Dan Burcaw is Co-Founder & CEO of Nami ML. He built a top mobile app development agency responsible for some of the most elite apps on the App Store and then found himself inside the mobile marketing industry after selling his last company to Oracle.
Comprehensive Platform Laser Focused on Helping App Publishers Make More Money
Nami ML, a new startup transforming the use of on-device machine learning for in-app purchases (IAP) and subscriptions in mobile apps, has introduced support for enterprise analytics in their Mobile Revenue Automation platform.
Specifically, the new capabilities empower enterprise customers to leverage the Nami SDK with their existing Adobe, Google or other third-party measurement tools to gain more valuable insights into the performance of their mobile revenue campaigns.
“Nami is laser focused on helping app publishers make more money and we’ve heard from our enterprise customers how important it is that they be able to track and attribute revenue with their existing systems,” explains Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder and CEO.
“Nami is laser focused on helping app publishers make more money...and attribute revenue with their existing systems” — Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder Nami ML
Nami ML’s platform and SDK empower mobile app publishers of all sizes to tackle the challenges of making money with apps by growing in-app and subscription revenue in three key ways.
First, Nami makes it easy to integrate with the mobile app stores, starting with Apple's StoreKit, dramatically reducing the amount of time developers need to spend coding and testing.
Second, the Nami ML cloud-based platform gives marketers newfound capabilities to manage product offers and creative elements in their apps using a hosted service, instead of requiring constant developer updates.
Perhaps most importantly, Nami’s pioneering use of on-device machine learning to identify revenue behaviors in apps unlocks the promise of growing app revenue automatically in a way that protects end user privacy.
“Adding support for these enterprise analytics features will help solidify our emerging leadership position.” — Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder Nami ML
“Nami’s groundbreaking revenue automation platform is at the forefront of the app economy and adding support for these enterprise analytics features will only help solidify our emerging leadership position,” added Joe Pezzillo, the company’s other Co-Founder and Chairman.
For complete information on the Nami(tm) platform and how it can help app publishers grow revenue, visit the website at https://nami.ml to learn more, request a demo and sign up today.
Nami is a trademark of Nami ML Inc., all other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Nami Co-Founder & CEO Dan Burcaw joins Moving Fast Technology - Boulder for a panel discussion about bringing AI + Machine Learning to life in products from MVP to production.
Topic: Machine Learning + AI
Your task is to deliver usable, multi-platform software with limited or no budget in weeks. Mission impossible? Learn what others have done and the helpful new technologies and tools they've used to successfully deliver POCs and MVPs in short time frames. Get 3 different perspectives from people in the trenches who are moving fast: a CEO, CTO/VP Engineering, and Developer.
Panelist
Sara Bates: CEO & Co-founder of MamaMend (Techstars '18), Data Scientist, Engineer, Machine Learning Advisor, Co-organizer of Boulder Women in Machine Learning & Data Science (WiMLDS) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarabates/
Diana Pfeil: Diana is a data scientist with a passion for building useful data products. She is currently a data scientist at Honey, and has worked in machine learning in various roles for 15+ years, including as a startup CTO, an adjunct at CU Denver teaching predictive analytics, and as a software engineer in the machine learning group at Amazon. She received a PhD from MIT, where she focused on machine learning and optimization. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianampfeil/
Dan Burcaw: Dan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Nami ML, a company at the intersection of mobile and machine learning. Before Nami ML, Burcaw led mobile product for the Oracle Marketing Cloud. He joined Oracle via the acquisition of Push IO, a leading mobile messaging provider, where he served as Co-Founder & CEO. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danburcaw/
Join us!
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Galvanize - Boulder, 1023 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO, 80302 United States (map)
A hyper growth mindset has infiltrated every aspect of the App Economy. As we explored in Part 1 of this series, The App Economy and The User, growth metrics such as monthly active users (MAUs) have created perverse incentives for app publishers to the detriment of end user experience. In Part 2, we dissect how app publishers are growing their user base.
Houston, We Need to Grow
Your boss comes to you and says, “We need to get to 100,000 MAUs in 6 months.” What do you do?
This is exactly the situation that Sara Cole found herself in on her second day as Marketing Director for Eyecon Global. Cole’s challenge was exacerbated by the fact that she was working at a bootstrapped startup with significant resource constraints.
Cole met the challenge and was not only able to reach the initial growth goal, but exponentially surpass it - over the next 24 months, Eyecon achieved 11 million downloads.
How did she do it?
Organic Growth
Cole’s first step was to work on growing organic downloads. That is, new users who cannot be directly attributed to an advertisement. For instance, if a user installs your app after browsing or searching the App Store, they would be considered organic.
A user is consider organic if they install your app without first interacting with an ad.
App publishers can cultivate organic growth by honing keywords, tweaking marketing language, and making other improvements under the umbrella of app store optimization (ASO).
App store optimization (ASO) is the process of optimizing mobile apps for the purpose of achieving a higher rank in the app store search results and top charts rankings. Due to similarities with search engine optimization (SEO) for websites, app store optimization is also referred to as app store SEO, app search optimization, and mobile app SEO. (Source: Meatti)
With the abundance of apps available, if a user simply downloads your app it is a meaningful signal that they are interested in what your app offers. Additionally, since these users aren’t gained from an advertising campaign they likely cost less to acquire.
Optimized app store listings have carefully tuned keywords, creative elements, and marketing text.
While someevidence suggests that organic downloads are often better than other methods at retaining users, the industry has shown an unwillingness to depend on on organic growth alone.
With this in mind, ASO wasn’t the only approach Cole used. There was more she had to do to achieve her growth targets…
Paid Downloads
Increasing organic downloads through ASO and other marketing takes time. Due to this reality, purchasing app installs has become a generally accepted practice used by app publishers to generate growth.
