Interview with Bob Lewis, CEO of SNAPin

SNAPin is one of the first companies to leverage the power of the mobile device itself, to resolve problems and to help the carriers drive revenue. Our company was founded in 2003 by Brian Roundtree, who is the founder and is a serial entrepreneur. Prior to this he founded Action Engine.

The company is privately owned, and is backed by venture and strategic investors. Brian was looking for something that solved some of the key issues for wireless carriers. There are two particular areas that they were challenged. One is the growing cost of supporting customers. Many people don’t realize that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of customers call their wireless carriers every month. The average cost of those calls is anywhere from four to six dollars a minute, so the amount of money a carrier spend on 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 million subscribers is very significant.

The other issue is that wireless carriers will invest a significant amount of money in their data networks. Of course, many of the devices that are coming out now that work on these networks and support data applications are much more complicated and require significant support in terms of supporting those devices and also in getting customers to utilize the specific applications is difficult.

We have come up with a client and software that address those issues. SNAPin is the leader in mobile international management that really allows the operators to interact with the subscribers in real time and in the context that their current subscribers utilize their devices. It’s based on a handset self-service product suite that interacts with the customer in terms of promotions or self-service customer care, as well as allowing the operator to deliver branded service right on the device.

We’ve split the product into a suite of three pieces. The self-service campaign, which providing the ability to guide customers through specific applications and teach them how to use them, as well as actually running campaigns on the device in a textural way when it’s appropriate to the customer.

What’s really powerful about this is that we see youth embracing many applications and new things very quickly. Teenagers and young people are really quick to teach each other and to show each other how to do things. But we as adults don’t tend to do that, and we tend to shy away from admitting that we don’t understand or don’t know how to do something. If somebody can accomplish this in the privacy of utilizing their own device, and learn how to utilize these applications, it’s very, very powerful, and carriers are very excited about this opportunity.

It has and the main reason is because the value proposition is fairly broad. We enable the carriers to lower their costs while also driving incremental revenue.

We tend to have many more people within the organization interested in what we are doing. Although it does make things a little bit more complex when you’re touching that many areas within the company.

Well, each piece of the suite can be purchased separately. So we approach it really with the carrier overall. I would say that today though that the area that is that where we get the strongest interest is in the customer care area.

The reason is that nobody’s been able to really break this paradigm yet in terms of customer care support to customer ratio. If you add 20% more customers you probably are going to have to add 20% more support, in the form of customer care reps, in the form of facilities, equipment, everything else that is required to support that subscriber.

There are a lot of companies out there that are selling solutions to help them increase their revenue. The thing that is very different about ours is that it helps them to sell everything that they already have and take advantage of providing that. We’re not really providing a new application for them to sell. We’re providing the ability for them to take the applications, that they have already made decisions on and that other companies have sold to the carrier, for the customers to embrace those and adopt those.

Your original question is that the area that probably provides the largest potential savings and potential impact on profitability of the carrier is solving the support and the cost to serve customer care area.

The customer knows their particular situation and their particular problems better than anyone else. So we really look to the customer to drive that exercise.

Generally, a sponsor within a wireless carrier will have in mind their long-term vision and long-term goals. This is something that’s very different. It’s bringing a level of customer relationship management to the device. There’s a certain amount of change management that’s required within the carrier world, and for their customers. It’s getting them to do things that are different than they do today.

We really look to this to be customer-driven, and we’ve found, so far, that’s been working extremely well.

Generally that happens automatically. Typically what we find is that within a carrier environment is that the communication spreads within the organization. We find ourselves very quickly – after the first couple of meetings – having both of those departments at the table talking about how these solutions might help them. And then they prioritize within their organizations what areas they really need to focus on first. So an awful lot of that just happens naturally within the carrier world.

One of the similarities is that McCaw and Cellular one were startups back in the mid-80s. We were dealing with technology which was new; we were dealing with product which was very new. Customers didn’t really see how this was going to work into their lives. When you talked to people back then they would make comments like, “Well, Bob, I’ve got a phone at my house and a phone at my office. I can’t imagine why I would need another phone.” Of course we see what’s happened today. That question has been answered about three billion times in the world – that’s about how many subscribers there are globally.

