Founder Profile: The Founder Building The Squarespace of Apps That You Can Invest In

In 2010, I ended up being laid off from a pharmaceutical company. Since 2000 I had been doing consultancy for small and mid-size businesses; as well as online marketing, logo design, branding, and touchscreen dashboard implementation for pharmaceutical companies. I was frequently looking to find a way to offer apps to my customers and complement their websites. Although I used to code before joining the pharmaceutical space, I couldn’t find any viable app development solution I could use that didn’t require learning many different coding languages and methods.

While I was still involved in the pharmaceutical industry, I was often subcontracting developers and took more of a project leadership role. Within these roles, I acquired a great amount of hands-on experience dealing with both, customers and users who were not inherently tech-savvy or could not intuitively learn how to use the technological tools in the industry. Much of my time was spent listening and learning about their troubles and frustrations. I became really adept at both, understanding the basic needs of the end users and translating those needs to developers in a way that was simple for the users to navigate and utilize.

Apart from those skills I developed, my main background is in industrial engineering. I am Six Sigma certified, so I have always paid close attention to the optimization and efficiency of any software or process that I come across. Because of that mindset and my background in design, there was a defining moment when it all came together in order to tackle this need to build apps without the extensive coding work. I wasn’t able to find this service for myself, so I decided to create a prototype in Excel that was generating JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files just by pressing a button after inputting select values and content into certain fields. That’s how it all started and, since 2012, we now have an app that has been live and helping people build their own apps through mobile devices.

iGenApps is a platform for people, especially celebrities, artists, business owners,  event planners, teams and organizations, that want to create an app without the need of complex coding and having high development costs.

On the web there are many small and big players. There is a wide range of websites to build apps, and they all vary greatly in terms of quality and pricing. In foreign countries and the millenial generation have shifted from being a PC oriented consumer to be more of a mobile first consumer. That is why iGenApps will end up being the best solution for them on the short and long term.

Most of our user growth has been mostly organic. Early in 2012 I was participating in conferences, pitch events, and a lot of press coverage, and we received a lot of new users early on organically. At that time, our pricing and business model was as refined and polished as it is today, which is subscription-based. When we started out, they were only allowing magazines and digital content to use subscriptions as a method of payment.. I knew it would happen eventually, but people have caught on and began to appreciate the model even though we were slightly early.

Right now we rely on organic growth and word-of-mouth. People are talking about our platform, and since we are an app referred to by Google, our SEO allows us to show up on the first page of Google if users search “how to create a mobile app” or similar phrases from any mobile device.

There are countless industries that can take advantage of building these mobile apps. A specific example could be a wedding planner that offers a wedding app for the event so that they can post and share images. There is a lot of potential in the event management space overall; any sort of conference event can also easily utilize this service to share similar information.

Businesses that are more oriented to providing content can very effectively take advantage of this opportunity. It would be incredibly useful for a surgeon, for example, that wants to showcase their work, and the same applies for professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants, realtors, etc.. Businesses like radio stations, dealerships, DJs, restaurants, and any other small enterprises can use the platform to connect customers with their content. Yet it’s not only optimized for businesses building their own app; developers can also create apps for other people in their area. If someone is interested in generating extra money or begin a new business, they can download our app and start charging whatever they want to build apps for their local businesses.

The latest monetization we have is based on subscription. The model has been changing since our inception, though. We connected with people at our booth in South by Southwest and collected first-hand feedback from people in order to know if they were understanding the model we had at the time.

Thanks to that feedback, people can now understand what we offer, how to get what they need and find it affordable. They can also request premium services that will allow them to convert their app into a native format  or we can develop custom screens for them. Custom screens could consist of something like connecting to salesforce data or a login screen at a very low cost.

My experience with WeFunder has been amazing. They quickly understood our priorities and goals that we were trying to achieve; I didn’t do much fine-tuning to put together our campaign. Overall, it has been great experience.

Off the top of my head, I can tell you two instances that have embodied our mission and purpose. One was a gentleman, around 55 years old, who signed up 5 years ago. He wanted to stop working as a handyman and decided to build apps for other organizations around his local Houston area. He began by building an app for his church, and then built apps via our platform for local restaurants and other local business and individuals. This shows you that people can start building apps at any age. We also have 8 year old kids using our app to create their own apps.

Another great story is about a local AM radio station in Puerto Rico called WAPA radio. They were very early adopters of our platform and have been our customers ever since. The designed it so that their audience could stay informed and listen to their live streaming through their app.

It certainly is a challenge, but it’s something I wanted to do from the beginning. Because of that, we have the architecture in place to make it easier. One of the challenges you need to think we supporting multi-languages, is how to effectively translate the content. For example, the Russian language has very long words, which can potentially alter the design if not properly adapted and formatted. Once you create the app, there are also certain things like dates and time that have to be adaptive depending on the user’s country. Dates and time in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, for example, will not be formatted the same way as they are in US, so we need to make sure we manage that effectively.

It depends on how much capital we raise. One of our big plans is to expand our business into the Chinese market. We are just getting our app in 6 different Chinese marketplaces, but still need capital to get the momentum going by updating the app language to Mandarin and getting it advertised in Chinese. The other plan is creating a web version of the platform which can allow users to build or complement their building experience from a PC or a mobile device. We need the capital to grow our development efforts and team.

I can see iGenApps evolving into something like Wix, a very well known platform for building apps. It would also be exciting to see joint ventures with other companies in similar spaces, such as hosting services and website builders like Weebly and others. It would be immensely beneficial both for us and other larger companies to develop these partnerships or collaborations in the future.