AWS Summer Startups: Appscend

Over the summer months, we’d like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we’re profiling Appscend, from Bucharest, Romania!

Appscend is a sign that catching the “startup bug” and being able to run a high-tech company is possible waay outside Silicon Valley, in Romania, where startups don’t have the benefit of tapping into a support system and extensive mentorship. I spoke to Gabi Dobocan, Appscend Cofounder, who was quick to tell me that his small team enjoys the challenge and is eager to work at least 10 times as hard as their counterparts in other countries in order to compete. To date, they have received support from local angel investor and mentor, Peter Barta, and from an extended entrepreneur network from Western Europe. We wish Gabi and his team the best of luck :)

Appscend offers a series of products geared at enabling our customers to build rich mobile apps apps using an intuitive, customizable interface. Our target audience is made up of digital publishers and agencies, so our products need to be easy to use and offer a wide array of functionality: we offer a mobile CMS, accessible for anyone that doesn’t have a way to host their content elsewhere and have made it easy for users to import and export content. We help customers who build their mobile apps through Appscend track social activity around their content and we also offer them the ability to implement in-app purchases. In addition, to help our customers further monetize their mobile apps, we have enabled them to display ads inside their apps through an ad management server.

To build all these products, we use most of the cloud web services provided by Amazon Web Services and are delighted to call our implementation 100% AWSomeness.

Right now, we’re living our dream and working on our passion. It’s really what makes us happy, what makes us grow, and at the end of the (12 hour working) day, that’s all that matters. We survive, we take nothing for granted, and we do good with limited resources.

The mobile market is really still a young, fragmented market and we work hard to always be alert, listen and learn as much as we can. We’re probably gonna change a lot of this product in the next year, and we welcome that :) Challenging your own beliefs and being flexible and open-minded is the only real way to evolve I think – as a company and as a person.