Ep # 153: Scaling SaaS with No-Code Mobile Apps & AI ft. Kaius Meskanen (CEO, Choicely)

Adil Saleh 0:02 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is the Hyperengage podcast. And, you know, we've been doing it really, really, you know, quick with the people that are we want to explore the products that we industries, categories we want to explore today. You know, this has been long time pain for, you know, a lot of people in the past three years, since the evolution of GPT 3 and then now GPT 5, talk about open AI and talk about other AI evolutions associated to that. One thing that has been that that actually definitely took off at the beginning of the year 2019, when, when lot of a lot of you know, individuals and solo founders, they tend to build apps, no code. Build mobile apps, no code. Websites, no code. A lot of, you know, bubbles and web flows coming along, and then with this, you know, the market shift, and especially in tech and B2B SaaS, you know, after this, AI, this has been put under the carpet for so long. Today we have Kaius who's the CEO of Choicely, Choicely is emerging, I would say, as stats plus product and service platform that helps individuals and teams build no code apps in no time, optimize, of course, their bandwidth, as well as the cost, you know, doing it at a fraction of a cost. We want to explore it today. Thank you very much, Kaius for taking the time. Kaius Meskanen 1:29 Thanks, Adil, it's a pleasure to be on the on your podcast. So I'm Kaius Meskanen. I'm CEO of Choicely. Our company is a platform for building mobile apps, and I'm happy to explore it and talk about the positioning and things that are happening in the near future. Adil Saleh 1:46 Interesting, interesting Kaius. I know that it has so much to do with your your private background, and how did you feel it as a pain or as a need in the industry, and that that a lot of fun. Say, Hey, the past seven years, I kind of lifted this thing up, you know, I was feeling this pain, and I was thinking that, hey, there has to be some solution. And then that actually became the inception for the product that they're building. I know this is kind of a regular story. What is your story getting into building a platform like Choicely? Kaius Meskanen 2:17 Yeah, sure, it's a good story. So before Choicely, I was running an architecture company here in the Nordics, and a couple of years in Africa as well. And before that, I was, I was in Finnish Special Forces in the army. It's, it's for all the, all the men in this country. And the reason why I started Choicely, actually, with our CTO Tommy Eklund, is that we came up with pretty strong idea that the mobile applications are, they come with a lot of business benefits, but a lot of companies, they don't build mobile apps just because of it's difficult and textile and it's pricey. Adil Saleh 3:58 That's very interesting. You know, SDK is, of course, a tailor made for them. They can directly embed within their systems to, you know, make sure that they don't understand the code. Because when it comes to designing a mobile experience, it has so much to do with, you know, whether a platform has a web experience or not, a lot of these, these, these apps they only have, like mobile apps like iOS and Android. The biggest thing for me as a consumer is the user experience, that how, basically it interacts with me. And you know, a lot of things that you need might need on the screen, on laptop screen, you might not need on the on the mobile. So optimizing of that, as well as the functionality, replicating the exact experiences onto the mobile and making sure the consumer is well adapted and retained to the mobile app. It's compelling enough. So I know vix and web flows a lot of these platforms. They have their own builders. There are many that come on a very smaller scale over the years, I would say, seven to 10years. There's a, you know, there, like, the biggest problem is, like, how you can customize it for you? Does the SDK that you mentioned solve this problem? Kaius Meskanen 5:09 Yes. So the Choicely platform comes with many features and capabilities. You can honestly build a production ready application in one day. Of course, if it's super extensive, just like putting together all the necessary things, will take more time, but you can really do amazing things in one day. We have our first ai ai tool already where, where you can basically give the AI a web page, and it will basically scrape the web page. It will take screenshots and mimic as much as possible. It will convert everything into JSON data and and match, match, match that data with our platform and rebuild it as a native mobile application in 90 seconds. Then amazing and asked, it's just one. It's sort of one of the ways to get started. You can also build it, build a new app using our templates, or just from scratch, all of these things. You can still do amazing things in one day. And once you have something like the first version of a clickable application in our platform, then you you have your account, and you have your app, then you can scan a QR code with the choices Studio application, so that you have the connection, you can make any changes, and you can test the app, like after a couple of minutes, and everything is real time. So this gives you better capabilities to prototype, to build something that feels real immediately. And we have a lot of features that you can add out of the box, and we have zero limitations. So you can add new features by either coding or integrating something existing, any, any, any third party software. Or you can also just pick a web page like a Shopify store and just copy paste