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AWS Blog: Mobilewalla Uses App Data to Build Unique Customer Profiles

(AWS Startups Blog Article by Mikey Tom – July 16, 2019) For Mobilewalla’s founder and CEO Anindya Datta, the origins of his 3rd startup can be traced to Doodle Jump. If you had an early-generation iPhone or iPod touch, the name likely brings back memories of shooting aliens in pursuit of beating your all-time score, eyes trained on the screen as your doodle soared to new heights. For the uninitiated, join the 15 million other Doodle-Jumpers and download the game to experience the magic.

Datta first encountered the cult hit shortly after leaving Cisco, which had acquired his previous startup a year prior. Instead of jumping back into startup life, the three-time founder decided to take some time off to focus on spending time with his daughter, who seemed permanently glued to her phone playing Doodle Jump.

The obsession confused Datta. Why were his daughter and her friends playing only this game when there were hundreds to choose from? After chatting, the main contributing factor, outside of Doodle Jump’s intrinsic virality, was the App Store’s search capabilities at the time. With over 200 games offered, the effort to download and try new ones was just too much.

This unoptimized experience piqued Datta’s interest. With two startups under his belt and experience as a professor focused on data, he set out to build an app search engine. The service quickly gained traction, becoming the #1 third-party search engine.

Sadly, even after much success, Datta saw it as a business with an obvious ceiling.

“Although we made solid progress, peaking at around 1 million searches a day, I realized we were never going to scale it to where I wanted it. Google is Google because they have something like 6 billion searches a day. From there, I started thinking of ways to apply all of the data we had to something more commercially feasible.”

To the layperson, it would be hard to see the value in the information that Mobilewalla attained from building its app search engine. For Datta, it was all about connecting the dots.

“We had mounds of data on what people were saying about apps, where apps were being used, etc. Using that information, we could build customer profiles of different types of people, which is really what we do today but for larger companies. If you want to know where people like to go, what people eat, where people fly, you can turn to Mobilewalla for that information.”

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