BUSINESS INSIDER - July 22 - Until Zynga hits the public markets, there's only one Facebook app company you can invest in:
SNAP Interactive. SNAP Interactive makes "
Are You Interested," one of the most popular dating apps. SNAP's CEO Cliff Lerner talks about what it's like to run a business that resides entirely inside Facebook.
Q: Why did you decide to put your company on Facebook?
A: It was a very challenging decision. Iamfreetonight.com was getting significant traction. But in May 2007, Facebook launched their platform, we spent a couple of days building a basic application that got several thousand users in a few hours of work. We transitioned the business entirely to Facebook and shut down Iamfreetonight on the spot in 2007.
Q: In 2007, you're already a public company. Why so early?
A: A company called Udate had just been sold as a public company for a significant amount of money. So we thought that the market opportunity was there. We’ve never actually raised any VC funding, which is pretty unique for the industry.
Q: Why not?
A: I wanted to make sure we didn’t go the VC route because we thought we had ideas that could really disrupt the industry, and I wanted to maintain a very long-term view. A lot of our competitors that have raised venture capital money are long gone, mostly because of that.
Q: What have you learned through the years from relying on Facebook for all of your business?
A: Well, I’ve learned that timing is very important.
Q: How is your relationship with Facebook? Do have any concerns about depending on their platform?
A: You always have some concern in the back of your mind, being dependent on the platform, but for us it’s been nothing but a home run. We have ~50M installs.
Q: What do you think of Google+ ?
A: We’re always looking at new and exciting opportunities.
Q: Have you heard anything about Facebook doing their own HTML5 mobile app market?
A: No. Only what we’ve all read on the web.
Q: Is that something that would appeal to you?
A: That would be very interesting because if anything, it would provide easy discovery of application.
Q: Have you noticed any big differences between Apple's mobile app market and the Facebook's app market?
A: Yeah, what we’ve noticed on mobile is people are most interested in interacting with friends or new people who are nearby and online. So what that means is having the critical mass of users who are online in a specific area is very important.
Q: What's the best method for acquiring new users on Facebook?
A: We have a pretty sophisticated system in-house that will put all our users into various categories based on their age range, their sexuality, their location, even their religion or ethnicities, and we know how much it costs to acquire a certain user. And we can build out a model on how much they’re worth to us.
by Jay Yarow
See full article at Business Insider
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