Eliran Sapir and the business hidden inside the business

Eliran Sapir wanted his email to arrive without having to go looking for it. In 2009, the iPhone could do plenty of things, but instant Gmail notifications were still an awkward omission. His response was GPush, a 99-cent app from Tiverias Apps. It offered the small luxury of knowing that a message had arrived. Entrepreneurship, in this case, began with wanting to stop checking an inbox.

Then came a less familiar problem. Sapir wanted to move on from the app, which had reached No. 17 in the App Store. He could build software and attract users. Selling the resulting business was another matter. There was no clear route out. The shop had plenty of customers; someone had neglected to install a back door.

That frustration helped set Apptopia in motion. Co-founded with Jonathan Kay in 2011, it began as a place to buy and sell mobile apps. By 2015, the founders had changed its purpose to mobile intelligence. Sapir's career offers an unusually concrete example of a business finding a second use for something it already possessed. The inventory was apps. The other asset was information.

An inbox, a marketplace, a second question

GPush was a practical answer to a practical irritation. Users could choose a vibration or a ring, see a sender and subject, and get a preview of incoming mail. Sapir had been tempted to return to his BlackBerry because of the missing feature. Together with fellow co-founder Yoni Gontownik, he supplied an answer for people who wanted to keep their iPhones and their prompt notifications.

The next venture dealt with owners rather than inboxes. Apptopia brought together developers ready to leave an app behind and buyers who wanted a business without writing everything from scratch. Code could change hands along with users, intellectual property and an existing revenue stream. A developer's abandoned project might be somebody else's starting point.

Sapir and Kay were addressing a mismatch they had noticed: people were paying to build apps that already existed, while developers sometimes wanted to sell successful ones. Maintaining a product, answering customers and running a business require a different appetite from creating software. Apptopia offered a way for that difference to become a transaction. A download chart could tell you that an app was popular. It could not tell you whether its creator wanted another year of customer support.

The useful thing they already had

A marketplace for apps needed information about what was being sold. By early 2015, Apptopia had gathered actual download and revenue data from thousands of apps on Google Play and iTunes. Those records suggested another commercial possibility: helping people understand the market, whether or not they intended to buy an app.

Product designer Brian T. O'Neill worked with the team on that shift. They mapped customer questions and sketched a product roadmap, using dry-erase markers to work through what publishers and investors needed to decide. The task was to make the accumulated data useful in a service people would pay for. A table full of numbers can be impeccably arranged and still leave its reader wondering what to do on Monday.

The new product launched in June 2015. Its early recurring revenue supplied a quick test: $30,000 a month within 60 days, $70,000 within 120. These are historical milestones for the new service, rather than present-day figures. They mark the moment the second business began earning its keep.

A small company with an expensive neighbourhood

Sapir's background had already taken him through several kinds of technology company. At GreatPoint Ventures, he worked as an entrepreneur in residence and helped incubate five companies. His operating experience included Oasys Water, GreatPoint Energy and DVTel; he also co-founded Dispatch. Mobile apps were one part of a broader interest in building companies, alongside marketplaces, data, access control and communications.

His public entrepreneurial biography puts his first company at 16. He attended Boston University's School of Management and says he left three months before graduation. There is a briskness to that sequence, but the Apptopia story would require more than getting started early. It required finding customers in a market where larger rivals already had substantial resources.

The 2016 demo-day deck makes the company's priorities visible. Of 25 employees, 14 were engineers and two worked in data science. Its product menu included estimates of downloads, revenue and active users, alongside analysis of the software components inside apps. In November that year, Sound Ventures, the firm of Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, led a $2.7 million funding round. Sapir was building an information business with a substantial technical core.

Courtesy as a competitive expense

Sapir's writing about competition has very little patience for ceremonial business language. One of his subheadings was simply “Don't suck.” He argued that a smaller company should listen for the weaknesses in a larger competitor's product and make those weaknesses its own strengths. At Apptopia, that meant talking to prospective customers and making the data easier to consume, with clearer conclusions.

He also described doing preliminary work without charge, before knowing whether a prospect would become a customer. Some of those efforts went nowhere. He admitted as much. The calculation was that attention could produce a sale later, or a recommendation to somebody else. Good service had a cost, and he was willing to discuss the cost rather than pretend that every helpful gesture immediately paid a dividend.

