We were honoured to have three Sauder alumni in this week’s lecture to share with us their stories and experience of starting their own business. Among all three, the most interesting story to me was Paul Davidescu with his company Tangoo.
Paul Davidescu’s Tangoo is an app that serves as a pocket concierge to any users. It suggests a list of perfect dining places tailored to the user by understanding his mood and occasion. This business really caught me eyes as I personally hold a strong interest to the technology industry. Through his story-telling, I learnt many insights to this potential option of my future career that I was highly anticipated of.
Firstly, he emphasized on the importance of being unique in this business. With the fast development of technology nowadays, the number of apps in any app store is growing rapidly. It is important to catch users and be outstanding from the massive pool of apps. Tangoo, despite being a startup, achieved so with its unique functionality. It it the first app that serves as a personal outing planning tool, hence many users seek out to the entire app store but find only Tangoo. The uniqueness in functionality is able to create a niche market for Tangoo, thus allowing it to focus on a group of users with specific desires and creating a profit.
Secondly, understanding the consumer behaviour in the market is another key to success. It was crucial for Paul to notice a desire of an outing assistant, however, it was more important to have a thorough analysis on the mobile application market and discover a broad market demand for such product. After initiating the idea of Tangoo, Paul also understood that ‘once a user finds a satisfactory app that exactly matches his need, he will be reluctant to switch’. This resulted into an almost one-year-long period of design and refining of Tangoo. Therefore, when it was finally released in the store earlier this year, it was able to soon reach a high user satisfaction rate due to the flawlessness of its initial product.
Lastly, he expressed his understanding on specialization of a mobile application. Paul suggested that specialization is important for a mobile application because ‘people tend to use one app for one purpose only’. Tangoo serves only one purpose — outing planning, but it does the job well. Although he later on revealed a plan of establishing a platform of multi-functional softwares in the future, Paul still emphasized on the importance of specializing on one function during the initial stage of an application. He believes a clearer purpose helps to build a stronger brand image and propose a more direct value to users.