MATTHEW STIBBE.

We have to go back in time to 1999 when I was 18. I used to run a computer games company called Intelligent Games. And in 1999, another company nearly bought my business. And I was thinking, what would I do if I sold my company?
As a business owner, I faced all kinds of administration - paperwork, bureaucracy, time-off requests, expense claims, et cetera. Lots of paperwork. And I thought, “Wouldn't it be good if there was an application where I could sign up and do all of that online?” It's not an unusual idea for today. It's very common, right? Whatever you want to do today, there's an app for it but in 1999 there was nothing.

Still, to make it real then, I would have needed to hire 20 or 30 people, to have my own data center, as I was going to build a really big, complicated software project. And I put that idea on the shelf and went away.

In the end, I sold Intelligent Games and took a sabbatical to become a journalist and a pilot, and then I started a copywriting agency. In 2008- 2009 my business was under some pressure. At that time, I thought, I need to do something else to make money from, I need to diversify. And I remembered the idea that I had had in 1999. And at this point 10 years later, there were more applications out there with the idea I had, for instance, Salesforce.

But also, and this is the important difference at that time - you didn't have to build a credit card processing system, you could get Stripe or PayPal. You didn’t need your own data center, you could go to Digital Ocean and get servers in the cloud. You didn’t need to hire an in-house dev team, you could also go to Elance and find freelance developers. And 10 years later, I realized I could do it. So, the two things met - the possibilities and the original idea.

And here we are. 10 years later and we've built my app together with Anadea. It's not the world's biggest app.com thing, but it's growing and it's profitable and I enjoy it. We did what I wanted it to do, and it's another source of income.

I think the challenge now for buyers is choice, right? If you go to one of these app directories and you type in time-off request apps, there'll be 30 or 40. So, what do you have to do to highlight your app? I think you need good marketing. I see it, as I'm a marketer.

So I guess, what you need is to focus very hard on the thing that adds value for the customer and be very good at 1 or 2 things. Be good deep, not wide. I learned this years later, from my own experience.

When I started developing Turbine with Anadea, the idea was originally wide - time off expenses, appraisals, HR record keeping, etc.

We were going to add modules so that you could do your whole business in Turbine. We were adding a new thing every 6 months! We had all kinds of things in Turbine, but we took them out. So, that’s about focusing on a thing that you do well, where you have a niche. This is what I've been trying to do with Turbine. There's still time off expenses, purchase orders, and a bit of HR record-keeping. I think if I was starting today, I would just do one of these things, as they have proved to be the most effective.

So, we see most of the new clients coming to Turbine for the purchase orders feature. What we see as a trend is that people come in for one thing and then they start using the other functionality.

The other thing I wanted to tell you about is a redesign of the user interface we did together in 2017.

I think the user expectation now is for something that's very fast, modern-looking, attractive, easy to use. And you did a very good job with the redesign. I think the current version still looks like it's modern. Also, over the last year or two, we've been doing together a lot more work on performance. Although the user doesn't see that it doesn't look different, the app is much faster today. And that's hard work. That requires you all to be very clever and technical and know how to make web databases faster.