Web Summit 2017: Get Social CEO Jeroen Bouwman on app discovery, making hard decisions, and saying no to machine learning

“App discovery is fundamentally broken,” says Jeroen Bouwman, the CEO of marketing startup Get Social. With 5,000 apps entering the Apple store a day and only a tiny percentage of those apps being featured a year, banking on Apple to promote your app is foolish. “Hope is not a strategy,” he notes. With paid user acquisition also getting increasingly expensive, Bouwman says the easiest way to get out in front out potential customers is to leverage the social networks of one’s users. If people love your app, he says, they’ll want to tell people, and products like ours make it easy to share the word with your friends.

Listen as Bouwman tells AWS about the original idea for Get Social, how he successfully pivoted from being a consumer-facing company to a B2B product, and why machine learning is not for every startup.