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App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Get ready to explore the stories behind some of the most iconic and innovative apps that have shaped the mobile landscape!We're here with App Masters Greatest Hits—a 10-episode series where we'll journey back in time to uncover the successes, challenges, and game-changing moments that made these apps truly distinguished.In this episode, we're joined by Roger Dickey, founder of Zynga and the creator of games like Mafia Wars. With an incredible entrepreneurial journey, Roger will share how to make the right choices and key decisions to build a successful app business.Here's what you'll discover:✔️ The key elements of engaging gameplay✔️ How to build successful apps and games✔️ How to tackle challenges and turn pain points into opportunitiesWork with us to grow your apps faster & cheaper:http://www.appmasters.com/Get training, coaching, and community:https://appmastersacademy.com/Get your app audited:https://appmasters.com/audit/*********************************************Follow us:YouTube:AppMasters.com/YouTubeInstagram:@App MastersTwitter:@App MastersTikTok:@stevepyoungFacebook:App Masters*********************************************
Roger Dickey is the Co-Founder of MADE. Roger is a serial entrepreneur & active angel investor based in San Francisco. Roger's first company was an AirBnB for tutoring started in Austin in 2006.He entered the games industry in 2007 with a Facebook app startup, launching 19 apps with the largest generating 300M+ page views per month. After an acquisition by Zynga, Roger went on to found Mafia Wars (100M users), FishVille (35M users), and 5 other titles in his 3 years there. Roger served as an international product team advisor for Zynga helping the company grow its games in India, Japan, and China. Since leaving Zynga, Roger has launched Gigster, a marketplace for software development services. Alongside his work at Zynga, Roger began advising & investing in bay-area startups in 2010. His investments include Docker, Addepar, iCracked, OpenGov, ClassDojo, and Wanelo. Advisory roles include Formation 8, Nest, OpenDoor, and The Thiel Fellowship. In this episode, we talked about: Made Renovation and how it serves people Made Renovation's satisfied customers Roger's team and system Their all-in-one renovation system Overcoming market risks His career as a CEO and Co-founder in Gigster What drove Roger to start Gigster Founding Mafia Wars
Sam Parr (@TheSamParr), Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and David Segal (@_davidsegal) discuss:David’s backgroundAt 26, David teams up with his 70-something-year-old cousin, Herschel Segal, to start DAVIDsTEA.Herschel had made his fortune in Canada’s fashion industry. Previously Davis was helping his Herschel make small investments. Together they saw an opportunity to grow a tea brand, where David led and Herschel investedHe made his first million when a Boston PE firm (Highland Capital) made an investment in DAVIDsTEA.When the company went public it was doing $30m in EBITDA. He didn't want to sell shares at the time, but needed to in order to make the IPO big enough. He eventually left the business and sold his shares because of management issues. He sold at an average of $14 a share.Today he runs a few businesses. One of which is a restaurant where he is trying to mix the best of ghost kitchens with a sitdown restaurantDavid is currently trying to get back in the tea game. He sees an opportunity to make tea good, and cool again. Tea penetration is tiny in NA, so there is a lot of room to grow.With his new brand he wants to do DTC business by keeping tea simple, but widening its appeal.Previous to DAVIDsTEA, he ran a software business. It was essentially an abandoned cart business but for real life.BrainstormIdea: good video for online meetings is like what a nice Italian suit was in the 80s. It shows professionalism and class. Sam mentions he is willing to pay thousands to have someone create a turnkey video conference setup for him. He thinks this could be a great business opportunity.Made Renovation (https://www.maderenovation.com/ founded by Roger Dickey) offers turnkey bathrooms. The idea is clients can select from a limited amount of pre-selected styles. Shaan suggests applying this same idea to video conferencing setups.Idea: Uber for contractors. David suggests it’s hard finding reliable contractors, and there may be space for a company that can help organize the market better.Modsy: For $500 per room, Modsy provides an on-demand interior designer. They will create a layout and make suggestions for furniture to use.The guys discuss several “experts on-demand” companies. Companies like Intro.co, GLGinsights.com, Clarity.fm & Officehours.com all do similar things in different ways: connect users with experts on a variety of topics.Idea: Decommoditizing everyday stuff. By taking an everyday item and adding a unique element to it, you can charge more and differentiate an otherwise commodity. David brings up Duraflame. Duraflame is a fast lighting fire log. The company does 9 figures in revenue but hasn’t been innovated upon in years. Homesick Candles successfully innovated on candles by adding regional scents and creating a differentiated product. Eric Ryan built his career doing this with Method, Olly, and Welly.Idea: Firelogs with scents. Decommoditizing a boring product like fire logs with a viral and catchy twist.Idea: “...For dummies 2.0”. The “...For Dummies” were a popular series of books educating anyone on any topic. Both David and Shaan are bullish on doing the same for complex modern topics like blockchain or NFT. But doing so through viral videos.Idea: Using stores as showrooms. David nearly started a company just like this. It’s a massive opportunity for whoever can figure out how to make use of retail space in a way that makes sense in the ecom age. A company doing this is b8ta.Smart Center: David mentions Smart Center and other REITS have been big... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We all know about islands... and we all know about lakes. We know we can have islands in lakes, and even lakes on islands. But did you know that there are lakes on islands in lakes? And even more, islands in lakes on islands in lakes? Roger Dickey knew this... And he had a quest, to find the elusive fourth order island! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science!