the URL to the application, and it will work as a inside a native web view inside the application, and then you can also use the SDK of some product and have the native experience or build something new, so you absolutely have no limitations. And at the same time, you're using the Choicely native code, which is already used by big enterprises with apps of millions of users. So there are a lot of many. There are many small things that you don't consider that day one, which are being GDPR compliant. The content needs to be accessible, because not all of us are like we. Some of some of us may have, you know, not perfect eyesight or different things. And also you're immediately, you're you can immediately also code something new with AI. So even a person with no technical skills cannot nowadays build something new with AI. And you can even add that. Adil Saleh 8:21 You mentioned about how you have your, you know, sort of an agent that actually helps you, you know, get quickly, 90 seconds that build something out of scratch and analyze data from websites in different mobile apps. Let's say, if you put up some inspiration. Let's say if I'm a mobile, if I'm a smartphone business, and say, hey, just just go to Q mobile, or, you know, read me, or smart like Apple or Samsung website and, you know, come up with some mobile experience, or something like this. So is that an, is that an agent that is specialized for different industries or different use cases, or is just a wide general agent, like any AI rapper? How is it different? Kaius Meskanen 9:01 It is. It is a specialized AI agent, and this is the first version of it. So right now it will kind of It's better with content heavy websites. If it's like a super special, functional website, it might not get what you want. But over time and in the next coming months, we are now building, building up an entire capability, like an A AI agent that can just chat with you, and then it can build anything based on prompts. So you can just tell what you want, and it will build it for you. It will, it will not it will not come up with all the functionalities in the world, because you can also just go to Firebase studio or lovable jut, GPT, Gemini, just anywhere, and build something new and just add it in the application. So it's because this, this space is moving. So. So we are focusing very much on the fundamentals of the high quality mobile application and easy ways to update it and build something new. But then, when talking about super special functionalities, it doesn't make sense for us to compete with the largest AI models, large language models. At the moment, it's better that let them do their job. Jet tip it, GPT five and the latest Gemina, they are amazing. And then there's next and next version. So basically, we can just use them already and have them build something new and just embed it in the application. Adil Saleh 10:41 Yes, of course, building, building, something on top of these is always, is always the real, real plan of all these, technology first, or AI first companies now, thinking about, as you mentioned, that you take the data a lot of these, B to B SAS companies in the first three years, they don't think about, you know, doing the mobile mobile app, although they can definitely have people consume the mobile apps, but they don't think about building any mobile app. The biggest reason is they think that web developer and iOS or mobile app developer is different, and they'll have to, of course, it's just going to be an extra cost, extra time, everything. So now, with this category, as you mentioned, moving really fast, you know, and evolving. How do you see what's your viewpoint on, you know, all these companies facing this challenging of not launching the mobile app, can do it. Let's say, if I'm ABS company, I give my website, maybe access to my product. Your AI builder analyzes all the interfaces, all the user experience and everything. How efficient is that's going to be the mobile app in terms of experience and functionality of the existing product? If we feed it, as you mentioned, you have an agent that actually learns from all the prompting and everything. So just keeping us in this use case, and most of these listeners, just explain. Kaius Meskanen 12:01 I think, I think this is the biggest question of all, like, when is mobile app useful, and how much does it cost? Does it make business sense for me? This is, I'm entrepreneur, your entrepreneur, and I'm sure there are a lot of entrepreneurs in your audience. So be so mobile apps, they really come with big business benefits. Most of the companies can somehow benefit from mobile apps. It really depends on what your company is doing. If your company is producing content, then mobile app is the most there you can create the best experience in mobile app in your mobile phone how to consume that content. If you have special functionalities, most likely they you can. You can build better experiences using the native capabilities of the phone than the web browser. Then again, like, how much does it cost? Well, it goes back to that. With the current tools, you can already build something very, very beautiful in one day. So that's the first investment you do, is use some of your time. Then Currently, our lowest pricing tier is 199 so $199 per month. But it's about to drop to zero and then start from $29 a month and so on. Why? Because we are enabling also the publishing of the application, but by anyone, so that you don't have to, like, buy our assistance at all. You can just do it yourself. And if you decide that you want some assistance, you can, then you can get that help if you if you need