We had a chance to chat with David Lieb, CEO of Bump Technologies, Inc. Bump is famous for their iOS and Android app which lets people easily exchange information in real life by simply bumping their smartphones together. It’s like the 21st century version of clinking beer mugs.
While ‘bumping phones’ might sound like a euphemism, it’s truly a fun and unique way to interact with your smartphone and your friends. Lieb told us about what his company has been up to and where it’s headed in the year of the dragon:
2011 was a big year for Bump. The app hit 60 million downloads.
David Lieb: At some point in 2011 we hit 60 million downloads. We haven’t really announced it publicly yet but we’re now north of 75 million. We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve certainly found the right recipe for distribution. Our app is magical and delightful and people want to talk about it. You have to get your friends to download it if you want to use it. So those two things just drive incredible distribution for us. And Apple recently released the list of the top apps downloaded for 2011 and we were in the top 20 apps downloaded.
Is this the first time Bump has been on the list?
DL: We’ve been in the top 100 pretty consistently since back in August of 2009. So we’ve been there for more than 2 years. We’ve pretty consistently been in the top 100. If you look at our growth, we’ve steadily grown with various plateaus depending on what our product looked like and what the growth of the iOS and Android platforms looked like. Today, we’re getting between 100K and 150K downloads every day.
It seems like yesterday that the app first came out. It made quite the impression as far as what was possible developing for iOS.
DL: Absolutely – I was just having coffee with one of the original iOS software engineers, y’know, one of the first four guys on that team. And he was telling me “Yeah, when you launched your app it was the first example of what you could really do with this platform that we built.” And it was celebrated internally [by Apple] as a good example of their success which was pretty cool to hear.
What’s the story behind the Android version of the Bump app?
DL: We launched the first version of the iPhone app in March 2009 and pretty quickly followed that up with a minimum viable product on Android in November 2009. We didn’t really touch the Android app for a while actually. We didn’t update that to the 2.0 version of Bump until May of last year and we’re about to launch the next version on both platforms simultaneously next month.
Do you have plans for a Windows Phone version of Bump?
DL: We don’t. We get asked that question lots of times every day. As much as it pains me to write back to these folks who are die-hard Windows Phone folks, we just have to be honest with them and say, “We’re a startup; we have 30 people. It’s clear the two platforms we have to focus on are iOS and Android.” But if Windows Phone or any other platform for that matter gets to the level where we really have to think about it every day we’ll certainly develop for it. There’s no technical reason we can’t; it’s really just a resource constraint. We’ve heard and felt that focus is one of the most important things for a startup and so we are trying to be very disciplined.
What’s next for Bump?
DL: Well, like I mentioned, we have the 3.0 version of Bump coming out soon. It’s going to be different in several ways. Stepping back to show the progression of the last few years – we started out trying to solve the contact exchange problem. That was a problem I faced when I was in business school and that was the reason we started Bump to begin with. We saw that that was really, really successful. Version 2.0 of the product, which we were working on in 2010 and 2011, was “Okay, people love this Bump-ing thing, let’s give them lots of other things to use Bump for.” So we added photo sharing, we added a music recommendation service, we added app recommendation sharing, we added calendar sharing and social networks. This was the typical “let’s try lots of stuff and see what sticks” approach, which is a good thing to do in lots of cases, but in the last year we’ve been watching how our users use those features and what we’ve found one or two features are the ones that they really use. The others are interesting, and they try them out, but they’re not really why they use Bump. The vision with version 3 is using this data we’ve gathered over the last year about how people use the app and creating a deep, well-tailored experience for those interactions. We’re cutting out the stuff that we thought were going to be really big and some people love but it’s not the essence of the app. Talking about it, it’s interesting. If I had to make a bulleted list of what’s different, it’s really just a reduction of stuff. We’ve eliminated the music sharing feature and some other things.
Were there debates internally over cutting features rather than adding more?
DL: Oh yeah, we certainly had lots of debates. But, we had the luxury of having the data telling us what people use the app for. We talked to a lot of users and asked them how they would feel about changes to the application. The high-level answer is that we’re trying to be more like Apple. If you look at what Apple does, they make decisions for the user. You can argue about whether or not they’re right about what they decide to build. They have strict focus and this makes things they choose to do really great experiences for the user. We’ve decided that we can get away with limiting the core of the product to a smaller set of features, but make those features really, really polished and deep to improve the overall user experience.
Other than this new version of Bump, what else does 2012 hold in store?
DL: Our general strategy for this year is that we’re going to be working on some other products that are very much related to Bump, but that we didn’t want to cram into the existing Bump app. We will launch a couple of side apps and watch how they’re used and provide the full depth that each calls for instead of cramming them into a single app. We’ll launch a couple things along that dimension in the beginning of this year. We’re trying to build solutions and products for people in the real world so they can do what they want to do. There’s this big push of being connected to the web all the time and we want to unlock the potential of carrying a mobile phone in the physical world. We’re launching and iterating our products along those lines.
A big thanks to David for answering our questions!