Called cost per install (CPI), app publishers pay whenever an ad results in a new install of their app. Major CPI vendors include the usual suspects including Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter enables marketers to surface app install ads based upon various targeting criteria.
Silicon Valley firm AppLovin is another major leader in the paid download space. In 2016, a Chinese private equity company agreed to pay over $1.42 billion to acquire the firm - proof that the CPI market is big business.
Ad networks often serve low-quality install ads which often don't articular what the app is or why a user should both to download it.
Apple even participates in paid downloads by selling Apple Search Ads which feature prominently in the App Store.
Apple's App Store Search Ads tend to surface highly relevant results based upon search keywords.
According to Growth Bug’s Deepak Abbott, however, marketers boast about optimizing CPI (e.g. paying less per install), while not fully appreciating that doing so may lead to difficulty keeping such users active.
Abbott recommends app publishers use smarter metrics including cost per active user and monthly retention to inform how to focus resources.
Sara Cole confirms this approach. At Eyecon, she used A/B testing to strike a balance between keeping CPIs low and retaining users, but…
Churn and Growth Whack-a-Mole
Relying heavily on paid downloads or the wrong type of paid downloads can quickly turn problematic. It’s a bit like eating sugar. A little is not bad, but too much will deliver a short term kick followed by a very hard crash.
Imagine your boss walks in one day and says, “We need to grow faster!” A typical solution might be to up your advertising spend because it generates more installs. The growth manager immediately gets to work and is excited to start executing campaigns that achieve a low CPI.
Installs increase. Crisis averted! - Reverse that. You’ve just arrived at churn. New users abandon your app as quickly as they installed it.
What’s the prescription for churn? Most of us have experienced apps that send way too many notifications reminding (read: begging) us to visit the app.
The solution for the user to rid the annoyance is to turn off notifications, right? Many of us have experienced the onslaught of emails that follow, pleading for our return to the app.
To compound the issue, app publishers often do not differentiate messaging for actively engaged users (low churn risk) from users who are less engaged (high churn risk). Instead, they panic and blast all users with one-size-fits-all messaging.
I experienced this first hand from a well-known meditation app. After a much needed meditation, I left the app and within minutes was disrupted by ‘re-engagement’ messaging. It was infuriating, not calming. Not only was the notification patronizing and counter to the entire point of meditation, it felt like an act of desperation by the app publisher. This wasn’t a one time occurrence and (so far) has resulted in less frequent use of the app.
The problem with over messaging is simple - Best case: Users tune you out which negatively impacts your monthly active user metric. Worst case: Users delete your app and you get churn.
This cycle is hard to break, especially in an ecosystem that is addicted to hyper growth based upon metrics that don’t account for quality of engagement.
"90% of our daily growth comes from organic and viral downloads." - Sara Cole, Marketing Director, Eyecon Global
Ultimately, Eyecon’s Sara Cole ended up with a healthy organic growth story, meaning her company was well positioned to focus less on retaining low quality installs.
Until Next Time…
In Part 3, we’ll explore how to build a healthier relationship with our users by focusing on selling your app, not your users.
Join the Nami team at one of the premier indie iOS developer conferences. Learn about how the Nami platform can help you get the most out of Apple App Store subscriptions.
Sun, Aug 25 - Wed Aug 28
Grand Hyatt Denver, 1750 Welton Street, Denver, CO, 80202
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nami ML revealed the future of mobile app monetization to a packed audience of developers, investors, and industry heavyweights just a few blocks from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference.
Using their cloud-based platform, Nami demonstrated how publishers can manage their mobile app paywalls, and optimize in-app revenue by utilizing Nami machine learning capabilities.
App publishers have struggled to convince their customers to subscribe in-app because existing do-it-yourself solutions offer little flexibility, contributing to the fact that fewer than 3,000 apps are making any real money on the app stores.
“The Nami Smart Paywall makes it easier than ever to generate mobile app subscription revenue by giving publishers more flexibility and control,” said Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder and CEO. “Plus we’re protecting user privacy using on-device intelligence.”
The patent-pending SaaS offering empowers app publishers to create customer journeys from the first run of an app through purchase. Once a developer installs Nami, marketing teams control the presentation of sales offers that guide the user toward conversion.
Nami automatically learns behaviors that signal a propensity to purchase which improves the user experience by reducing extraneous marketing noise thus increasing customer satisfaction.
“The mobile app industry is struggling to build a healthy paid customer base. We want to give app publishers the tools they need to win,” explained Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder and Chairman.
This is the second company jointly founded by Burcaw and Pezzillo. Their prior startup, mobile notification provider Push IO, was sold to Oracle, where they helped build and sell the Oracle Marketing Cloud’s B2C mobile product.
Nami has raised a pre-seed round of more than half a million dollars from WndrCo alongside strategic investors with experience at Apple, Oracle, Samsung, WPP and more.
Additionally, Alejandro Cantarero, Ph.D. joins the company as CTO, after years of experience applying machine learning to monetize digital products, most recently as VP of Data at the LA Times.
Mobile app publishers can request an invite at: http://nami.ml
Nami ML is a trademark of Nami ML Inc., all other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
From the founders of Push IO, Dan & Joe have been in stealth working on something new. Be the first to see what we've been working to help app developers make more money. Get an exclusive sneak peek at an event near WWDC by emailing us.
WWDC19 Details
Monday, June 3, 2019 - Friday, June 7, 20195:00 PM
San Jose McEnery Convention Center150 West San Carlos Street, San Jose, CA, 95113United States (map)
