Inside the App Factory: Q&A with Polar Mobile’s Regan Fletcher

Polar Mobile has experienced explosive growth in a relatively short amount of time. What do you think accounts for your success?

I think all business owners realize now that apps have to be an important part of their business. Additionally, the cost and reliability of apps have improved greatly over the past three years.

The type of technology that Polar offers to content owners has brought down the cost of delivering a truly best-in-class content app. Our technology has also made the mobile experience for an end user more consistent and more reliable, which means the total cost of ownership over the life of an app comes down as well – there’s a lot less cost in maintaining, updating, and fixing.

One of Polar Mobile’s selling points is the SMART platform that makes it fast and easy for media companies around the world to launch mobile apps for different devices. Your CEO, Kunal Gupta, has coined it the “app factory.” But why would customers prefer templates to custom designs?

Custom app development is never going to go away, but the need for custom work has almost disappeared for content owners for newspapers, magazines, sports entities, and entertainment offerings.

Anyone who has traditionally monetized their user base by the delivery of content can now make more money through a platform-based app versus a custom-designed app.

In the end the main reason for anyone to build an app to support their business is monetization. So what Polar offers is a much better fit on the monetization side, for our customers.

How is the monetization of apps changing? 

At Polar we focus on building engagement into an app. No matter how you decide to monetize, you’ll fail if you don’t build engagement.

We have customers who are monetizing by giving their app away for free and using it as a marketing tool. For some customers it’s as simple as getting them to upgrade to a paid version of the app.

My opinion is that if you just go out and design an app, charge 99 cents for it, and don’t have any other context around that app, one of two things is going to happen.

Either it will be a great-looking app and you’ll get a bunch of downloads at 99 cents and then it will stop. Or, it will be such a terrible app in the first place that you won’t even get the 99 cents. Either way it will lead to failure.

Polar Mobile stresses the element of “leveraging social.” What’s the relationship between social and mobile media?

What’s important is to incorporate the social features and sharing features into what you design. Statistics have shown that when people are given the opportunity to share their purchases with their friends on Facebook or Twitter, sales increase.

The social element has to be a part of it. Hockey News is a customer of ours and it’s important when people read an article that they’re able to share it. Their friends will either see it online or they’ll see it on their phone and end up getting driven back into the app. So all of that is pulling people back into your main offering, whatever it happens to be.

Do you expect more companies to adopt your model? Or is the market already saturated?

I think the pure numbers indicate that there’s still room to grow for everyone on the development side. Projections are for 2012 that there will be over 20 billion apps downloaded.

When we put the number of apps downloaded together with the huge number of smartphones that are being sold and adding tablets to the mix it’s clear: The market is growing.

What’s unique about mobile is the customization of the way that content can be repackaged in the mobile space. For example, you can take a popular section like Globe Life and turn it into a stand-alone brand in mobile.

As mobile grows there’s more and more room to create channels for different portions of your content and that creates more apps, usership, and it means you need more development. Also, what is attractive to a lot of content owners about Polar is that no matter where they’re located in the world, we build for whatever device is most popular in their country.

Do you think apps are starting to be used largely as a marketing tool?

It works for some, but others are using apps as a commerce tool. Zappos gets people buying shoes from their app. Their business model is so fantastic with its free shipping and returns.

Knowing that when the shoes arrive, if they don’t fit or I don’t like them I can send them back for free, removes a barrier for me to just shop inside their app at my leisure.

Unlike most of your Polar colleagues you’re based in San Francisco. Do you see any differences between the creative cultures of Silicon Valley and Toronto?

What I see in Toronto, especially in the mobile space, is very much a scaled version of the mobile space in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of start-ups in the mobile space in Toronto that are doing really well. There’s a real sense of community.

Other parts of Canada are just that much smaller but Toronto has gotten to the point where you can start a company in pretty much any arm of technology and find the resources – the human resources and capital resources – to build a great product.

I think where Canadian start-ups, regardless of location, still have a challenge is getting to the next level of funding. Eventually you are probably going to find yourself in the position where to really grow your company you will have to come to Silicon Valley for funds.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Toronto, or Boston, or New York, the key difference is the networking that’s available in Silicon Valley.