He is only 29 years old, but he runs a tech startup and its products have reached the top of the app store charts 27 times.
Now Davidd Liu (劉于遜), CEO of Oh!Cool Co. (歐酷網路), is eyeing something bigger.
“First we establish ourselves in Southeast Asia. Then we keep going,” Liu said.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“Currently Taiwan’s smartphone penetration is now between 13 million to 14 million people. The growth potential is 17 million, maybe 18 million. That’s a sizeable market, but if this company wants to be in the major leagues and do a public offering, we need to go global,” he said.
Liu was born in Pingtung County to parents who didn’t apply academic pressure. He excelled in school anyway, but also spent long stretches of time on the Internet.
In junior-high school, he built his first Web site, and as a graduate student he interned at Microsoft, meeting intern Kevin Huang (黃崇傑) who joined him in the Oh!Cool venture in 2011.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
MODERN LIFESTYLE
Since then, their startup has released 56 apps under the brand “Chocolabs,” mainly for the iPhone.
They are inexpensive or free programs that are profitable through advertising, Liu said.
Some of the apps are novelties. One smartphone download, priced at NT$180, gives a “romantic” tour of Tokyo led by Mayday frontman Ashin (阿信), complete with maps, a currency converter, camera function and to-do list.
The rest of the catalog is apps that have been done before by innumerable developers. There’s a tool to book train tickets and a tool for YouBike users. There are apps for television viewing, news reading music listening and browsing the bulletin board PTT.
Despite the very crowded market, Oh!Cool has gained considerable traction in Taiwan, becoming an uncommon success story in the mobile app industry.
Of its 56 creations, 27 have placed in the top charts at Taiwan’s iTunes App Store and Google Play Store. The Chocolabs YouBike app is currently a top Travel download, and last year won the gold in FarEasTone’s annual national competition for commercial applications.
USERS FIRST
Oh!Cool has a staff of about 30 people, most under 30 years old. Liu said they are hired for a certain kind of design skill that pays attention to the user.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about user experience, because it’s a main reason the products do well,” he said.
“When interviewing candidates for job openings, what I want to know is how well they can place themselves in the user’s seat. Before we released the YouBike app, for example, I would have asked them to think for five minutes about key features the user might want,” he added.
The Chocolabs YouBike app informs users if it’s likely to rain and has a built-in timer so riders can track their fees. Based on usage metrics, the app can also predict if a bike in the rack is out of working order.
“Sometimes you travel all the way to a station because you think there’s a bike and then discover you can’t use it. This feature prevents that,” he said.
Liu also applies a reductionist design principle to design, the idea that complexity is the enemy of a first-rate user experience.
“In each app, we have no more than five main features, and usually it’s three. During development, we only remove features. We don’t add,” he said.
ROLLING OUT
This year, Oh!Cool embarked on a plan to take its best concepts to the world market.
Since March, he’s been rolling out an English-language drama-streaming app called Dramot, first in Indonesia, then in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand.
In Southeast Asia, smartphone penetration is relatively low, about 27 percent in the first quarter.
“China’s a much bigger market, but you can look at it this way — their smartphone penetration is now 60 percent. You can’t double that,” Liu said.
“Southeast Asia? It’s different. By the final quarter of next year the smartphone penetration should be around 40 percent. For us, that growth is very sweet.”
So far, Oh!Cool’s first release in Southeast Asia has averaged at about 200,000 regular users a month in all the countries combined — well below the 12 million monthly users in Taiwan alone.
“There is a lot of work to do, but there is also momentum,” Liu said.
“I’m not worried that the international market won’t become a great opportunity,” he added.
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