it. Now, if you're on the other if you're more established business, and you have customers, and you you produce content for the customers and services, most likely the application is the native mobile application is less the best place to do it and like, it's like, what you could get out of the box on the Day one, you can get a lot of things, all the structure of the application, which is super stable, used by millions of users and big companies like premier awards and Eurovision, Miss Universe, big TV broadcasters, small companies as well, just just Like the big ones, and we have customers on all continents. We what you can kind of start with is you get all the basic functionalities you can imagine in the application, for the content, for the structure, you can, you can you can build pay walls in app purchases. You can send push notifications. You can add maps, you can do a lot of things, and then when you go more and you get interactive tools like voting and polls and tools that can create stickiness with your customers. But then when you go more and more and more special few features, then it might be that you connect an existing third party provider, like for ticketing or for E commerce or for something, or you build it yourself, or you build it with AI and just connect it there. So we want to really enable an ecosystem where you can build the most premium applications out there, which we have been on the base call. We have been working long hours, but then you can really make it serve your own purpose. Adil Saleh 15:47 Absolutely on a fraction of a cost. And I love the fact that you're trying to make this, of course, the user experience for your customers pretty much sell short like and on the lowest price, dollar price. There is one thing that I love. And second thing is, you know, you're not jumping into website builders. There are so many, so much of noise. I know you've been there for, for almost a decade now. You must have tried a lot of things backstage, but sticking to one industry, one segment, niching it down and making it perfect. Now you're building. Good luck with that, by the way, the agentic frameworks, like the agents and copilots, which is, which is super cool. So what makes you excited, by the way, like you're, we're almost eight months down in this year in terms of product, in terms of industry. I know the AI is the excitement, but what you do with that as a founder is a real key. So what makes you excited, by the way? Kaius Meskanen 16:42 I think what's exciting about native mobile apps is that it's the it's already like, the most valuable channel to reach your customers across the world. People use almost five hours a day on their phones, doing something 90% of that time they use in native mobile apps, and 10% of that time they use in mobile browser. But that's the big picture, the the amount of money people companies spend in building and maintaining apps every year. It's It's somewhere in 260 billion at the at the moment, and in the next eight years, it's, it's going to grow to 660 billion, based on Statista. And so it's a growing market. People already spend most of their digital time in native mobile apps, at least when talking, I mean, when talking about their mobile phone time. And it's five hours a day of everyone's time. It's a massive time. It's It's massive. So, I mean, it's more about when you're an entrepreneur and you run your company, do you want your piece out of that time? It's people use apps because of the better user experience, easy access to the service, because you have basically the thumbnail like the app icon on your phone. You just click it, then you get push notifications about new content, or maybe your friend sent you a message, or your Uber ride is coming, so you get notifications that are so much more natural than emails. People feel that it's almost like a human sending you a message when you get relevant information in that format. So it's more about who's which companies are able to really, really, really kind of grow in that market. It's a growing market. There are, like 5 million apps in App Store, in Google Play. There could be much more in the coming years, because companies like Choicely, not only us, but companies like Choicely, will make it easier and cheaper to build the native mobile apps so it's more accessible for also smaller companies. And through that, historically, usually the market grows. Adil Saleh 19:10 Absolutely and the interesting fact is that you're now trying to build a seltzer model, a smaller scale model for SMB is not just like big companies, but SMBs. And then the big, next big challenge would be familiar to success of those customers. I just want to touch a little bit on that in the remaining time that we have. Like, what is customer success for you in a very specific way? Like, what are those like talking about post sales, like onboarding, what are those key action we want them to take. How long do you think they they should be called as successfully on boarded customers? What does like? What kind of initiatives are you guys taking? What kind of strategies or maybe playbooks you have to make sure that they are well adopted to the platform? They're consistently interacting with it, and of course, then getting well. You out of it. So, you know, when we started this podcast, it was more about customer success. We had, you name all the leaders you You will find them on our on our podcast, we talked about customer success in the past four years, and now it is even a bigger problem to retain the customer in revenue than acquiring customers. So what are you guys doing internally? What kind of tech stacks you have, you