📱 Appdrop: No-code dev tools dropping to a university near you
Kamar Mack and Adrian Abrams have built a way to help college students bring their mobile app ideas to life - and to the market
I recently had the chance to chat with Appdrop Co-Founders Kamar Mack (CEO) and Adrian Abrams (CMO) about a variety of topics, including their focus on university entrepreneurship centers, their experience in Georgetown University’s first alumni-focused accelerator, and future plans for the team. Kamar and Adrian are a dynamic duo of recent-alum entrepreneurs and student entrepreneurship is still very much near and dear to their hearts.
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A student comes to your office and has a million - no wait - billion dollar idea for a mobile app.
Perhaps its Uber for dogs? TikTok for infants? Shazam for memes? (actually hold on, that’s a really good idea…)
All they need is $5,000 - no wait - $50,000 to pay a dev team to build it out for them and …
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. It’s a tale as old as iPhones.
But now we live in a world in which no code tools, such as Airtable, Bubble, Webflow, and Zapier, just to name a few, are changing the way in which non-tech people can create incredibly sophisticated tech-enabled platforms.
The next time that student comes into your office with their zillion dollar mobile app idea, you can equip them with Appdrop.
Kamar Mack and Adrian Abrams have designed Appdrop as a no code tool to bring apps from your head to the market with a focus on simplicity, quality, and cost.
Need to design a beautiful interface for your app? Use their Canva integration.
Want to enable e-commerce capabilities? Pick Printful or Pirate Ship.
And what about accepting payments? Stripe or PayPal are a click away.
Literally everything you need to design, build, and launch your dream mobile app is contained on this platform.
Kamar and Adrian have built Appdrop with an eye towards a population who could most benefit from their technology: student entrepreneurs.
Now they’re launching an upcoming beta for university entrepreneurship centers in order to test this tech out with some of the most creative and innovative folks around. So if this sounds like something you’d like to test out you can sign up for the Beta here.
Below is a snippet of our wide-ranging conversation - check it out, comment, share, yada yada. You know the drill. Enjoy!
So what sparked the idea behind Appdrop?
Kamar: Adrian and I wanted to start our first business back at Georgetown. It was a simple problem we hit on - we wanted to give people a way to buy and trade items on college campuses without using money.
At the time I was studying computer science, but I didn’t have the chops to build an app from scratch. And Adrian studied liberal arts and then went on to do digital marketing. Neither of us had the typical skillset for it.
So we did what most people do. We found an agency to build an app for us. We funneled $30K into development and the app never even saw the light of day. From that experience, we knew we’re not going to do that again.
We’re going to learn programming ourselves and work on the business full-time. That’s what we ended up doing the first year and a half of our company life cycle. It’s an opportunity for us to take everything that we learned building apps from scratch - the design, the programming, the servers - all of that - and then automate it.
We’ve wanted to really focus our product development because there are a lot of competitors in the space that do no-code app builders, but our product is specifically built for university students. Its the market that we know the best and its the market we know the type of impact we can drive in the space.
Appdrop is kind of like the brainchild of all of our years of R&D.
What about the university setting makes it an ideal beachhead market to launch Appdrop?
Adrian: There’s an influx of students that have great app ideas but don’t necessarily have the technical coding prowess to bring it to life. The other side of it too is that you have engineering students and business students, but as far as them always being able to come together, there’s a big disconnect.
Kamar and I probably could have found someone who could’ve built our app for us, but there’s a lot of barriers to entry in that regard.
But ultimately if you cast out a wide net for university students, the odds are that one point in their undergrad career that could but them on par with Evan Spiegel of Snapchat or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. So we wanted to capture that sort of excitement and optimism from those types of students and be able to help them figure out if Appdrop can be the next underlying software of the next viral app.
No code platforms are definitely on the rise (I’m using one right now with Substack), but there are a lot of competitors in the space. How does Appdrop differentiate itself from existing no code app building developers?
Kamar: It comes down to the end user experience.
We are very confident in the actual apps that our teams have put on market. That’s something we have battle tested with our software. Because ultimately, one of our company values is “Create Wowable products”. Its not about just getting to market, its about how can you get a breakthrough product to market?
Like one of the apps we recently got published on iOS - literally this past weekend - is called Dropshop, a fully functional, mobile-responsive e-commerce store.
We think about the small things that make an app great - like how fast does it load? How responsive is it? When you use it, do you get confused, or is the entire experience seamless?
The second piece is one thing we learned from working with students is they want direct contact with us throughout the process.
So we have Appdrop office hours. If teams have trouble with our Starter Plan, where you have to do some of the publishing like shipping through Xcode and Android Studio where it can be tricky, we provide them one-on-one contact with Appdroppers to troubleshoot any issues that they hit.
Adrian: The other piece to complement the office hours is Appdrop University. Another way in which we differentiate ourselves from traditional no code is by positioning ourselves as a strategic advisor as opposed to the folks that you pay to build your app for you.
