Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Arnold Leung, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Appnovation Technologies, explains how a small Vancouver-based web design company has managed to expand into the U.S., U.K. and China and land major clients, like Samsung and Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC), by becoming experts in open-source platforms and HTML5.
“I finished at University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in 2007 and started a web development company. We started by building websites, then people wanted content management systems, so we specialized in Drupal, which is an open-source website system.
“Over time, we expanded into other open-source areas, doing mobility apps, doing back-end systems, ERPs [enterprise resource planning], and as we grew, we saw that the uptick of open-source was growing in North America. We’re one of the few companies that do not just one open-source technology like Drupal, but also the full open-source deck, including Alfresco, and we were able to capture some major customers in North America.
“Interestingly, we do 90% of our business in the States. Most companies I know locally do mostly local Canadian business. There aren’t any large companies beyond 60 people doing this. Most open-source shops are more lifestyle-focused companies that don’t have the same intention or plan to grow as us, so we were able to capture the market much faster, because we have a much bigger sales team and much more aggressive sales goals.
“One interesting area is the creation of cross-platform apps using a technology like HTML5. If you want to program a native app using the old way, you need to do it four or five times. With HTML5, you can use software called PhoneGap that allows you to make your one app cross-platform.
“That’s been a challenge because the technology is still fairly new, and we’ve had to invest in R and D to make the technology work. The challenge is you have to continually invest in R and D for this because it’s a technology that continuously evolves. New phones come out every month.
“About three years ago, we realized that we wanted to grow beyond North America, for a number of reasons. No. 1 is we need access to key talent. The talent pool in North America is great, but it’s pretty competitive. So we overcame that by starting an office in the U.K. We’ve got about 10 people there now.
“Early on it was fairly challenging. We didn’t fully understand the local laws, the culture, how things are done. We got the help of UK Trade and Investment. Those folks helped us a lot to get things moving along.
“We’ve got about 45 active customers. A few major ones are Samsung, the U.S. government, Time Inc., Intel. Revenue-wise, we did $4 million in 2012. We hit $8 million in 2013, and we’re going to hit $16 million this year. So we’ve been doubling every year for the last few years, and our head count’s been doing the same thing.” •
