Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 49Find Your Whitespace

Raj Aggarwal

Raj is a cofounder of Localytics, a provider of mobile application analytics. Localytics raised $700,000 from angel investors after completing Techstars in 2009. In 2019 Localytics supports more than 6,000 customers and reaches 37,000 apps, 2.7 billion devices, and 120 billion data points monthly. They have raised $69 million to date.

While companies with monopolies don’t worry much about differentiation, startups are not afforded that luxury. Nearly every startup must find ways to differentiate itself from competitors, whether it’s through location, service, price, product features, or something else. As your competition increases, so does your need to differentiate. This becomes even more critical in a crowded market, as your product’s differentiation needs to be clear enough to help you rise above the noise.

In the midst of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, very few people were thinking about hot new market segments. There were a few notable exceptions, however, including the fulfillment of the longtime promise of the smart phone. Kickstarted by the Apple iPhone and the App Store in early 2008, developers were busily creating apps for this new platform. We created Localytics to provide analytics to these mobile app developers. We initially set out to address a need we saw in mobile app market, which was that the analytical data about usage of mobile apps was lousy. We worked closely with several mobile ...