While much of the attention in the mobile apps industry is focused on high-profile games or entertainment products, there is also a significant opportunity creating products designed to meet specific user needs, building on the core personal information management features offered by most devices. One of the key players in this field is SplashData, a US-based company with ten years of experience in mobile apps.

SplashData’s portfolio includes password management, finance management, photo organising, and travel apps, which it says are used by “millions of users globally on BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and webOS smartphone platforms.” Early in 2010, it acquired Iambic, adding its flagship Agendus calendaring and time management software to the portfolio, in a transaction that the company said at the time “combines the resources of two of the most respected and established developers of mobile productivity software.” 

According to Justin Cepelak (pictured), VP of Product Management for SplashData, “productivity and lifestyle have always been our bread and butter. We have a well-established brand in these categories that we started ten years ago in the Palm OS days.”

In recent years, SplashData has witnessed a change in consumer-buying preferences, as a result of the launch of Apple’s App Store. “People seem to buy a lot more but want to pay a lot less. They don’t want to spend over US$10 for anything, so there is a general developer trend toward prettier, lighter-weight apps with fewer features. We have had to lower some of our prices to stay competitive in the flood of cheap mobile apps, but apps like SplashID continue to do well even at US$10 because they are tried-and-true, powerful tools for serious users.”

“When a user is looking for a particular tool to accomplish an immediate task, they are willing to pay for it. It’s only when users are casually browsing the store that they are looking for freebies or bargains,” Cepelak said.

Tapping new and existing markets
Thanks to its long heritage in mobile apps, Cepelak says that SplashData has a “very loyal customer base that we are grateful for. They like SplashID, so they check out SplashMoney, SplashShopper and the rest of our applications, and they get used to our family of products. Then when we release a new product and tell them about it, they are excited. Or if they switch to another mobile platform, they are looking for our applications among the first that they buy. They can sometimes be disappointed if we haven’t yet ported to their new platform, so we try our best to stay on top of the trends.”

The company has also identified some marketing tricks which can help raise the profile of an app, in the increasingly congested app store marketplace. “Attractive icons can help. Newsletters to the customer base will make a large number of people aware of a new product and boost app rankings. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter become more effective the more you invest in them.”

In order to expand its channels to market, SplashData has introduced an affiliate programme, intended to create partnerships with “web and mobile publishers all over the world that have content related to our software products.” It offers 20 percent commission on products sold by partners, as well as discounts and sales support. “We’re expanding our marketing efforts, especially on the enterprise front, and the affiliate programme is just another step forward. We hope that affiliates will help us find new clients in the enterprise space, where the incentives are larger for everyone,” Cepelak said.

The company has identified the corporate market as a potential growth area, with Cepelak stating that “we’re looking to expand our enterprise reach in 2011.” It has developed a version of SplashID for this market, which is said to be “excellent for corporate intranets where large volumes of sensitive data can be controlled securely.”

Trial and error
The company has adopted something of a trial-and-error approach to supporting new platforms, with Cepelak stating that “we generally start with one product on every promising platform and see how it does. If it sells well, we invest more in that platform.” Porting apps to different OSs is not an easy process, with the work being described as “a ground-up development project” except where there is a substantial shared code-base (iPhone to iPad, for example). But the company’s experience means that the challenges of fragmentation are not new. “There was fragmentation on Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry, and you just have to spend more time testing and optimising for various device types. Fragmentation is not a new thing in mobile development. The new thing is Apple’s ability so far to maintain standardisation.”

In the consumer market, the company will be “porting more of our successful apps to Android in the comings months, including SplashShopper.”

One area where SplashData has not focused a significant amount of effort is localisation, offering different variants of products for different markets. “We target the world, but we often focus on English-speaking users because localisation is a time consuming task in the development process. We have localised SplashID into French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and we continue to investigate what effect this has on sales.”

“The surprising fact is that strong-selling products like SplashID do well in non-English countries even without localisation. This is partially because the content is user-generated, so they can put their data in their own language and just read the UI labels in English. Also, a lot of our users tend to be business professionals who speak English regularly even as a second language.”

Lessons learned
Cepelak believes that flexibility is key for developers to remain successful in an increasingly competitive market. “We learned the most important lesson very early: always keep evolving. The mobile space changes every year, and you have to predict trends and place bets. Some platforms will fade away as others are born and begin to flourish. If you stand in one place, you’ll be left behind as the world moves forward without you.”

“More recently, we’re learning the power of social networking. Facebook has proven to be a cheap way to reach out to our most loyal fan base on a daily basis. These users then spread the word about our products through their networks, and it takes on a life of its own,” he concludes.

 

Steve Costello