The dorm room startup is a beautiful thing. Alex Moazed started the mobile innovation firm Applico while studying at entrepreneurship powerhouse Babson College. Alex was surrounded by friends who were running successful companies, raising venture capital, and launching new ideas. As Alex explained, “It’s baked into the community of the school.” Now focusing on the community created at Applico, Alex has turned the company into one of the leading mobile application development firms in the space.
Applico’s success didn’t come without tough strategic decisions and an important pivot. Their first revenue stream developed out of a bestselling travel based application. In the first year, Alex had an important decision to make about the focus of Applico. “I had two concurrent business models going (product and service based). At the end of the first year I knew I had to make a decision because focus is very important. It is hard to do one thing well and pretty near impossible to do two things well unless you are Jack Dorsey.” Jack Dorsey is the brain and co-founder of both Twitter and mobile payments company Square.
When asked why he decided to shift from building products to creating applications for other companies, Alex replied, “I quickly realized that in order to truly build a product company, you’re going to need to raise a lot of money. You are going to need money to make product improvements, marketing, etc. I was able to launch the app and execute on it to make it a bestselling app, but to then turn that app into a successful business would have taken a lot of capital. I was then looking for ways to augment capital that I was bringing in to fund what I was doing on the product side, and I turned to services.”
As a junior in college, Alex changed the overall focus to services and had a contract to create apps for NBC before the end of his first year with Applico.
Although he may not be Jack Dorsey, Alex Moazed has used innovative techniques to keep Applico near the top of the competitive marketplace that is application development. The firm now assists clients with all aspects on their application development, from strategy sessions to designing and developing. Applico has succeeded in a competitive marketplace because, as Alex said, “If you want to be able to affect change, you need to have all of these different faculties come together and closely intertwined.”
Alex called the time we are now the connective revolution and believes that there is a large amount of opportunity left in the marketplace. Applico looks destined to capitalize on the continued growth of mobile computing and cloud based technologies.
Listen to the full audio interview with Applico CEO Alex Moazed below.
Interview Highlights:
– How and why Applico chose to focus on providing mobile innovation services instead of products.
– Startup or go to school? Both, they are not mutually exclusive. “You’re in school, how much stuff do you really have to do?”
– His best experience as an entrepreneur: “It’s really beautiful if you look at what we are building, the company Applico. Looking at how the company has grown, how the people in it have grown, and how all of the pieces of Applico are coming together is really a beautiful thing to see and makes this the most enjoyable thing that I could be doing.”
– Advice for young entrepreneurs: Start sooner rather than later. Stay focused.
– “You’re going to fail, but how quickly can you bounce back from a failure, how quickly can you identify that something is going down the wrong path and readjust? Those are skills you will use throughout your entire career.”
Listen to the full interview here:
[powerpress]
