Description
You know how technology brings us together like we know what everyone’s doing at all times, but we don’t really know each other on a deeper level. Well today’s guests built a calendar app that is on a mission to make sure we all come together in person. You will discover key lessons about fundraising, why they decided to rebrand even after an Apple Feature and how they use events to promote their app.
Ramy Al-Kadhi and Latif Baluch are Co-Founders of Calio & Founder of The Social Corporations.
Show Notes
Key Lessons on Fundraising
On the onset, they have self-funded the project but soon realized that they have to pay themselves as well. They also needed to hire great talents and pay good developers to grow. On top of this, they have to think about marketing initiatives as well. They have to raise money to grow, develop and hire a team. They wanted to avoid tapping friends and family and their main investor turned out to be a friend of a friend. When you are in the corporate world, leave a good impression and always be positive because, for them, the money came through because Latif did not burn bridges with his former company.
Using Events to Promote Apps
Nowadays, there are so many apps out there that it is difficult to get people stop and listen. If you got an interesting event or an interesting experience, people will be more likely to listen as you have better stories to tell. So they arranged an event focusing on how social media affects our lives, they managed to get a bit of PR and a bit of an audience. These days, you want more than just a digital relationship with your users; it’s nice to have a physical one especially in the phase where you need to get feedback from people and you don’t have a huge budget for user testing. They had about 700 people for 3 days interacting with their product, having a good time, posting about the event and really excited to go to another Calio event in the future.
Show Mention
Fav app: Polymail: (iTunes)
Forest: (iTunes | Google Play)