You could say Fiksu, one of Boston’s most buzz-worthy mobile startups, took the lemons its first product gave it, and made lemonade.
The firm, founded in 2008 under the name Fluent Mobile, rolled out a news aggregator mobile app in 2009, to help consumers track and read publications from their smartphones.
“What happened with the app was very similar to what we see with other apps that have a successful launch: lots of downloads in the beginning, and relatively quickly things started to peter out,” says Fiksu CEO, president, and founder Micah Adler.
“We obviously needed to figure out how to market our mobile app,” he says. So the firm contacted mobile advertising networks to take a deeper look at customer acquisition for its app. Fiksu found that attracting customers through these networks cost it roughly $3 for every user download of the mobile application.
“We immediately saw there were tremendous inefficiencies in the mobile marketing ecosystem,” Adler says. The company took that knowledge to develop an algorithm-based service that, six months later, brought the cost of acquiring a customer to well under 30 cents, he says.
At that point, Fiksu could have taken its newfound knowledge on app marketing to build a bunch of (hopefully) successful apps itself, or “use this service to help other people market their apps.” Last year Fiksu officially pivoted its business toward the latter, and spent months further developing its technology to help mobile app makers attract more customers at a fraction of what they were previously paying. It publicly announced the launch of this service last month.
“The idea here is that were able to generate very large volumes of loyal users and we’re able to do so cost effectively,” says Adler. “We’re not just