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Roger Dickey, CEO of Untitled Labs, a "search lab" that is creating and incubating multiple startup concepts. Untitled Labs raised a $2.8 million Seed Round from Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures and Caffeinated Capital. Ashton Kutcher, Nikita Bier, Justin Waldron, Liquid Ventures and other investors also participated. Roger previously founded Gigster and Curiosoft, and is an active angel investor with stakes in 32 startups including Scripted, Unsplash, ClassDojo and many others. In this episode, Roger explains what a "search lab" is and how it compares to the "search fund" or "startup studio" models, how to foster both competition and collaboration amongst the teams, the process of productizing side products and "intentional experimentation" and much more. Note: Roger is hiring for engineers in SF. Visit www.untitled-labs.com This series is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Learn more at www.foundersuite.com.
Most founders don't walk away from their startup after raising $32 million and reaching 1000 clients. But Roger Dickey's heart is in consumer tech, and his company Gigster had pivoted to doing outsourced app development for enterprises instead of scrappy entrepreneurs. So today Dickey announced that he'd left his role as Gigster CEO, with former VMware VP Christopher Keane who'd sold it his startup WaveMaker coming in to lead Gigster in October.
Roger Dickey is the founder of Gigster, a venture-backed start-up that gives clients a way to systematically outsource software development to a large network of freelance coders. Gigster has raised over $32 Million from high profile investors including Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowtiz, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former basketball player Michael Jordan, actor Ashton Kutcher, and "Super Angel" Ron Conway. The company has quickly become a Silicon Valley darling.
Roger Dickey is the founder of Gigster, a venture-backed start-up that gives clients a way to systematically outsource software development to a large network of freelance coders. Gigster has raised over $32 Million from high profile investors including Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowtiz, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former basketball player Michael Jordan, actor Ashton Kutcher, and "Super Angel" Ron Conway. The company has quickly become a Silicon Valley darling.
You have heard the phrase: every company is becoming a software company. An insurance company is now supposed to turn into a software company that sells insurance. A clothing retailer needs to reinvent itself to be able to build software to manage the production and distribution of its clothing. Software applications provide so much leverage The post Gigster with Roger Dickey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Automation, innovative management practices, and real-time communication tools are creating new models for skilled work. Every professional relies on software to structure and assist their work, and as that software becomes more intelligent it will gradually play a larger role in day-to-day tasks. Eventually, AI-powered platforms will facilitate complex work (from taxes to lawsuits) as easily as Uber calls a cab. Roger Dickey, the founder and CEO of freelance developer platform Gigster, will discuss how marketplaces and intelligent software can combine to improve and accelerate professional work, while making it more fulfilling, more profitable, and more accessible.
This week, the Inc. podcast crew talks about how robotics company Savioke's robots are now delivering room service in hotels in California, how veterans from the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are turning to entrepreneurship in civilian life, and interview Roger Dickey about how he built Dope Wars (eventually remade into Mafia Wars) and sold it to Zynga. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Y Combinator's Startup School Radio, host Kat Manalac interviews Gigster co-founders Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan
Today we have a conversation with entrepreneur & investor and co founder of software development company Gigster Roger Dickey. Prior to founding Gigster, Roger led game studios at Zynga after joining when the company had just 30 employees after selling his first company Curiosoft to zynga. Roger oversaw MafiaWar’s explosive growth to over 100million users and 1billion dollars in revenue. Roger also as an international product team advisor for Zynga helping the company grow their games in India, Japan and China. Alongside his work at Zynga, Roger began advising & investing in bay-area startups in 2010. His investments include Docker, Addepar, iCracked, OpenGov, ClassDojo, and Wanelo. Advisory roles include Formation 8, Nest, OpenDoor, and The Thiel Fellowship. Lets listen into Roger Dickey interviewed at our san Francisco chapter by startup grind editor in chief Michael Gasiorek.
As software becomes core to every industry, there is a need for more and more software development across practically every department in a company. But as anyone who has tried to get quality software developed knows, that has given rise to a supply and demand problem. Leveraging open source software is a big part of the solution to that problem, but venturing into the open source world raises all sorts of questions for most companies. For example, how do you engage as a company in the open source community; what are your obligations to the project; and if you are hiring a development team what clues ought you to be looking for to get the best developers? And what are the developers looking for? And in the end, who's responsible and accountable for the all this code flowing around? In a discussion from the firm's 2015 Tech Summit, Steven Sinofsky digs into all those questions with a panel that includes Roger Dickey, founder and CEO of Gigster, Slack CMO Bill Macaitis, GitHub Director of Field Services Matthew McCullough, and Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of StackOverflow. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.