Kunal Gupta is convinced the mobile lifestyle is the future, and his advice to budding entrepreneurs is to get on a plane.
The young CEO of Polar Mobile – a fast-rising developer of smartphone applications –hit the streets of Manhattan with his colleagues in 2008, and bagged big-name clients such as Time magazine, BusinessWeek and Sports Illustrated.
“We went straight to the top,” Mr. Gupta says of Toronto-based Polar’s first international success. “We went to the customers and we told them the value proposition.”
Being aggressive didn’t hurt, but Polar also got in early with a strong product. Founded less than three years ago, the business-to-business company helps large media firms swiftly launch mobile apps across BlackBerry, iPhone and other smartphones. Its software platform solves the complexities of delivering content to all the different devices.
“Our goal is to help our customers gain reach,” Mr. Gupta said. “Today, we think the best way to get maximum reach is to have a native [resident] app that’s on somebody’s smartphone.”
Customers are responding to that message. Polar already has clients in 10 countries – after starting 2010 with the United States as its lone foreign market – and its user base is spread out across 100. Polar hit 6.3 million users as of early October, a giant leap from 10,000 users in the first four months of business. It also launched some 300 apps in 30 months – a remarkable feat by any standard.
“The biggest challenge for us today is also the biggest opportunity,” Mr. Gupta said. “How do we grow our customer base all over the world, from Toronto?”
In the media space, Polar has taken charge of the sports vertical. According to Mr. Gupta, his 40-person shop has more sports publishers than anyone else in mobile. Polar and CBS just launched 190 apps that bring the U.S. broadcaster’s online GameTracker service to mobile for 95 NCAA schools. If you’re, say, a Florida State fan, the team’s logo appears on your GameTracker app, with features including scores, schedules and news.
An even bigger coup was the mid-October announcement that Polar will craft 500 apps for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7. The device gets its own versions of nearly all existing Polar apps – many of them in time for the release of Microsoft’s newest smartphone operating system later this year. Microsoft is happy because its phone will come loaded with apps, while Polar has yet another showcase for its development platform.
One fan of Polar is Tyler Lessard, senior vice-president of global alliances and developer relations at Research In Motion. (The two companies have a partnership that Mr. Gupta describes as part technical, part marketing and part business development.) Mr. Lessard praises Polar for its technology – and its gumption. “A big part of their success in the early days was they put a lot of faith in their own abilities and showed companies that with little investment, they could get them great returns.”
From the start, timing and circumstances worked in Polar’s favour. Mr. Gupta, 25, has a degree in software engineering from the University of Waterloo. He founded Polar in 2008 with five fellow U of W engineering grads. Three influences sparked the company’s launch, Mr. Gupta explains. The first was being in Waterloo, Ont.-based RIM’s backyard, where BlackBerrys were everywhere.
The second was a global outlook. While working, travelling and studying in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East, Mr. Gupta noticed that the planet had gone mobile. Five years ago, the Ottawa native said, mobile penetration in Hong Kong was 126 per cent – while Canadians were barely texting. “The massive gap is what got me thinking, ‘Hey, there’s something here.’”
The third influence was the lure of software as a business model. Mr. Gupta says software is an ideal entrepreneurial venture because it has low capital costs and it is easily scalable. “It scales beautifully across verticals, across geography, across markets.”
