STARTUPS

SUCCESSFUL YC S13 APPLICATION

OCTOBER 8, 2014 | NANCYHUA | 5 COMMENTS

Jeremy and I incorporated Apptimize in February 2013 and applied to Y Com-

binator 2 months later. Below is our Y Combinator application because a lot of
people ask to see it. If you’re in the Bay area and would like feedback on your
application, shoot me a note and I’ll try to help because my Paul Graham simu-
lator is pretty good (he’s always making fun of my Peter Thiel simulator
though). You can read about my Y Combinator experience here. My next post
will be about the many ways reality has revealed itself as different from what
we saw when we wrote this application, because the competitive landscape
has changed, we are now a 15 person company, and our users include the top
apps in the world. I hope you find this useful and upvote/share this because I’m
even including our embarrassing video. Good luck!

We were so young then…

http://apptimize.com
What is your company going to make?

Apptimize lets you AB test mobile applications. You keep the native experi-
ence without needing to push changes blindly or rely on users to update.
There’s a web interface to manage experiments, and a WYSIWYG interface for
non-programmers. Apptimize removes the pain of designing a controlled ex-
periment, serving variations, collecting results, and calculating statistical sig-
nificance. Right now you have to be a developer and statistician to AB test a
mobile app, but we make it so that non-programmers can AB test too. Appti-
mize makes optimization as easy for mobile as it is for web. Apptimize technol-
ogy could transform the process of testing and pushing changes and be inte-
grated into 100% of apps.

nancyhua; Nancy Hua; 27; 2007, MIT, Bachelors of Science Mathematics for
Computer Science, Bachelors of Science Writing; nancyhua.com, @huanancy;
GETCO algorithmic trader, Quantitative Strategies Team Leader

jorlow; Jeremy Orlow; 28; 2007, Purdue, Bachelors of Science Computer Sci-
ence; @jeremyorlow; Software Engineer at Google, Software Engineer at
Three Laws of Mobility (startup acquired by Motorola that was acquired by
Google), DrawChat
Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other
than this startup that each founder has built or achieved.

Nancy: trader who ran the Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team at GET-
CO (GETCO grew from 100 to 500 people to become the premiere algorithmic
trading company); world class expert in Fixed Income trading and exchanges.

Jeremy: owned IndexedDB (the emerging w3c standard for storing data in a
browser) within Chrome; edited the spec, worked closely with Mozilla and Mi-
crosoft on the design, and wrote most of the initial implementation in
Chrome/WebKit; simultaneously started the London Chrome team.

Please tell us about the time you, nancyhua, most successfully hacked some
(non-computer) system to your advantage.

Nancy wanted to work in the Middle East but there wasn’t a culture of intern-
ships. Nancy discovered if she didn’t mention she was just a sophomore she
could interview as a consultant (and get a company car and phone). She was
the first student ever hired for Mercury’s R&D office in Israel (a load testing
company acquired by HP).

At Google, Jeremy became an expert in free travel. After getting on shortlists

for university recruiting, he positioned himself as a datacenter expert and vis-
ited many across America. After targeting developer relations, Jeremy got on
the shortlist for places like Moscow, Berlin, Manila, Singapore, Sydney, and
Tokyo, giving talks, meeting partners, and exploring- all for free.

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or

work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

We prototyped an app called Firesale that helps people sell unwanted stuff. To
create a market of buyers, we brought on full-time Craigslist market makers.
The Craigslist expert users complained about the process of being first to
email a poster, so we optimized the messaging to make transacting as fast for
them as possible. They also complained about Craigslist lacking a reputa-
tion/identity system, so we implemented one. We put Firesale on hold to work
on Apptimize.

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?
Have any of the founders not met in person?

We met a couple years ago through mutual friends and started working to-
gether when Jeremy convinced Nancy to leave NYC for the Bay.

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this
area? How do you know people need what you’re making?

We picked this idea because Jeremy had looked for a mobile AB testing solu-
tion when working on Drawchat, but couldn’t find one. Three 50+ people com-
panies, 3 YC companies, and 10+ indie developers have signed up to beta test
our product. All the programmers/contractors we’ve interviewed have also
asked to sign up for our private beta. This is an immediate need for most mo-
bile companies.

Nancy is an expert in experiment design and data analysis. Jeremy is an expert

in mobile and has built many efficient, scalable backends. We both love being
data driven and view life as an experiment.

What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort
to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?

Most wait for app store approval and push many changes simultaneously. They
eyeball the results and haphazardly rollback suspect changes.

