Fliplet

How long does it take to develop a mobile app? Six months? Six weeks? We meet the company that says you can do it in six hours

How long does it take to develop a mobile app? Six months? Six weeks? We spoke to the British company that says you can do it in six hours using its WYSIWYG app development platform.

You’re the head of legal affairs for Big Shiny Corp. You want a mobile app for your team of in-house lawyers, so that should a legal emergency occur out-of-hours, they can answer a few simple yes/no questions and know exactly which procedures to follow and who to call.

You approach the head of IT. He sucks his teeth, points to a long list of jobs queuing from across the company and assigns you a ticket. You and he both know that’s the last you will ever hear of it, but this is the charade you must go through.

Ian Broom helps companies cut through the red tape. At the turn of the decade he was one of a gazillion digital marketing agencies in London, when he kept getting asked the same question by clients: can you help us make an app? He could have instructed his team to carry on making apps for clients, pocketing a nice fee every time the client wanted that app updated.

Instead he decided to do something radical, and set out to build the “WordPress of apps” – a platform that would allow customers to design their own apps using a WYSIWYG editor. Even though he initially set out to target small businesses, he was soon counting some of the country’s biggest corporations among his clientele. We caught up with Ian to find out how this transformation happened.

Reinventing the company

If necessity is the mother of invention, in Fliplet’s case it was the mother of reinvention. “There are a lot of digital agencies in London and I was kind of struggling to understand how we could differentiate ourselves,” said Broom, recounting the period before the company switched direction. “Around the time I started to ask myself that question, clients started to ask us ‘can you help us build apps?’. It became very obvious very quickly that customers didn’t understand what apps were. They didn’t understand the complexities.” What’s more, those clients were sick of banging their head against a brick wall when it came to either developing those apps internally or paying an agency to do it. “They could go and talk to IT and that’s a six-month black hole before you get a response, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance whether it’s going to be positive or negative. The question is: do you really want to blow six months when you have no control over the outcome?” Agencies, on the other hand, were super-keen to build apps for their clients – and super-keen to reap incremental income for little effort, too. Broom talks of the problems faced by one of his biggest clients. “The app they wanted was a business information tool, a reporting app, and they knew that they wanted to change the content every six weeks. They knew if they went with an agency, they’d be on the hook for an ongoing day rate to continue to maintain the app.” The cost would quickly outweigh the business benefit. So Broom decided to change the model. At the time, his company was building websites for clients using WordPress. The sites were heavily customised and looked nothing like the average WordPress blog to the end user, but the client had a simple, familiar content management system that they could use to update the content whenever they liked, without having to pay the agency every time they wanted to add a new article or tweak a page. “We knew there was nothing like that in apps,” said Broom. “So we used that as inspiration and said ‘could we

create the WordPress of apps?’ We would help customers get up and going really quickly, really cost-effectively, but they would be in charge of maintaining the app and updating the app, so they would be off the hook for really high ongoing retainers.”

Thinking big

It’s fair to say Broom didn’t initially realise the scale of the opportunity he had created with Fliplet. The company originally set out to target SMBs, because it was a small client that originally asked for help with building apps and Broom wrongly assumed that big firms would turn their nose up at the idea of building apps themselves. “We thought let’s go after the small- and medium-sized business market, because big businesses… could afford the £500-a-day contractors. They are not going to come and play around with an off-the-shelf product that builds apps. They will want an enterprise-grade solution.”

The company built a sales website specifically targeting SMBs, so was a little surprised when the first firm to make an enquiry about the product was Sky, the country’s biggest pay TV provider. “We were in two frames of mind. Do I tell them we’re a small and medium business offering or do I just shut up?” Broom held his nerve, and now the client list includes names such as Marriott Hotels, Tata Communications and Premier Oil. The big firms love Fliplet because it helps them bypass the internal roadblocks, allowing them to quickly build apps without having to go through eight layers of internal sign-offs. Fliplet Studio is a WYSIWYG editor that allows users to drag elements such as forms, videos, buttons, charts and panels straight into the app interface, allowing people with no previous experience to create an app from scratch in only a few hours. Sky, for example, told Broom that Fliplet is so easy to use that it gets its graduate trainees to build the apps.

Is there not a danger that handing over app creation to non-designers will result in a UX car crash? Broom insists it isn’t a big problem, because people are already preconditioned to keep things simple on mobile. He draws a comparison between Outlook on the desktop, which “has a million buttons”, to the Outlook mobile app, which has “maybe ten”.

“We’ve completely accepted that,” said Broom. “What most people do with a mobile app is they start simple. And that’s actually the basis of most good UX on mobile.”

Furthermore, the apps companies produce with Fliplet don’t tend to be public-facing. Instead, they’re used almost as substitute intranets, with apps for in-house training, financial reporting, sales CRM and health and safety. Fliplet Studio also makes it easy for app creators to share their designs for user testing, allowing colleagues to preview the app before it’s released to the company at large. “User testing prevents bad UXs,” Broom insists.

The next big thing?

Broom has already demonstrated his ability to pivot a company in a new direction when he senses an opportunity. So is he tempted to divert some of Fliplet’s developer resources towards the upcoming voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant? He’s in no hurry.

“Enterprise mobile apps are still in their infancy,” he said. “If you had a mate who worked at Deloitte and sat down with him at a pub one night and said ‘show me what Deloitte gives you to be more effective’ and he got his work phone out of his pocket… I think you’d be surprised at how few, if any, solutions they had.

“The next big thing isn’t all of this sexy stuff [such as Alexa],” Broom claimed. “It’s actually about just figuring out how to use the technology they’ve had in their pockets for the past five years.”

And while Broom says devices such as the Echo speaker have quickly gone mainstream because of their frictionless setup and learning curve, he says enterprises simply don’t move at the same speed as consumers. “We offer a product that enables you to build an app in a couple of hours, and then we get put through two weeks of due diligence on ISO 270001 and supplier documentation to begin working with companies,” he said.

“They [enterprises] need suppliers to come along and show them ‘this is how you do stuff really rapidly’ but they still need suppliers to conform to these big business processes. Companies deliberately don’t move at breakneck speed because of the risk and security implications that they’ve got to balance out.”

Instead, the company will be focusing on expanding its US operations – which currently amount to a single employee on the west coast – and pursuing a second round of funding. Fliplet, meanwhile, continues to almost sell itself. “The product generally spreads virally across the business,” said Broom. “You might buy today, but we might be training three of your colleagues next week.” We’re all app developers now.