Interview was originally published on Siftery Stories – here

Appocalypsis is a SaaS application for website owners, developers or marketers to create & manage widgets which helps with conversion of their websites. It then gathers important analytics about how their widgets are progressing.

Kevin William David interviewed Vicky Dallas, CEO of Appocalypsis to know more.

Hi Vicky, So tell us about what you are working on?

Appocalypsis is a set of Conversion Rate Optimisation & Lead Generation Tools. We provide tools/widgets to:

1. Communicate your marketing messages in an efficient way
2. Enhance your e-mail lists and as a result boost your conversions.
3. Turn your site’s visitors into MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQL (Sales Qualified Leads)

Actually, it is about engaging your visitors across your sales funnel.

Apart from the well known Popups, Overlays, TOP + Bottom Bars, Countdowns we are also offering new types of Widgets which will help Business Owners and Marketers with Marketing Automation and will also provide inspiration to them to decide what types of campaigns they should run on their online Businesses.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

There are two main reasons we got involved into this. First of all Appocalypsis was build by 9AM LABS — a Web Agency building Tailor-Made web applications.

Many of our customers requested us to implement widgets on their websites in order to promote various activities. This is the reason we initially built Appocalypsis. To give Business Owners and Marketers the power to communicate their messages without the need of a developer or any technical expertise.

After our initial launch we realized that there was more to the problem that we had originally identified. Marketers and Business owners now had the tools, however they did not have either the experience or the inspiration to build campaigns. This is why we have build the largest widgets templates library in order to provide them will ideas, and solutions, apart from just the tools.

How is Appocalypsis different from what already exists in the market?

There are amazing tools out there that compete with Appocalypsis. Some are Sumo, GetSiteControl, AddThis.com. What we provide and differentiates us from the competition is our daily growing templates library.

People don’t lack tools, they lack of inspiration and widgets that will follow their business lifecycle. Special promotions, sales, new stores, click baits, ebooks and so many reasons for widgets not only to exist but to evolve together with their brand. As an example, within the following month our new set of unique widgets will be another differentiation point from our competition.

Our support team is also very strong and our customers really appreciate that. Our response time is super fast and we try to provide customized support to each of our customers. If a customer does not find a widget that works for them via our templates library we are always around to create a custom design based on what each customer has in mind.

Last but not least, we offer what we call Beamers. You can place any widget you have created in other websites that you do not own (for earned media). A Beamer link is created that you can share on social media with your widget on it.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Appocalypsis?

Appocalypsis is currently being used by the following segments:

1. Marketing Agencies who use our tools to provide value to their customers. One of our early adopters was Growthrocks — Growth Hacking Agency, who have been with us from the very beginning
2. Then we have Website Owners of all verticals (Fashion, cosmetics and more) and stages (early stage, pre-launching, growing)
3. E-Shops (they use Appocalypsis to promote their Promo Codes, Sales, and to Build their E-mail List) — Pinelopifashion.com, Dangerousminds.gr
4. Publishers (they use Appocalypsis in their digital properties for List Building and for Advertising) Palo.gr, Startup.gr, Eurohoops.net, Marieclaire.gr, Madamefigaro.gr
5. Other Websites: Corporate Websites and Marketplaces (Food Delivery: delivery.gr, Marketplace: Paramana.eu)

How are your customers using Appocalypsis? Could you share a few different use cases?

Our customers use Appocalypsis to:

1. Communicate Brand News and Promotions
2. Inform Visitors about their Facebook and Instagram profiles
3. E-mail List Building
4. Advertising

Have there been unique use cases for Appocalypsis that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Some of our customers sense of design truly rocks. We get 30% of our design ideas based on how our templates are used. The way Publishers are using our templates to serve Ads on their websites was another unexpected use of Appocalypsis which opened up for us a market that we hadn’t thought of. For example we introduced interactive feedback widgets for people to tell us their opinion for a topic during a basketball game.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We provide White Label plans for an extra fee. For all non white label plans we add in our widgets our signature: Widget by Appocalypsis. That brings new customers to us without the need to do any advertising at all. We have also developed a semi-automatic way to inform people who post their projects on Product Hunt, Beta list and similar websites about our Pre Launch widgets templates library. That seems to convert pretty good!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Apart from various minor technical challenges, one of our biggest non-technical challenge was to prioritize what needs to be done first. Our customers ask for new features all the time, and we love delivering the features we are asked for as fast as possible.

However building features is not strategically-wise our top priority right now! Providing awesome new templates is our main focus. In order to help us with prioritizing what needs to be done first we’ve built an internal system where we record all the features that we have been asked to create and we have build an internal Algorithm that measures the weight of importance of each feature. So. feature prioritization is done 90% for us and we just follow the results/rules. There are a few cases that we ignore what our own algorithm says. We are human after all 🙂

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

We have not yet build many integrations on Appocalypsis. We have a Daily Slack Notification report, a Daily Widget Analytics E-mail, Mailchimp Integration for Form Widgets.

What is coming up next is Leads to E-mail and integration with Zapier.

Later on we are preparing to provide our customers information about the e-mails they collect (who is behind each e-mail — the person or/and the business).

Before we finish, What are the topproducts that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• The minute we walk into the office we launch Slack. We absolutely love Slack. We communicate via Slack about everything. Slack is installed on our mobile devices and I would say slack runs 24/7 🙂
• We use SendGrid to send all e-mails via Appocalypsis and Mailchimp for our Newsletters and Product updates.
• We use Google analytics, Hotjar, Mixpanel to get meaningful insights about our visitors.
• We use Clearbit in order to get as much information as possible about new sign ups.
• We use Viral-loops for our referral campaigns.
• We use Siftery to monitor our competition :).
• We always seek for new tools that will make us more productive/efficient and new tools which will bring more value to our customers via Appocalypsis.