know, walk us through your customer success organization? Kaius Meskanen 20:25 For sure. So we have different kinds of customers. Some some are pretty much like self serving. They do their own thing. They learn things and they they invest their time to do things. Some customers value the service of experts helping them to build and manage a successful mobile app and make sure it gets people's attention. And if they have products they're selling, we help them to make sure the app sells. So we value very much efficiency. So we have, we have great app designers who can help in a couple of workshops, basically to help new customers build their applications, and eventually at workshop four or five, which are like one hour workshops, we can already together, publish the application in App Store and Google Play. After that, we give, or during during that time, we also give a training. It can be one or two hours where we make sure all the customers can use the basic tools, at least to some extent, so that the core, the core actions they need to do daily or weekly or monthly. They can do it themselves. They can always get help if they don't remember what to do. We have also built extensive manuals or tutorials that go, let's say, section by section, how to do things. Also after launching it's as important as building a good product a mobile app, is to get get it in people's hands. So we're pretty good at we're pretty good at it after launching a zillion apps. So we have, again, we have people who are capable to, like, great designers who can basically give you, like, a social media package of many different kinds of visual assets that you can place in your social media and emails and web pages and everywhere, we also build dynamic links, which you can then have a one click way for regardless of the phones or iOS or Android, so whatever, wherever you promote the application and The value proposition, you always have a one click way for people to get, get, get the app downloaded. And when things evolve, you can also create dynamic links that go to specific sections of the applications. So we have built those tools as well. So we we very much go hand in hand when we help our clients, we make sure their app gets, first the users, then we see statistics how the users behave. Then we start measuring the engagement, how much time they spend there. If there is some kind of service or product, we definitely start measuring how much the sales are through the application, and how can we make it as efficient as possible the process through discovery to kind of a user who frequently comes to the application and eventually converts into a paying customer. Adil Saleh 23:36 Gotcha. Very interesting. The one thing that I noticed is like for you as to crack the success of your customers is equally important than compared to like, how they're acquiring users. So your your success actually dependent on how they're acquiring or getting traction on their mobile apps that they're building on your platform. So do you have, like, second tier of user level sort of tracking to measure the success, as you mentioned that you you track the the interactions and the usage, and then, of course, their success around those apps. Let's say, let's say 10 out of five people build the apps that do nothing. You know, they don't, they don't get downloads. They don't get, you know, a lot of this. So how you're measuring those and trying to integrate and work through those five customers that are not being successfully, either launching or they're maybe there's something wrong that they're doing because they're not getting traction. And you mentioned the self serve model, I think I know that there, there's going to be a lot of people facing this problem, individuals, not technically people, that are building ads, but they don't know what to do next. Don't know what to do next. So what kind of workflow you have around that, since thinking of it as a as a sort of a low touch or hybrid touch sort of model, you cannot tap into 30,000 customers like that, like a white lab service. Do you have you got to have some sort of system, system or success tracking, or something like this, any technology? That you're using, or what is your workflow on those customers? Kaius Meskanen 25:03 Yeah, well, you get, I mean, we in a basic setup. We connect the all the applications to Google Firebase, where you get a lot of tools. You also get extensive Mobile App Analytics, where you can kind of make the most, you can instantly get the most valuable well statistics that kind of talk about the success. So of course, there are cases. There are a variety of cases of high success, low success, medium success. And I have learned, I have learned that it's not the technology you I don't think it's typically a technology problem if, if a product is not selling, or the app is not providing the traction that was It was hoped for. It could be more about it's really more about you. Based on my experience, it's more about sometimes the customer itself, who built the application, we give the help, we give the we give the support. But if, if there's no efforts and no like, not enough interest to do, you know, build things and throw ideas and, you know, wrap things around until things work, then I think it's more in that sector, because our technology gives you endless opportunities to wrap things around or change the appearance or so. But at the end, it's also about the end product, the pricing of the product, and what drives the incentive of that and the real customer buying that physical or digital product. So it, it's, it's a very, very, let's say there's, there are these variations, so