Guest: David Lieb, CEO and co-founder of Bump
Producer/host: Arman Suleimenov
Mountain View, CA
December 8, 2011
Bump is one of the most popular free iOS apps of all time (more than 65 million downloads, 7th in US, 3rd in Japan). Bump is the mobile application which lets two smartphones to share contact information / schedules / photos / app recommendations / etc. by simply bumping phones together. After the recent partnership with PayPal, you now can exchange money using Bump. Bump is funded by Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Ron Conway, Ram Shriram and the others.
Questions addressed in this interview:
- What is Bump?
- The origins of the idea for Bump
- How to start a startup: 2 ways startups are formed
- YCombinator experience: launching before applying
- Make something people want
- How did Bump look like on the YC demo day?
- Challenges of the network effects product: from the risk to the asset
- Thoughts on NFC (Near Field Communication)
- Closest pair problem from Computational Geometry
- Retention rate and usage across different features
- Countries where Bump is big: US, UK, Japan
- Reasons why Bump is the 3rd most downloaded mobile app of all time in Japan
- Stats: the total number of downloads, the number of active users in the last 3 days
- The key lesson learned as the first time entrepreneur
- Technology stack: Objective-C, Java; C and Python on cloud servers
- Hiring at Bump
- Applications built on top of Bump API
- 5 whys: underneath any technical problem lies the human problem
- Viral engine growth at Bump
- Blogs and books: Paul Graham’s essays, TechCrunch, Ben Horowitz’s blog; ‘The Facebook Effect’, ‘Emotional Intelligence’, ‘Steve Jobs’
- The vision for Bump
Click here to see the other episodes of Princeton Startup TV.
