Applancer, a startup at the heart of Vietnam’s mobile explosion

Last year, when Flappy Bird exploded Gangnam Style-esque onto smartphones worldwide, mobile app fever hit Vietnam. Within a few months, mobile app development was sexy – you could be a millionaire. It’s a refrain still heard today in the timbre of events throughout Vietnam. They’re always mentioning Flappy Bird. At the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit, former ambassador to the EU Madam Ton-Nu-Thi Ninh said on stage that Vietnamese youth ought to have a sense of pride about Nguyen Ha Dong, Vietnam’s mysterious creator of Flappy Bird. She admonished those who downplayed his accidental fame and encouraged the audience to look up to his mobile success.

It’s no surprise when I talk to friends who work in the mobile business that they hear stories of students and mobile developers who are quitting their jobs or leaving school to find their Flappy Bird, hoping to strike big on the App Store lottery.

But all of this eagerness and pride in Vietnam’s mobile industry might just be a lot of hot air that will fizz out. Although Vietnam’s tech industry is arguably one of the most mature and well developed compared to its neighbors, there are serious hurdles. The smartphone penetration only recently broke 50 percent of the population, consumers are still not familiar with using apps besides games, and payment remains a barrier for making money on mobile. In other words, the local market is still a struggle, dominated mainly by mobile ads and games. It’s tough.

It makes sense then why Vietnam’s mobile developers’ most reliable source of income is client and outsourcing work. There are mobile app studios you can hire, but what about all those independent mobile developers in Vietnam not part of studios? This is the space that Applancer, a new freelancing and recruitment platform dedicated to mobile app developers, comes in. Indeed, on the surface, it appears that Applancer may be at the heart of Vietnam’s mobile ecosystem. In fact, it might even be creating it.

Nguyen Huu Binh, CEO of Applancer, Vietnam’s first and only mobile dev freelancing platform, strikes me as a sturdy yet cheerful founder. His built frame and crew cut is somehow softened by his nerdy glasses and engineering demeanor. Binh used to work at FPT, Vietnam’s largest tech company, as the the head of mobility. After his stint, Binh started his own mobile outsourcing studio, where he got a glimpse of the struggles of mobile app developers. He lives and breathes mobile. His startup is only seven months old but there’s an air of confidence to him that makes you feel like Applancer was an inevitability.

In April, when I first met Binh, we met at Applancer’s humble office tucked away in District 10, about 40 minutes from the city center of Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam’s bustling metropolis. He greeted me with a smile and a firm handshake. Applancer’s office sits in a corner of the southern branch office of Appota, one of Vietnam’s dominant mobile platforms. It’s a logical fit for Appota, which was an early seed investor into Applancer. Appota is keen on encouraging Vietnamese mobile developers to produce more original content and apps for the local market.

According to Do Tuan Anh, founder of Appota, he’s keen on the partnership. His vision was that the partnership between Applancer and Appota would lead to a strong mobile development community that can produce content for Vietnamese users. Applancer, if successful, could play a meaningful part in growing Vietnam’s mobile developer community. And it just might be in the right spot at the right time. Binh elaborates:

The key for us has been the growth of Vietnam’s mobile app development ecosystem. When all the pieces of the puzzle come together, we’re hoping more developers can get jobs and their skills are ready for the world stage.

To get on the platform, developers must submit a form, a portfolio of prior work, and a video of themselves, then the Applancer team uses this to determine if they’re ready to be listed online. In addition to the freelancers, there are also 20 studios listed on the platform that can take on larger projects that freelancers cannot.

At the moment, Applancer has over 15,000 mobile app developers on its platform. Three thousand of those developers it added in the last few months. In a country where there are tens of thousands of engineers being trained annually, this might be a drop in the bucket, but the engineers on Applancer’s platform are vetted by the 15-person Applancer team daily. Binh tells me that Vietnam has likely over 200,000 engineers and mobile developers only account for about 10 percent of that. If these numbers are to be believed, Applancer is on pace to have a database of nearly all of Vietnam’s mobile developers by the end of the year. Albeit only a fraction of them will display publicly on the site. These are impressive numbers for a startup that’s only over half a year.

Applancer’s ecosystem?