Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast. Today I’m speaking with Logan Fields, a visionary entrepreneur and tech innovator renowned for his pioneering work in the digital landscape as a founder of AppU in 2014. Logan embarked on a transformative journey that propelled the company to remarkable heights, including a powerhouse team of over 30 professionals that consistently deliver cutting-edge software solutions to a diverse clientele. Logan, how are you doing?
Logan: I’m pretty good, man. How are you?
Dave: I’m doing well, thank you for being on the show. I’m curious to learn more about your journey with AppU, which if I’m not mistaken, is already celebrating 10 years. Congratulations on that. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into the space.
Logan: Sure, yeah. So, we started 10 years ago, right? And I had started my own app just in. I had a job in the nonprofit world and I wasn’t making any money at all. I was super poor and had started my own app. That’s really early, 10 years ago it was really early in the app world. So, I went through that process, got it done, and it was really interesting. I just saw a gap in the market; there weren’t many development agencies like there are today. The only development agencies that existed were like corporate service agencies that were charging millions to big companies to build something totally different than what we do, which is more of a six-figure engagement. So, I went door to door to businesses, took my vacation week (I couldn’t afford a vacation anyway), printed the worst half-sheet flyer you’ve ever seen, and went door-to-door to businesses and met the business owners, sold some apps, took the money from the initial sales to start the company, and then we started building apps.
Dave: Awesome, man. Yeah, it’s cool. I started my first software business in 2014 as well, and you just forget, like, it’s only 10 years ago, but it was just a very different time. There just weren’t as many SaaS apps; there were still a number of desktop apps kind of out there. And just in general, there weren’t as many apps, period. Whereas nowadays, it just feels overwhelming how many apps there are. And just like how much that space has grown. You’re at 30 people now, and obviously, the team has grown. What has it been like growing the team? What have been some of the milestones in terms of the company like that sort of organizational structure that you passed through along the way? What types of challenges?
Logan: So, yeah, growing a team from zero to 50 is interesting, but also you have to consider how technology has changed massively in 10 years. So, it’s been a lot of challenges getting through that. We’ve had to learn how to be good at design, how to be good at frontend code, backend code, system architecture, project planning. So, yeah, it’s been really interesting. Some of the biggest challenges were learning how much to charge; that was one of the first ones, ’cause we started kind of cheap. I was also new to business, and I didn’t understand that being cheap is a dumb strategy. You should be the most expensive, like if you’re a service agency, you 100% should be the most expensive, or you’re fighting an uphill battle; you’re completely disadvantaged. So, once we figured that out and we stopped charging like, first, it was like $10,000, then it was eventually $50,000, once we started charging like $200,000, it was like, okay, now we can actually properly service the project, we can staff it, we can pay the highly paid people that need to get paid, and we can pull out appropriate amounts of gross and net margin. So that was one of the big things, understanding that. And I would say this, by the way, for anybody that’s in a service agency, so marketing or development, you should be expensive. Now we are one of the most expensive options, that’s by design. But you also have to be able to justify that, right? Like, you can’t just charge a high price; you have to be actually excellent at what you do. So, that was one, learning how much to charge. And then, how to charge like the finances of it, how to invoice all of that, and not doing like net 90s and stuff like that, that just really slaps your business in the head, you know what I mean? So those are like some of the technical things on the finance side, and then on the actual development side, finding developers that have a critical mass of skill isn’t hard, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is being good at design, and the hardest part of software development is project management, and is also the most important part. So now we have, and it’s taken time, we are, like, processes and systems is our religion. So we have everything SOP’d like crazy, it also allows us to run fast, by the way. So once we got good at project management, we started to be able to move fast. So now we’re building apps in 100 days or less. So you know, project and those are thousand man-hour projects for reference, they’re not small, they’re big custom software development projects. And so, other companies that are taking like six to 12 months, we’re doing in 100 days, and that is because we are the absolute best at project management, like, that is the reason. So, so that was the biggest challenge, was becoming great at project management, which I would say took us six or seven years honestly before we were at that point.
Dave: How do you as a CEO identify the problems in your organization and determine how to fix them? Is it through customer feedback? Is it through experiencing it yourself, maybe trying to do some things internally? And then you know, is it just, hey, this is I’m going to come up with this project management process or system that I think is good, or are you relying on communities, mentors, coaches, consultants? How do you kind of go about it?
