Meet your Apple and Google account managers every two weeks and share your roadmap

Jacob EitingYou have 30 points of alignment of interest.

Yoav SharonExactly. No, and they want to have these quality apps as valued to their users and app stores and they see most of the metrics, right? But metrics are lagging indicators. They don't always help understand. So, we found what's working really well for us is we work very closely with them. We share with them our plans, share with them our roadmaps. Of course, we share with them our challenges. We ask for their help in supporting some of the areas where we're going. And we found that in addition to helping us understand where the market is going, it also helps us really gain some access to beta programs. It helps us gain access to design partnerships.

Yoav SharonSome of them I cannot even talk about here, like all the stuff, but really, really cool design partnerships that we partner with both platforms and basically we're looking at the platforms as real partners. Of course, no one likes to pay large fees for these.

David BarnardI think a lot of people listening will be curious and you don't have to answer if you don't have a good answer, but How would you recommend people build a relationship with Apple? Often it's like a we'll call you, don't call us kind of situation. But do you have any tips for working with Apple and Google as partners and maybe even how you establish that relationship early on?

Yoav SharonI think any company, any app developer at a certain size, but even already at the earlier sizes, you have an account manager there. Embrace that. Embrace that. Keep them in the loop, fly to meet them. Make sure that you share with them your plans, your challenges. So, in the earlier days we used to send our developers to WWDC with real problems that we have with building our sound recognition engine. And we gave unprecedented access to engineers in their sound system to help us in all of these forms, relationships, and they see a partner here that really cares to have great value to the users on their platform.

Yoav SharonSo, we're always trying to adopt all the new features and adopt all the recent technologies that we can to make sure that we give the most quality value to our users, the user experience across all of our apps. We have monthly meetings, even in Simply Piano, I think we have a fortnightly meetings, biweekly meetings with our account managers there, both in Apple and Google. So, we're always keeping track and updating them and learning from them where do they see that we're not according to what they expect in terms of benchmarks and stuff like this. So, I think it's just embrace this collaboration and keep ongoing communication with your account manager.

Jacob EitingThat's more meetings than I have with most of my reports.