Featured Startup Pitch: Mobile app back-end and analytics provider Buddy.com is focused on capturing relevant customer data for better user engagement

Company: Buddy Platform

Website: www.buddy.com

Founders: Dave McLauchlan, Jeff MacDuff

Headquarters: Kirkland, Washington

Year Founded: 2011

Investors: Transmedia Capital, Bing Fund

Brief Company Description: Buddy helps publishers and developers power, optimize, and measure apps on any platform, OS, or connected device.

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By Dave McLauchlan, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

Buddy products:

The Buddy Development Platform and The Buddy Analytics Dashboard.

Buddy’s core API platform for app developers supports 200+ APIs across 15+ sets designed to support 100 percent of the Cloud requirements for 80 percent of the app experiences in the market. Buddy supports all connected platforms, including  iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Facebook, HTML5, web, SmartTV, and Windows 8. Buddy also has SDKs for the following platforms: iOS, Android, WP8, Windows, and Mono.

The Buddy Analytics Dashboard records metrics about all of the objects created by apps built on the Buddy Development Platform. This data can be viewed on a dashboard which presents the information interactively, such as on a map of locations, graphs of statistics, and pie charts.

Founders’ Story

After working at Microsoft for over a decade each, myself (Dave CEO) originally from Adelaide, Australia, and Jeff (CTO) from Seattle, left our jobs in 2011 to start Buddy.com. We realized that the shift to mobile was accelerating and there was a tremendous opportunity in providing a mobile ‘backend as a service’ for app developers. After releasing a private beta in September, 2011, Buddy announced its formal launch at the end of May, 2012. Customer feedback was immediately positive, but we started to get enquiries from some pretty large companies about using Buddy to capture usage data. We quickly realized that the market was hungry for data—analytics and metrics, really—and with our enterprise-grade BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service), we had the richest, highest fidelity way of capturing that data. We recently released our first product in that space—the Buddy Analytics Dashboard.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Buddy focuses its marketing and promotion strategy on three key audience segments: developers, publishers of apps, and advertising/creative agencies.

Most of our marketing and promotional activity is executed at the grass roots level. We leverage social media channels and have an active community of developer advocates who we communicate with regularly. Every member of the Buddy team spends time networking and answering customer service requests. We are passionate about supporting our local community of startups when-and-where we can with access to tools and know-how when it comes to developing and promoting apps. We also work closely with agencies and brands to show how using Buddy to build your app can not only help you measure and optimize that app experience, but have a big impact on your overarching business goals.

Market Opportunity

Consumers now spend more time using mobile apps than on the web, but advertisers spent 82 percent less marketing dollars on mobile vs. the web.

If mobile engagement drove marketing spend like web engagement, advertisers would be spending $67 billion on mobile marketing—10x what it is today. Buddy provides the tools, metrics and analytics to unlock this potential.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

We sit at the intersection of two huge markets—mobile back-ends as a service and mobile analytics. We’re unique because we believe that the market demand for the overlap of those markets is going to be bigger than either individual market. That means we’re a deeply technical product team selling to a deeply data-driven customer—and uniquely, we’re going to pull it off!

Business Model

Buddy is a company that services an enterprise clientele. The Buddy Development Platform is geared towards development studios and the Buddy Analytics Dashboard caters towards brands and agencies.

Current Needs

We are always looking for awesome people to join our team.

Buddy.com – www.buddy.com