Appdrop University is our flagship learning curriculum where we take students through the ins and outs of mobile app fundraising, growth hacking vs. paid marketing, UI/UX dos-and-dont’s and other things of that nature.
These are the things that helped us break onto the market in the first place. We also want to be a beacon of knowledge. At the end of the day, like Kamar said, we want to build a Wowable product. We want to be a beacon of knowledge because these teams have the same aspirations that Kamar and I did.
There are a lot of topics that aren’t covered in a formal class at the undergraduate level, but we fundraised for a mobile app so we’ve got both the knowledge and first-hand experience.
Appdrop is a part of the inaugural Georgetown Startup Accelerator (GSA) cohort which is focused on growing alumni ventures. What has that experience been like so far? What have you gotten out of it?
Kamar: It’s been powerful. First and foremost, the programming that GSA has put together has been high impact and relevant. We’ve had weekly workshops from within and outside of the Georgetown network, ranging from founders to legal experts to VCs - really the whole spectrum. We also got matched up with a one-on-one mentor who has been phenomenal.
Adrian: It’s been cool from a cohort standpoint seeing what people have on their horizon. Everyone has a niche lane that we’re not too familiar with, but they each have a high chance of impact and growth. The life of an entrepreneur can definitely be very individual and lonely, but being able to have a cohort of comrades, going through challenges like you, or being able to share marquee milestones like getting your first sale, is another big value component. It’s just a really dope cohort of companies that range across a vast array of industries, experiences, and age levels.
So on Demo Day we get a chance to showcase Appdrop and where we’re headed, but it’s also great to share the stage - a virtual stage for that matter - with a bunch of other companies who have the opportunity to do great things in the future.
It’s going to be a nice memento to look back on years from now when everyone blows up.
What are you proudest of in your time with Appdrop so far?
Kamar: There’s a ton, oh my goodness. One thing that comes to mind is the story of how Adrian and I co-founded this together.
We had met at Georgetown and were in the same fraternity. We were awesome friends, he was a year older and kind of mentored me, and I always just looked up to him. He graduated and went on to work at Google, so I always knew he was out in the Bay Area and wanted to keep him in mind if I was ever out that way.
So when I took the plunge and decided to work full-time on Appdrop, it was January of 2019. I was working individually at the time, laying some of the programming groundwork. I ended up getting an interview for Y Combinator, which was dope because that meant a flight out to the Bay Area. I rang up Adrian and asked if I could crash at his place while I took the interview.
At the time, he was at a point at his career in Google where he was looking for what’s next creatively, and I was also looking for a co-founder. I know jack squat about selling. Adrian doesn’t know a ton about programming. So the pair made sense. But what was really powerful is that Adrian said “With or without YC, I’m in”. That’s when I knew we were going to make something happen.
A week after I poached him from Google, we closed a seed round.
Stuff like that is really cool to reflect on.
Adrian: That’s one of my proudest moments too. Another moment, coming from this quarter, comes from the contracts we were able to close from our students and recent grad teams. Their confidence in us that we can put them in a position where they don’t necessarily need to go down the route I went, where I have to take on a job in big tech, finance, or consulting when they really know what they want to do. That’s the position we want to put them in. There were even some cases where we’ve accelerated our timeline to help them coincide with graduation. It’s just a cool moment to know that we can give people the opportunity to take that entrepreneurial leap a lot sooner rather than later.
One of our portfolio apps Palanor - a fitness gaming app - peaked at #22 on the app store. That’s another cool moment that I’m proud of, especially so early on in our company journey.
If I’m someone working in the university entrepreneurship setting - and I am - I’m hyped about this. How do I go about bringing Appdrop University to my students?
Kamar: Essentially, we give you a way to create a university account through our Cloud site (cloud.appdrop.com). We have our live Demo Day coming up [for the Georgetown Startup Accelerator] on March 30th and we’ll be doing our release shortly after.
We’re using this Spring and Summer to do our demos with universities, give them a sense of what Appdrop actually is, and we’ll be using that to line up universities for the Fall 2021 semester. By then we’ll have e-commerce, marketplaces, and streaming apps, that students can build with no code.
After you have your university account, you’ll give students access to the Appdrop workspace where they can build their app from any browser by logging on with their university email. From there, they can design their apps and manage them - and there’s a thousand things you have to manage when building a mobile app.
So we handle the billing, we handle customer management, really the whole end-to-end process because we built this solution with non-tech people in mind.
They don’t want to touch server code. We got that.
And that’s a wrap on Appdrop! I personally can’t wait to see what this team has in store for the university entrepreneurship community. It has the potential to be a total gamechanger for how apps are designed and launched. If you’re interested in bringing Appdrop’s beta to your university ASAP, sign-up below. Demand is high and capacity is limited.
Want to spread the good word about the Appdrop team?
Next week I’ll be posting my April edition of Coach’s Corner which will round up all of the funding opportunities, e-ship news, and more. If you’ve got some suggestions, or want to get in touch to promote your venture or an opportunity, you can let me know below.
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