In terms of things that are different though, there were many things that were similar as we grew the business in terms having to find really talented people, people with vision, and people who were interested in doing something that was new and that was a risk. Many of the same challenges that every single startup has we certainly had.

I grew up with McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless, and you look back at the days of Xerox, was that in companies that size, you have an awful lot of specialty. You have people that would do many things. We know, those of us who are in startups, that you end up having to wear many hats. One of the great things about working in these kinds of environments is that rules aren’t tightly defined; that the ability to go outside the lines and expand your experiences and take advantage of the talents that many people have, do not just do something where it’s fairly narrow in scope.

It’s really exciting from that standpoint. You’re doing many things for the first time, which is always a challenge. When I joined here, I was one of the first 10 employees, and right now I think we’re close to 60. There are challenges that begin to occur without everybody sitting in the same room and overhearing every conversation. Now we also have an office in the UK. We have nine people over there. The complexity of the business continues to grow, as with every startup going through this growth stage as we are.

They have to be very passionate and excited about the technology that we have and the solution that we have for a wireless carrier. We’re looking for people who are willing to move into unchartered waters, to do something that’s never been done before, because what we’re offering a wireless carrier is totally new. It’s something that they haven’t done before and it requires vision and enthusiasm from the people that work here.

Obviously, we have small groups who really need to work as teams, and we need people that are willing to do pitch in and do whatever needs to be done with a level of ambiguity that you have in young, small organizations where everything isn’t clearly defined in terms of roles and responsibilities.

If you think back, there was a day when McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, VoiceStream, Nextel, US West Cellular (became Verizon) and Airtech were all headquartered here. You have a concentration of wireless talent in all aspects, everything from engineering, from IP capability to marketing and sales and business people, that all elected to, for the most part, many of them, to stay here in the Pacific Northwest, and specifically in the Puget Sound area, after these companies were sold and their headquarters were moved elsewhere. So I think that’s the reason that this area is probably one of the top three or four wireless capitals of the world. If you are going to be involved in wireless, you are either in Seattle, San Diego, or London, because that’s where the concentration of wireless power has grown.

The concentration of wireless talent is even significantly greater than it is down in Silicon Valley. This is clearly the headquarters for the US, in terms of wireless development and growth, and that’s why we see so many companies starting here. One of the other reasons is we have a very good angel community here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s really been very supportive of the growth of global startups.

It really does, and the thing is that we have also now, in addition to all this, you have Microsoft here who is developing mobile operating systems, and you’re seeing concentrations of equipment manufacturers starting to show up also here in the Pacific Northwest.

Our goal is really to be a global player. Today we have activity in Western Europe and North America, and that’s our focus today. Our goal is to move to Asia, Latin America, as well as to other parts of the world. So our goal really is to serve the wireless carriers globally, and to continue to provide solutions like the suite of products that we have today, as well as building on that. We are continuing to file IP in this area, as well as other areas in terms of what’s our future vision for what should be accomplished on the wireless handset in the years to come.

If we think about how far we’ve come in voice from the mid-80s to today, in terms of the level of service and quality, to the point where people today are giving up wired phones in a preference to utilizing their wireless, you can pretty much see the same thing occurred in the data. We are just beginning to have the networks perform at levels that are acceptable to everyone. The quality is there. It is continuing to improve. The speeds are there. The devices that we’re beginning to see are much more mature. Their capabilities are going to be significant.

I believe we’ll see that same kind of change in the next 10 to 15 years in wireless data that we saw in the last 15 years of wireless networks. We have a very exciting future ahead. Mainly the things that we do today, that we think of utilizing laptops or PCs, will be in a more mobile environment. And so it will be a combination of whether it’s the wireless networks of today or whether it’s the WiFi networks or whether it’s the WiNet networks or others that keep developing. We have a pretty exciting future ahead of us.