Appify

Jen Grant joined Appify in February 2020, fresh off the massive sale of Looker to Google where she served as CMO leading the marketing efforts for Google Apps, Gmail, and Google Books Search. She had won Google's prestigious Founders Award for taking Gmail out of beta in a global campaign. When she met Hari, Appify's founder and former co-founder of ServiceMax (sold to GE for $1 billion), she saw something special: a platform solving a real problem.

Appify launched in 2017 as a no-code platform for building business applications, positioning itself as the "Squarespace for business apps." The company took a different approach than competitors like BuildFire—focusing on empowering non-technical users (the actual people who needed the apps) rather than requiring translation through developers and traditional coding. By the time Jen joined, the platform had been running for roughly three years with a small but engaged customer base.

The company's initial go-to-market strategy targeted field sales and field service workers—essential workers who needed to be efficient in the field. COVID-19 actually validated this focus: medical equipment, construction tools, and service technicians all had to keep working while minimizing time on job sites. Jen found about 30 early customers when she arrived, though she notes that not all of them represented product-market fit. By the time of this interview (late 2020), they had grown to about 45 customers, with the first cohort beginning to show some natural churn as expected.

Appify's land-and-expand model showed early promise. Enterprise customers averaged $12,000 annual contract value (ACV), while SMBs ranged from $1,500–$3,000, bringing the overall average customer to roughly $5,000 annually ($400–$500 per month). Jen and the team had just started their formal sales process in Q4 2019—before that, growth had been more organic. By Q2 and Q3 2020, they began seeing expansion revenue as initial customers stayed happy and started using more of the platform. However, the company was still in the "figuring out stage," with only four quota-carrying sales reps plus a strategic account executive. The team didn't yet have repeatable unit economics, so they were running light sales compensation ($50–$60k range) to stay neutral until they could prove the motion worked.

Appify had just closed a Series A and extension round totaling $11.45 million ($8 million base + $3.45 million extension in summer 2020). With 45 people on staff—28 engineers split between Bangalore and a smaller US go-to-market team—the company was on track to hit their goal of $250,000+ annual run rate by year-end 2020. Jen brought in her experience from Looker and Box to build a scalable go-to-market function, betting that the platform's ability to solve any mobile or desktop app use case would eventually power massive expansion.