many variations. Adil Saleh 27:02 Yes, yes. When you are there long enough you get to interact with, like, so many of us from so many experience. And being a founder, I know that I cannot be in your place, because you had like these experiences. You have learned, and I learned a lot of things in these years. And what you're saying is actually absolutely practical. It's not just about technology. It's about, you know how they're they're promoting it, and what kind of, maybe intuition that they have in the beginning, just like Amazon product, like, you gotta make sure that you invest time into hunting the product and get the right product. And this is a super superpower, you know, ecom, like, getting the right product. So this is half of the game, so perfect, so curious. I know that this has become so overwhelming. And just like any other company, you're also trying to make sell short models or AI, you know, agents or copilots to enable and make sure you tap in and go up market 10 years down. How do you see the growth year on year? Growth on your side? What kind of like, I know that you guys are lean team, less than 30 people for 10 years old company. It's really smart. So what are you guys thinking about, raising funds neck like, like, how you gonna go and expand the market into, you know, getting more bigger logos, or expand really, really fast? Because with this AI, there's going to be a cost. You got to make sure that you meet that as as I'm sure you must have these conversations with your CTO. So doing it, doing things that really cheap at scale, might be challenging for that. You got to make sure that you have the right, you know, acquisition channels and all of that. So what are you guys thinking in house, you know, sitting on a drawing board in terms of the commercial standpoint and acquisition raise funds. What are those conversations? Kaius Meskanen 28:48 Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the high, highest level of strategical thinking. So we have a very promising future. So we are launching a lot of things in the next three months regarding the SDK, so more tools for developers. It's kind of opening a different door how to use Choicely, we are working on the AI, so it will help a lot of it will be sort of a sort of extra employee from Choicely, helping to do quickly beautiful things and helping people to get started, especially in the first five minutes when you maybe you find us somewhere, you come and test Choicely, and then you will find it very, very appealing. How, how, how fast you can create a product, a mobile application, for you. So we have some very interesting ways how we're going to market this platform once we again upgrade our capabilities that are already there, but like we're opening these new capabilities with AI and for for developers with SDK, now we have, yeah. We have a team less than 30 for now. It's technology heavy, so most of our team are developers. We have a small business development team as well me and a few other people. We believe also that we're going to we're already talking with some large tech, tech platforms, very different kinds of platforms, where people build different things, and we're going to enable almost like one button, integrations from different platforms to create applications, just like we did. Adil Saleh 30:37 Gotcha So you know you're talking about once, while you're working at the launching the SDK, you're trying to partner up with companies like VIX. And you know, these builders like, wait, they can have like, embedded solution within their platform. Since I know people hate Vic that want, you know, people that want to customize their design and want a really good website talking about that VIX is not for them. They know it in the first 30 minutes that they can, of course, they can purchase domain or maybe something with VIX, but not design an entire website. Same goes for go ready. Has tried natives has tried to have their own hosting servers. They have their own builders, and they need a platform that embedded inside them where they can enable their customers to not just buy their domain or hosting, but they can build and host a website like WordPress and customize it as well. Kaius Meskanen 31:21 That's it, and this the way we build Choicely. It comes with absolutely no limitations. So you can build something very beautiful and functional on day one. But you what, if your plan is to grow some, build something for a large audience, you you're already on the lot the right platform. It can, it can take the 1 million or 10 million simultaneous users on day one and all these small things you need and open it's an open platform. So you can build anything right there. Maybe you know some new, nice tech company that builds something cool, just put it there. Adil Saleh 32:02 Yes, love it. Love it. You know, Kaius. I know that it's, it's been so, you know, insightful, having to dig in deep into your industry and what you're building. And I really, really respect the amount of time that you have spent on building this technology, right? I know this is one of the fewer platforms that that, that I can say and tell like I realized being been working on the SaaS for the last four years, that, hey, this is not a platform you can come and say, hey with AI rappers and all these thoughts. And then, you know, OpenAI, we can build it in one year, one or two years, it takes time to do it right. And you've done your course and shows you respect that. I wish you good luck for the years to come. Kaius Meskanen 32:42 Thanks, Adil. It was a pleasure to be in your show. Adil Saleh 32:45 Likewise, Bye, bye. Kaius Meskanen 32:47 Bye, bye.