That approach sits comfortably with an operator who keeps asking what makes someone else's work difficult. It turns customer conversations into product research. It also asks for a kind of commercial patience: spending time with a person whose procurement department has yet to fall in love with you. A large competitor's idea of inefficiency might leave room for a smaller company to make an impression.

“Don't suck.”

Eliran Sapir’s succinct customer-service advice, 2017

Before hiring, remove the obstruction

Sapir applied the same scrutiny to his own payroll. In a 2017 essay about spending after a funding round, he recalled a sales team unable to keep up with incoming leads. The obvious response was to hire. Before doing that, the team examined the sales process and found steps it could eliminate. Removing them allowed existing staff to handle more leads.

It is a pleasantly unglamorous anecdote. Nobody needs a commemorative plaque for deleting an unnecessary task. Yet it reveals a specific management preference: examine the work before buying more capacity. He advised founders to discuss bottlenecks with employees and hire against an identifiable need. Funding could make waste easier to afford without making it any less wasteful.

His advice to app makers was equally domestic. He proposed a grandmother test: hand the product to a grandmother and see whether she can use it. He urged developers to examine early user drop-off, make tutorials brief and optional, and test the timing and frequency of notifications. Coming from the builder of GPush, his concern about excessive notifications has a certain charm. The alert must earn the interruption.

Giving away a little of the shop

In March 2018, Sapir explained a decision to offer app data and tools free to publishers who connected their developer accounts. He remembered the 2015 market as difficult to understand and too expensive for many developers to investigate. Apptopia had grown enough, he wrote, to widen access. Customers such as Google and Facebook had helped make that possible.

He described two hopes for the offer: help developers build stronger businesses, and eventually earn some of them as paying customers for fuller access. He also acknowledged that free access could replace some existing revenue. The commercial intent was plain. This was a long conversation with tomorrow's customers, conducted through a product rather than a sales pitch.

Sapir had already argued in 2017 that declarations about the end of the app boom were misreading a changing market. He pointed to apps spreading across television, desktops and the mobile web. For a founder whose work depended on measuring usage, new screens meant new questions. A familiar icon could take on a different commercial significance depending on where it appeared and how often anyone returned to it.

The phone reaches the trading desk

In February 2019, Apptopia announced its work with Bloomberg to bring mobile metrics to the financial industry through Enterprise Access Point. The available measures included downloads, active users, in-app revenue and session activity. Sapir described finance as one of the company's fastest-growing customer segments. App behaviour had become information that investors wanted alongside other evidence about a business.

By December 2020, Apptopia's Bloomberg offering extended to the App Portal. Its screens let users compare companies, examine performance over time and follow mobile signals for public companies. The route from selling an app to informing a financial analyst is a considerable journey. It retains the original question of value, with a much wider set of people asking it.

That wider audience did not arrive without repeated fundraising. Kay's account of raising capital at Apptopia recalls 15 rounds and $35.5 million in investment, from seed financing through Series C. It describes the founders' first $120,000 investment from Expansion Venture Capital in April 2012. Those numbers belong to Kay's retrospective account. They make the company's evolution look like sustained financing and adjustment, rather than one cinematic meeting and a cheque.

Still willing to fix the printer

Today, Apptopia lists Sapir as co-founder and chairman, responsible for strategic vision and investor relations. Kay is co-founder and CEO, leading daily operations. The division gives Sapir a different vantage point on the company they started together. Its current business serves institutional investors and equity analysts, using mobile behaviour to examine how consumers move between competing services.

Outside that formal role, Sapir still leaves evidence of a tinker's interests. His GitHub account includes AirPrint Bridge, a project for enabling AirPrint on unsupported printers through macOS, and a Homebridge plugin for a Z-Wave USB adapter. These are wonderfully specific problems to find beside a chairman's title. A printer that refuses to cooperate has no particular respect for your career history.

His personal website supplies a more candid explanation of his relationship with entrepreneurship: “I hate losing more than I love winning.” He describes reducing a thousand ideas to ten and finding a partner who picked one. The admission makes room for hesitation inside a career full of launches. There is the builder who sees possibilities everywhere, and the partner who helps choose which one deserves the next morning's work. With Apptopia, that choice eventually changed. The company followed the information it had collected, and Sapir stayed with the business that emerged.