Priori Data embraces the app economy

By receiving data from about 5,000 apps operating worldwide, Priori Data is mapping the mobile app world.

What is happening in the mobile app world? Is there a way to unravel the tangle around apps’ performances and revenues to visualize opportunities? Priori Data offers a solution that embraces the entire app economy.

Before introducing the company, it might be helpful to clarify the meaning of ‘app economy’. Since 2008, the world has experienced a move from web-based  to app-based services. The app economy encompass all economic activity related to mobile apps (e.g. sales of apps and the ad revenues).

The shift began when Apple opened the App Store back in 2008. As of October 2014, 85 billion apps had been downloaded from the App Store alone. This, of course, leaves behind an enormous flow of insightful data.

However, once an app is on the market, app publishers and companies find it complicated to figure where to direct their focus for the next step. This is where Priori Data enters the picture.

Systematisation of tons of data

Priori Data is a market analytics company with a data-centric approach that goes beyond statistics. The company makes it possible to gain practical market insights in order to better invest and make decisions with your own mobile products, customers, and investments.

The company was founded in Berlin in June 2013 by former investment banker Patrick Kane (CEO), who saw the need for better data and greater transparency in the app stores. He teamed up with Michelle Tran (Director of Data Science) and Anders Lykke (Head of Sales), and while much back then they worked using Excel sheets, the company has since developed their own fully operational system to handle vast amounts of data.

“We initially offered highly customized 1:1 reports delivered via Excel/CSV. This approach resonated particularly well with leading management consultancies that typically need answers to specific and highly complex questions while always working to meet a very tight deadline. It was a really good business, but it did not scale to meet the growing market demand. So for the past 18 months, we have been fully focused on transitioning into becoming a SAAS provider with an online product to help more people make better sense of the app economy. That obviously also means investing in building out a technical team, and today we are 15 people – most of which are developers or data scientists.”

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

Besides giving clients insights into own apps, Priori Data also gives them the chance to explore the performance of competitors.

The company’s core belief is that only data has the power to explain and predict, and therefore it leads us to the best decisions for developing business opportunities. Priori Data receives anonymised data from about 5,000 mobile apps to build knowledge in this area. The data includes information about the companies’ installs and revenue across 55 different countries and helps Priori build statistical models for estimating installs and downloads for every other app in the app store.

Knowledge sharing between developers

“In the beginning we thought we could somehow start building a data business without cooperating directly with those who actually have the data, the app developers. But we realised that this wasn’t possible,” Anders Lykke says.

In July 2014, Priori introduced a data for data model for app developers. In return for exchanging anonymised data, app developers get free access to the part of the platform that they help improve data for: A partnering app developer with an app in the Lifestyle category on iOS has free access to Priori´s estimates across 50+ countries for every other Lifestyle app – free of charge.

Organisations that cannot exchange data can pay to access the platform. These clients include consultancies, investors, advertising technology providers, and media agencies.  The platform can assist with lead generation (i.e. targeting of developers based on current performance), identification of investment opportunities, and market sizing (i.e. the total size of the market for Kids Games and how it is evolving over time).

With their user-centric platform, it is easy to visualize information by simply filtering by top performers, new entrants, or fastest growers, and narrowing the range by country, category, and business model to better understand how to drive performance.

Meet Anders Lykke at TechBBQ tomorrow May 20, tickets are still available here