Stick Like Glue Radio #182 On this special episode of Stick Like Glue Radio, I interview one of the founders of Dom and Tom – a mobile app development shop, Tom Tancredi. Don’t miss this powerful show!
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Stick Like Glue Radio www.getjimpalmer.com
On this special episode of Stick Like Glue Radio, I interview one of the founders of Dom and Tom, a mobile app development shop, Tom Tancredi. Don’t miss this powerful show.
Main Questions Asked:
How did you get into Priceline?
What is a big tech opportunity that is a year or two out?
Why do you need physical offices since you work in a digital world?
Are developers more creative or engineer types?
What has been your most challenging app to date?
How do you get people to say yes?
Do companies build applications because they are trying to sell to their customers, or is it for internal use and stickiness?
How is building an app for a large organization different from building an app for a startup?
What lessons have you learned from an entrepreneurial perspective?
Key Lessons Learned:
Meet Dom and Tom
- Dom is the computer science guru, CEO, and CTO.
- Tom is the CFO and chief strategy officer.
- The company ethos is ‘do good work, do what you say you are going to do, when you say you’re going to do it.’
- They don’t try to sugarcoat the bad news, nor do they overpromise and under deliver.
- Dom and Tom didn’t hire anyone to do marketing until Year 5 of the company.
The 24-Hour Development
- Part of Dom and Tom’s goal is to complete a 24-hour development cycle.
- This involves developing in time zones around the world to the point where you never stop building a product.
- If you have a US team in both West and East coast time zones, Asia/Australia, and Europe, then you can pretty much have a 24-hour development cycle.
Creative Vs. Engineer Types
- Art and science have melded in recent years, and you can’t get a good developer who doesn’t know about the design and schematics.
Challenges
- There hasn’t been a Holiday season since 2006 in which there hasn’t been a major credit card security breach.
- Instead of app development getting easier as time goes on, it gets harder as more third party requirements come into play such as integration with Facebook and Google analytics.
- The challenge in the next 5 years will be about boundaries, limits, and what we want and don’t have with regards to privacy and personal preference.
Do Good to Be Good
- The motto of the company is that you have to do it to be it.
- Dom and Tom only work with startups that are doing good in the world.
- The Simple Life is an app that will put money back in the pocket of beauty service providers by helping them find clients and double their salary within a year.
Services Businesses
- These should be profitable from day one and can be started without investor money.
- Too much money papers over a lot of problems.
- Find the value in your services and have it validated by a client shows what is working and isn’t working.
Getting People to Say Yes
- People only use a handful of apps on their phone regardless of how many they have.
- Dom and Tom walk through the value chain as to why someone would want an app.
- Where is the value of what you are building, and why does it have to be in an app for user experience?
Enterprise and Startup Apps
- Enterprise companies see a problem happening internally and use an app as an efficiency tool, then often offer to the clients.
- Most enterprise apps want to move and act like a startup, which is why they don’t build them internally.
- A funded startup has a finite amount of resources to access.
Lessons Learned
- Keep your business as simple as possible.
- Be easy to understand, and be willing to speak human instead of tech talk.
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