cycle, which attempt to wake you at the most optimal moment. Personally, I think there will be a big winner in this space.

Taking photos is universal, and, with more than 5, camera-related apps in the App Store alone, the competition is fierce. Calendars are inherently social, since we do things with colleagues, friends and family all the time. Calendars outline where we want to be at given times, and we expect, and want, them to prompt us with alerts. The big question is how this will evolve, and how the next generation of mobile browsers will challenge the current, rather simplistic, app architecture.

Whether they be simple battery packs or multi-device chargers, solar chargers or even the very cool inductive wireless charging pads which have yet to catch on in any significant way , there is a clear demand by users to keep their devices full of juice.

As behaviours have changed — triggered by the prevalence and convenience of numerous messaging apps — the relevance of voicemail has diminished. The last serious attempt at a voicemail startup was Spinvox. So, while the above opportunities are clear and have attracted lots of competitors, there is still big opportunities around not-yet-invented apps, which have the chance to capture our attention in new and novel ways. Sharing Big As humans, we love to share. On a practical level, sharing makes sense because we often need the support, skills and insights from others to help us through our day, our jobs and our lives in general.

But sharing also just feels good because of the way our brains are wired. According to Harvard University professors Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, sharing information about ourselves is intrinsically rewarding and gives us a few squirts of dopamine every time we do it.

People love to share rich content — such as photos, news and magazine articles — and this builds very strong network effects. A great example is Instagram. One of the main ways it drove growth from the very first day was by allowing users to simultaneously share their photos on Facebook and Twitter from the moment the photo was taken using the Instagram app.

This massively increased the reach of the new app to big social networks — with very compelling photo content. This promotion of the Instagram app on Twitter and Facebook led people to its website to download the app. The success of Flipboard — the social magazine app see earlier — is completely off the back of this premise as well. What is disruptive, however, is taking something that was not social and shareable — and reinventing it completely. When it launched, its premise was simple: if you want to buy a great product at this 50—75 per cent discounted price, you need to get other people to buy it too within a certain timeframe.

Suddenly, Groupon created a very selfish — and social — incentive for people to tell others about their sales. And the social component is going strong.

The chart below gives us a great idea of how much different countries like to share. The results are fascinating. Up-and-coming markets such as Asia and the Middle East are sharing a lot more than the UK and the US 11 per cent and 15 per cent respectively and compared with a global average of 24 per cent.

This is more than double the rate of sharing in the United States. Why is this important? It means that big ideas have the ability to spread and take off a lot faster in some parts of the world — and that means very lucrative windows of opportunity. And, unremarkably, size is not everything that matters. The key is to have a disruptive idea.

A disruptive idea is one that delivers a step change — an idea that is hard for an existing player to copy. This is the wow factor. Wow is going to play a big part in this book, because an idea, a product that wows its audience, is one that can rise to the top and truly stand out. People talk about wow, and people keep using something that wows them. Rethinking how to solve existing problems is how people disrupt.

Our stellar apps have been able to disrupt their own markets — and then create their own perfect storms. These superficial, romantic treatments rarely capture the true story. The best disruptions appear simple — they are best because they are the simplest to communicate and the simplest to understand by the largest number of people. Mass appeal is a core component of far-reaching disruption. Unsurprisingly, the apps with indisputable billion-dollar status embrace simple propositions.

Despite the veneer, simple ideas are rarely simple to execute. Great, disruptive entrepreneurs need to understand the capabilities of the technology available to them, the necessity of building new platforms, how to integrate virality into their products and, perhaps most importantly, the power of timing.

But being an entrepreneur is not for the conservative. Nicholas Nassim Taleb author of The Black Swan would question the viability of betting on low-probability, high-impact events, what he calls black-swan events, but that is the business of entrepreneurs: manufacturing opportunities that are rare and complex and ultimately yield huge returns.

Why hating advertising pays more Jan Koum and Brian Acton both hate advertising. Both were long-time Yahoo! There are numerous apps and services like this — but WhatsApp is the biggest. As of January , WhatsApp was processing 50 billion messages every single day. What differentiates WhatsApp from the other players is its business model.

It does not rely on advertising, nor does it force you to buy virtual goods. Even so, the company has hundreds of millions of dollars of recurring revenue still coming in. After ten years working at Yahoo! They also want all their friends to be using it. WhatsApp delivers on all those fronts. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, it is poignant to see Koum focused more on talking about optimising server code to ensure messages are being moved more quickly, more efficiently and more reliably than other hot topics such as valuations and buyouts.

It is impressive that the company still has only around 50 employees in That is a testament to its clinical focus, and to the calibre of the people it is hiring. London: Piatkus, I bond has created a new billion dollars the hard effort to defend the South Korean include an editorial from the You can be part of a billion - dollar global market; you have a chance to develop an application that can be sold to millions.

This chapter provided a general overview of Windows Phone features, hardware specifications, the development This has become the novel talk of the world by successfully turning around new startups into multi - billion - dollar ventures. With mobile app development being one of the largest and fastest growing industries across the globe These music sites are going to have an app society around them— building social media on top of these sites, In contrast, Microsoft still insisted that users pay for the mobile OS, and without access to the cache of a billion mobile apps that Apple and Google have.

In my own work, I've been immersed in the worlds of people who create new drugs, traders managing billion - dollar funds, organic goat farmers, YouTube video stars, Startups are reaching billion - dollar valuations twice as fast as they did back in [Van Grove ], not because of a bubble, but because it is Smartphone cameras were getting better, and mobile photos seemed like the right target for the