Interview with Ryan Matzner, Co-founder & Managing Partner - Fueled

Ryan Matzner  

Co-founder & Managing Partner, Fueled

When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

Fueled started around 2009 when we realized that mobile was going to be this big paradigm shift. We were going to really take advantage of some of the new possibilities that native iOS app and later native Android apps would allow. We saw these really cool use cases that we were super excited about, so we wanted to get into the world of building them. We didn't quite know exactly where that was going to take us; we thought maybe we'd be taking equity in startups and partnering that way. It turned out, sure there were a bunch of startups, but there are also a lot of corporate entities that wanted to leverage us, and we were having a lot of fun building those out. We began to grow a team to do that and sort of just continued down that path of servicing a wide range of clients. Occasionally we build our own app, occasionally we took equity. And now here we are.


What is your role in the management and development of Fueled?

Like any co-founder, I wear a ton of hats. I was our head of accounting, products, strategy and sales, and marketing at various points. It's really kind of wearing all the hats necessary to make Fueled happen to get to where we are.


Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry.

I think the one I am most proud of is that Fueled has made a name for itself as the go-to mobile dev shop. If you're building an app and you're shopping around, Fueled is always on that list. So being sort of one of the go-to players for any mobile app being built in the country is a huge accomplishment.


How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

We try to be super realistic. We don't promise an exact timeline; we know that software is highly variable. It's about achieving a target amount within a set amount of time, rather than a set amount of functionality within a set amount of time.


How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?

Every project is evaluated for what technology stack makes the most sense for that project. We are generally avoiding building anything that we could use off the shelf solutions. It's always sort of cost-benefit of what we can gain from doing custom versus leveraging an existing platform.


Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

Different projects have different requirements, but usually native makes the most sense. The number one reason to build through something non-Native is a lack of available resources to build natively. It's not that it's inherently better or faster or cheaper. Since we have a team of developers available, we typically would go that route. Native is often more secure, can respond to changes int he operating system more quickly, can respond to new hardware more quickly, and in general, gives you a more robust capability to decide how to implement your product.


How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

When people hire us, they're hiring a team of a certain size for a certain amount of time. That's how the budget is calculated. There's a blended hourly rate; that rate gets lower if you are committing to a longer period of work with us and it scaled with the size of the team.


How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

We've driven over a billion dollars in transactions through the products that we built. We see one of our key success metrics as being the ability to drive new revenue for our clients.


What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

We pride ourselves on building the right solution for clients rather than building the first thing they asked for. It's about helping clients understand the opportunity, helping them understand potential challenges, asking tough questions, and ultimately working with our clients to build the product that's most likely to win in the marketplace.


How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

We have a very modern stack; our team is constantly attending conferences, undergoing training, and generally staying up-to-date with the latest best practices. We're pretty agile in our stack and we are always willing to move to something new.


What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

I think the Internet of Things is here, it's real. AR and VR are also real right now, mostly relevant to certain niche industrial applications, training, or gaming. In the future, that will likely change as new use cases develop. It's not entirely clear today that there's a mainstream useful solution or use case just yet.


What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?

Mobile is evolving into audio-based, so just wearing headphones. It'll become more integrated with glasses and it'll eventually move out of our hands, so into our eyes, and our ears, or into direct brain connections. We'll have more gesture-based interactions because there won't be an object to touch, so it will just be about how our hands move or our head moves. I think that's sort of the mid the long term future of mobile.