You have this grand idea for a social networking apps. You have convinced your tech savvy friends to write you a program that can give you access to NASA’s space station. You can get a sneak peak at what’s cooking and floating and jettisoning in outer space thanks to your billion dollar app idea. You can rake thousands of dollars on a per minute basis each time someone who shares your wavelength clicks on your gold laying geese of an app.
With this new application, you’ll be able to drop all the horrendous tweets on Twitter or stop writing hapless profile statuses on Facebook. You have figured that as much as advertisers and big corporate media intrude in your social network and private life, it’s a much better idea to bring the universe closer to you. The universe expanding and contracting at the comfort of your laptop screen, right?
Who doesn’t want to see a Nebula take place in live stream? Who doesn’t want to hear people in space suits saying “Houston, I’m orbiting” or “Houston, we have accidentally ditched the Mars Rover. Can you send Triple A”? You just nailed the nail into the coffin, right (pun intended)? But here’s the problem: you don’t have the startup capital needed. To make matters worse, apps are growing by the thousand as of this write and a company like Apple can only take so much. Should you give up?
The answer is both “yes” and “no.” Yes, because I was being silly with the app idea I broached earlier. Unless you pushed through with it – and for some reason you have succeeded – and a whole entourage of your friends and relatives were carpooling to visit you in Federal prison. No, and in this regard I’m serious, because you have “appbkr.”
Appbackr is a digital wholesale marketplace for the application market (sorry, I have to capitalize “a” in appbkr because it’s the start of the sentence and my editors will start questioning me). It’s applying a wholesale model to solve common funding and distribution problems of application developers. What happens in appbkr is that a whole bunch of apps can be sold. Appbkr’s marketplace allows buyers to purchase apps in bulk from a developer at a lower price. If the apps sell, say in the App Store, the buyer profits from the difference.
This is a boon in the apps market especially for small developers who neither have the connection nor the money to market their apps. With appbkr’s marketplace, they can get an upfront price for their apps, which they can use for investing in marketing and improving their existing apps while leaving some of the promotion to the wholesale buyer. The wholesale buyer, who already invested in the bulk purchase, will in turn have the incentive to make sure that the apps they bought get recognized.
Appbkr is addressing the biggest challenges for apps developers – marketing and distribution.
Appbackr said wholesalers will be able to earn 27 to 54 percent of the apps when they sell in the store. The company’s members who are buyers and sellers are growing rapidly since its launch.
Appbkr was founded by Trevor Cornwell, CEO of appbkr, and Sam Zappas, co-founder together with Robert Clegg, their founding advisor.
Cornwell is a veteran entrepreneur and founded multiple innovative companies. Among those, Skyjet was the first online reservation system for business jets and sold to Bombardier in 2000 and Embarkons served as an idea marketplace which led to the genesis of appbackr as a formal wholesale marketplace.
Zappas was a Senior Executive of ARTISTdirect, an online digital media company that went public after attracting $97M from strategic investors.
He founded Acmepet, later acquired by PetSmart, and The Johns Hopkins University Media Center.
Clegg is a product development specialist with a rare blend of creativity and analytical abilities, he co-founded the venture-backed start-up Tabula Digital, an AlwaysOn Top 100 education company.