Logan: Yeah, I mean, it is contextual, it’s like case by case. Like some of the bigger stuff, um, when I say bigger, I mean higher level, some of the higher-level stuff like how much should you charge, that is that that’s more like learning from, well, yourself, like really being introspective about what’s happening, being and considering what’s happening, because like experience is not… the most experienced people aren’t the best at what they do, let’s be super clear about that. Most of the people who are really, really experienced have just taken more years to enforce bad habits and bad skill sets. The way you become great is by reflecting on your experience, which almost nobody does. So, anyway, at a high level, reflecting on what’s going on, which means that you also, as a CEO, cannot pack your schedule back to back, that not long term, anyway. There are seasons, to be fair, but long term, like you have to have cushion to where your mind is actually able to reflect on what’s happening. And so pricing is one of one of the things that came from just reflection, right at a high level. And then maybe more specifically, how we bill, that is from mentors. Like, we’re billing weekly, we bill weekly, and that is something amazing for agency cash flow, by the way, like every agency should be doing it, and that’s from mentors. Most things, though, like what makes us great at project management is the fact that we have feedback loops built in. So, so we’re building sprints, right, which are 10-day sprints, two-week sprints, and so 10 business days, yeah. And through that, every week, the client is seeing new work, right, which is a bit unique. It depends on the situation, but a lot of developers, they’re making you wait quite a while, sometimes to the very end, to see anything substantial, and then the owner goes, oh no, what is this? What you want is you want to hit feedback loops as often as possible, internally and externally, um, without overscoping everything, that’s also, you don’t want to have so many SOPs that you can’t even follow them, that that’s the thing. But so week, we’re having client check-ins, and we’re showing client deliverables too, and they’re testing stuff and all of that. So the problems that we’re running into are typically say two to 5% problems, they’re not 90% problems, right? So we’re able to pivot, pivot, pivot as we go. So you just want to build in your business feedback loops, and that’s how you can be proactive and avoid problems, and then you’re also not able to just correct the deliverable, but you’re able to keep correcting and perfecting your processes too.
Dave: Nice. Technology development is a space that’s changing rapidly, maybe even more so today than ever before. With 50 people on the staff, you’re going to have some people that their skill sets maybe are no longer in demand the way they were before. How are you seeing the landscape changing, and how do you as an organization steer the ship to make sure you’re still relevant? Is that a case of bringing on new talent, is it professional development making sure people are learning, how do you go about it?
Logan: So, one thing, like with AI, for example, in our context, it’s not nearly as far along as people imagine. People comment sometimes, be like, ah, ChatGPT can do that. It’s like, no, it can’t, it cannot. But let’s just say, let’s zoom out for a sec. Let’s say you could snap your fingers right now and have AI create code, have AI code and design your app right now just with a prompt in GPT. One is you would have to know how to write that prompt, first of all, let’s be clear, it can’t do that, but let’s say it could. First, you would have to know how to write that prompt, which is a skill, that the ability to write that type of prompt with AI and to walk alongside AI to get the outcome you need is a six- or seven-figure skill, it’s not a beginner-level skill. So that’s first. Secondly, you still have to connect all of the pieces, like you have to connect it to a payment processor, you have to create the servers and the system architecture, and you have to optimize the costing of the servers. There are so many pieces to where, um, yeah, we’ll just keep evolving, and eventually, if AI can do all of the coding and all of the design and stuff, we would essentially become consultants and project managers and like backend support, which I’m not worried about, we would still charge six figures for that. Now, to answer your question of like, do we wind up having to churn out people, not yet. AI and other tools are not far along, not enough yet to where that’s necessary. Now, that said, we’re doing super custom stuff, okay? There so, so we’re not doing low code stuff. So if somebody comes to us with a solution that can be built on like bubble.io, I tell them to go to bubble.io and hire a bubble developer for that. We’re doing the super big, super custom stuff. So as low code, no code, low code gets better, then maybe the threshold of the projects that we’re taking is evolving, but not much, man, not yet. We’re probably a few years away from that being a major thing.
Dave: Interesting. For people that want to know more about you, the app guys, where should they go? How should they get in touch?
Logan: Okay, yeah, go to theappuguys.com, um, and you can also see a lot of good content about tech and being an app owner on my Instagram, Logan theappguy. Thanks so much for being on the show, Logan. Appreciate it.
Logan: Thanks, man.