Desperate people resort to basic, home-grown solutions. Because of other

projects, Switchboard and Clutch.io evolved incomplete solutions (we noticed
errors: randomization mistakes that mess up the experiments, poor error han-
dling, malformed responses that’d crash your app!).
There hasn’t been much focused effort towards creating a seamless AB testing
experience for native apps. AB testing for mobile is a technologically harder
problem than for websites due to challenges particular to mobile devices (ie.
intermittent internet, lack of cookies/iframes, users running different ver-
sions). Existing solutions ignore complexity whereas we view handling it as our
core business.

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do
you fear most?

Several companies very recently entered the game. Swrve has so far focused
on games. Pathmapp is focusing on overall analytics (pretty different from our
approach). Abstate is unlaunched. Artisan and Arise.io have buggy, immature
products. A risk is that Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely will decide to
focus on expanding from websites into native apps. Native might be a natural
next step for them since they offer web app support in premium plans, so we’ll
grow aggressively.

We think there’s no dominant player because nobody has made anything good
yet. Our goal is to be the best.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just
don’t get?

Our competitors are developers building for other developers, so most only
offer programmatic interfaces. We understand often the goal setters and deci-
sion makers aren’t programmers. Apptimize makes it simple for non-technical
owners, product managers, designers, and marketers via a WYSIWYG inter-
face and a website to control and create experiments.

Our experimental setup, results, and analysis will be superior. Stanford PhD’s
helped with our statistics by pointing out problems with competitors’ setups
(ie. fixed sample sizes, small data set handling).
We’ll target companies who don’t monetize through app sales, instead using
apps for branding, coupons, other off-app conversions. Although our first
users are indie developers, most profitable apps make <$2K per month, so
we’ll grow to targeting corporations like United, Starbucks.

How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize
you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate.)

The plan is a monthly subscription. We’ll offer customers help with experiment
design. If we charge premium customers $1K per month and get 200 cus-
tomers (less than 2 sales a week) over 2 years we’d make ~$2.4MM per year 2
years in. Artisan (launched this month) claims to charge $1K-$10K per month,
so that’s possibly a better price.

Ultimately we want to be the default way people change their apps. Everyone
would use Apptimize to test each idea, and then use Apptimize to deliver the
change to users. 100% of apps would use our library to reduce time to propa-
gate changes and tighten the app development cycle. We’d help erase the line
between apps and the web.

If you’ve already started working on it, how long have you been working and
how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

We started in January, and Apptimize is currently ~8K lines of code (not in-
cluding libraries, html, or css) and works end-to-end. The frontend is JS, CSS,
and Angular. We’re on EC2 mainly using PostgreSQL, nginx, and Netty/Java.

How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are
you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If
so, how much? If you’re launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users
or revenue or both)?

Apptimize works and we just launched our private beta this week! We have
100+ signups but we only accepted 2 friends this week because we are work-
ing closely with our first customers to shape the future of our product.

The beta has the Android library, a website dashboard to manage experiments,
and a results page showing statistics and conclusions. The WYSIWYG inter-
face will be ready in a few weeks. Our research suggested starting with An-
droid because Android developers rely on freemium (compared to iOS who
make a lot off premium) and want to AB test to optimize in-app purchases, etc.
Our iOS version is coming in a few weeks.

If you have an online demo, what’s the url?

yc.apptimize.com/admin

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg
problem in the sense that it won’t be attractive to users till it has a lot of
users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you over-
come that?

Our first customers are our friends’ startups. To target our next customers, we
downloaded their apps and their competitors’ apps and are designing experi-
ments for them. If they find the pre-designed experiments useful, they can eas-
ily start testing with those the instant they sign up.

We’ll offer customer referral rewards such as temporary premium member-

ships. We also want to make it easy to see and implement case study results by
suggesting experiments to potential users. For marketing, we will ask and an-
swer stackoverflow and Quora questions regarding how people AB test on
mobile.

We could partner with companies in related fields like App Annie or Parse.

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no
school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?
Nancy and Jeremy are committed to exclusively working on Apptimize for the
next few years.

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them.
One may be something we’ve been waiting for. Often when we fund people
it’s to do something they list here and not in the main application.

EEG machine to read babies’ minds. We like playing with our Emotiv machine,
know prominent MIT/Stanford researchers, and see parallels between EEG
analysis and high frequency market data for financial instruments (both sys-
tems produce massive amounts of data that seem random but aren’t).

A page-less browser using crowdsourcing. It’d show logical dependencies, as-

sumptions, relationships between ideas, and best arguments for and against
each belief.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discov-
ered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

People think it’s red, but no one knows the best button color.

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