Sunday Business Post article on Furious Tribe partnership with Vodafone
An Irish mobile development company has signed a lucrative new deal with mobile operator Vodafone, which it says will treble its turnover and enable it to double its staff numbers.
Furious Tribe has signed a partnership agreement with Vodafone, under which it will provide a consultancy service to Vodafone business customers to develop their own mobile applications strategies. The partnership will see the two firms build mobile applications for Vodafone’s business customers.
Vodafone customers will receive access to Apptivate, Furious Tribe’s content management system, which allows them to manage their mobile applications without having specialised IT skills in-house.
“This is a major deal for us,” said Patrick Leddy, the chief executive and founder of Dublin-based Furious Tribe. “It is going to triple our turnover and it will increase our headcount. We have 22 staff and expect to double it by the end of the year. We’ve now moved out of our original offices – which were in an incubator on the IADT campus called Media Cube – into a custom-built office on Hume Street in Dublin.”
Leddy said that the company doesn’t disclose its turnover. However, he did say that the firm has now signed deals worth €1.6 million in sales for the next year, indicating the level it is operating at.
“Vodafone are going to focus on their corporate customers to start with,” he said. “We will work hand in hand with Vodafone to help people form good mobile strategies and applications for brands. We have already worked with Irish Life, NCB stockbrokers and Teagasc under this agreement, which is a great start since the deal has only just been signed. Eventually it will be rolled out to all of Vodafone’s SME customers.”
Leddy said that Apptivate was a lower-cost solution and was somewhat more convenient option for firms who wanted to develop their own mobile app and don’t want to have to outsource most of the development work. He said that firms could typically reduce development costs by around 60 per cent.
“You can build your app in one place rather than having to develop for different platforms,” he said. “If you build it on Apptivate it will put it onto iPhone, iPad, and Android all in one go. It probably does have some restrictions in that it probably isn’t suited for games. It is aimed at utility and service companies, such as banks or insurance companies, that need to allow their customers to log in, or airlines that want to allow to people to book flights.”
Leddy has a long history in the business, having started out as a web developer before he even went to college.
“When I was in secondary school, I started up a web development business,” he said. “I was only about 15 when it began and we started out by building loads of websites all over the country for different towns and communities. We started offering people advertising on the sites and we made a few grand that first summer, which was pretty good when you’re that age.”
The business quickly moved on when Leddy got an offer from one of his advertisers, a chain of hotels, which asked him to build websites for them. He and a school friend began developing hotel websites and ended up getting a lot more business clients.
“Eventually I ended up going to college since I thought it would be a good idea to get a degree in case it didn’t work out,” he said. “To be honest, while I was in college, I was still more interested in building websites and making money so I kept working away. I was the only person in my class who would come into college wearing a suit because I’d have meetings almost every day with clients or potential clients. Everyone was wondering what I was up to.”
When Leddy left college, he continued with the web development business, but after a year he found himself increasingly tired of it. “I’d been doing it since I was a teenager and I decided that I needed to do something else and I needed to pivot my business into something completely different,” he said.
The iPhone had just launched and the App Store arrived shortly afterwards. He decided that mobile would be the next big thing and took the bold step of closing his company and opening a new one, Furious Tribe.
In retrospect, he said he made the move too early and ended up with no work for around nine months, an experience he called “extremely painful”, which was made doubly difficult by the fact that he’d opted to drop all of his previous web design clients. The turning point was reached when Leddy was asked to speak at a conference in London.
“I love public speaking now, but I used to be petrified by it,” he said. “But after so long without work I decided to do it. We tried a number of other things to ramp up our marketing and only a week later I got a phone call from Royal & Sun Alliance, an insurance company with global reach. The guy was ringing me from Chile and we ended up building this really cool app for them to report car crashes. With your phone you can take a photograph of the accident scene, the location is tagged via GPS, and you can upload it into their claims system.”
The app turned out be successful and Furious Tribe ended up deploying other Apps for Royal & Sun Alliance in Mexico, Brazil, India and, most recently, in Ireland. More importantly, the company now had a good customer which it leveraged to gain contracts with big international clients like Citibank, Axa Life and Danone.
