I’ve always been a big believer that behind every winning product or service, there’s an even better team. After meeting with the guys behind Appoxee, it’s clear they make no exception to the rule. In fact, they even have a saying of their own that goes; Behind every download there’s a person. I for one couldn’t agree more.

I recently sat with Elad Kushnir Co-Founder at Appoxee to find out more about their engaging service, his views on the mobile app industry and what it takes for app developers to succeed in today’s mobile ecosystem.

Hi Elad, let’s take it from the top. What is Appoxee and how can developers benefit from using your service?

Appoxee is a mobile engagement tool for app developers. Appoxee allows app developers maintain a constant communication channel with their users, which in turn substantially increases the lifetime value of an application and allows the developers to maximize the revenue potential of their users.

The concept is simple and at the same time extremely powerful.  At the app level, Appoxee is an app-based-inbox to which app owners send messages to their users. Our clients send out reminders, updates, surveys, coupons, new app announcements, or anything else that may be relevant to them and their users. At the back end level, Appoxee is a power web based service where app owners can create and target messages as well as nalyze their effectiveness. Think “email marketing” but instead of sending messages to the users email inbox you send it to the app inbox in your app.

All this is super powered by push notifications, internal and external badges, custom sounds, message schedulers, our feedback module (with our super-cool review optimizer), cross marketing modules, and many other well thought out and executed features, as well as a super creative and loving support team behind the scenes.

A lot of developers think: Develop, Market, Monetize but the truth is, it’s not that simple. Where does Appoxee fit in?

The app market has matured; It’s not just about getting the user to download your app anymore. Actually that’s just the first step in your app lifecycle. For an app or app business to be sustainable you need to be able to engage your users after the download through promotions, cross marketing, up-selling, providing support, increasing brand awareness, and even gathering business intelligence. The app industry is much more robust and complex than it was a year or two ago.

Your app is only competing with 500,000 other apps but also with the users’ very short attention span. I have over 130 apps on my device. How many of them do you think I have opened over the last 60 days? Probably no more than 6 or 7. Not because they are not good or because they have no value to me – but simply because they are buried in some folder on my iPhone and I don’t necessarily remember that they exist.

There have been great reports stating that app users are likely to use app no more than once or twice. Appoxee solves this problem by allowing the developer to “remind” users that the app is on their device  in an engaging and informative way. That’s exactly where Appoxee fits in.

We like using the term post-download-engagement. Take for example one of our clients BabyFirstTV (the largest TV Network in the world for educational content for toddlers). BabyFirst T V has lots (I mean lots and lots) of downloads in their app called BabyFirst Mobile which is a Video on Demand App catering to toddlers and their parents in 12 languages. BabyFirst TV uses Appoxee to communicate with the parents and inform them of new content in the apps, new app launches, promotions for their website, and even to collect survey data from their users. The results are astounding. The lifetime span of an app user has more than doubled since they installed Appoxee in their apps and the revenues have jumped substantially. This is just one example of how Appoxee could fit in.

Appoxee is jam-packed full of awesome features app developers can utilize to their advantage with your SDK. Can you go into detail about a few of them?

Wow…there are lots of features I would love to discuss. If I have to mention just a couple it would be our message wizard and our persistent messaging feature. I mention these just to show you that we have thought through the entire usage lifecycle of Appoxee from the app owner to the end user.

Our message wizard was designed for ease of use and simplicity. Anyone can use it with little or no training at all. With our message wizard it takes a couple of minutes or less to send out a message. The message wizard allows you to chose what type of messages you are sending (with a push notification or not), when to send them, which of your users to send it to, and of course you can actually design the message in Appoxee using our WYSIWYG editor.

The persistent message feature allows you to define a message as “persistent” meaning that when you send out the message to your users not only will all your existing users get this message but all future downloads will get this message waiting for them in their Appoxee inbox when they first download you app. This feature is especially good for “Welcome messages” as well as messages that you would like your future users to get for example a “Join our Facebook page” message.

You’ve just transitioned into Public Beta. How long was the service under private beta, what does that mean for developers and what did you learn along the way?

Appoxee was under private beta for over 7 months. We tested, fixed, learned, and released Appoxee to the public after a really hectic and detailed analysis of our service. We partnered up with several dozen developers during this time who were kind enough to help us out and tell us what they would like to see from Appoxee. The result is a robust and easy to use engagement tool for app developers and owners.

Lets talk about the app industry for a moment. We’re seeing big numbers across the board such as 500K approved apps on iOS and Android crossing the 200K app mark. What’s are the biggest challenges for independent developers today.

Like I said before the market is maturing and the competition is getting rougher every day. The main challenge is by far user retention. It not just about getting your user to download your app anymore. Its about capturing the user’s attention over time and extending the lifespan of your app on a user’s device. An extended lifespan of your app on a users device translates into sustainability which in turn translates into increased revenues.

Any last words of wisdom?

Love what you do or don’t do it.