Building a mobile app without writing any code sounds ludicrous. Yappli makes it possible

Before embarking on his entrepreneurial pursuits, Yasu Ihara enjoyed a long and varied career, which started as the editor of Transworld Snowboarding magazine. He was then offered a job at Yahoo Japan, which at the time was dominating the internet landscape in the East Asian country and considered an exciting place to work. After dedicating five years of his life to Yahoo, Yasu switched to a digital marketing role for Citibank. However, something didn’t click. He yearned to get out of his comfort zone and do something he was really passionate about.

“The salary was good, but it wasn’t something I was looking for,” Yasu says of his stint at Citibank. “At the same time, me and Masafumi Sano were dabbling in building iOS apps. When our how-to-snowboard app was ranked at first position in the app store, we thought we could try to do much bigger things.”

Shortly after, Yasu and Masafumi co-founded their venture, Fast Media. The main product, Yappli, allows users to build a native app out of a website without writing a single line of code. Yasu says it “revolutionizes how businesses create and manage apps,” and can result in cost savings up to 80 percent.

DIY

Yappli can be used to make iOS and Android apps. It’s designed primarily for those who lack programming skills and helps them build an app through drag-and-drop functions. An array of templates, designs, and functions are supported. Once the app is ready, Yappli will upload it to the respective app store for review. “It’s very easy to manage. Anyone can update an app in real time, anywhere in the world,” explains Yasu.

It wasn’t easy for the entrepreneurs to get to where they are today. Yappli’s conceptualization came after several painstaking brainstorming sessions. This was in 2011 when Japan was reeling from the after-effects of a deadly tsunami and markets were collapsing. Yasu says they never gave up and believed in themselves. After two years, they were able to launch a beta version of their product.

The startup claims to have 5,000 registered users on the free trial package. Roughly 5 percent convert to paid users. Fees vary for the service. Small companies pay US$100 per month to use the service, while enterprise clients have to cough up more, about US$1,000. A total of 40 enterprise clients have signed up so far, including Coleman, Yahoo Japan, L’Oreal, and the SoftBank Hawks baseball team.

The Fast Media team says the business has grown by 78 percent from Q2 to Q3 2015, and revenue for the year is on track to increase by 300 percent compared to 2014. Apps developed for ecommerce clients have clocked in the highest revenues, with US$100,000 generated per month through this channel alone. Funding for the startup has come from a US$2.7 million series A round.

Feedback from clients is encouraging, the team says. Businesses see user retention rates in their apps are 10 to 20 times higher than on their websites. Some of that may be due to the smartphone boom and consumer habits changing to doing more things on mobile phones.

“When you hear ‘easy to create,’ you may think the quality is bad. But we focus on native app UI/UX within the Japanese craftsman style. We [also] provide advanced technology such as geo-fencing, iBeacon, and deeplink. It is all implemented within Yappli […] and we are proud to see many famous domestic and international brands using the product,” says Yasu.

There are plans to scale rapidly. While concentration remains on selling the product to startups doing ecommerce and O2O, Yasu says there’s plenty of opportunity. “Mobile ecommerce alone is a US$60 billion market in Japan and US$800 billion globally. Even if 5 to 10 percent [of that] is invested in software, our potential market size is still huge.”

Today, the Yappli team is presenting on the Arena stage at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015. The judges were curious to know about Yappli’s traction so far, conversion from free trial to paid users, and the competitive landscape it operates in. Surprisingly, only a few questions were proffered, and the judges opted not to utilize their total allotted quota of 5 minutes. Yasu explained they’re catering to big companies and premium clients, which is different from other startups in the space, who mainly target small businesses. However, he didn’t reveal specific numbers pertaining to active users and revenue growth.