Appscend is one of the simplest and fastest platforms to create your own mobile app and the good news is..it doesn't require any code knowledge. With its dead easy 'drag and drop' feature, building apps is absolutely hassle free.


"Appscend’s vision is to empower people and companies to create mobile, interactive experiences that drive engagement in a simple and fast manner. Mobile is our mission, belief and passion and we aim to be a part of bringing it to it’s next level", Appscend in their own words. Appscend has a lot more to be discovered. Let's learn more about it from Sebastian Vaduva, the founder of this excellent mobile app building platform:


Sebastian, let's start with a brief introduction of yours.

In the past 6 years of my life I have been focused on building and growing organizations.

In college I was involved in a wonderful student's association and lots of exciting additional projects along with it at Bucharest's main Economical University. After that, I've worked as a project manager in two of the leading local online publishing companies in Romania.

In 2008 I launched my first startup, Vitality Media, along with two of my closest friends. Vitality was a software development agency, and I was involved in growing this company for 2 years, being in charge with customer acquisition, project management and overall business development.

In 2010 we decided to create Appscend, so the three of us focused exclusively on developing this great mobile platform that everyone could love to use, and here we are today!


Tell us about 'Appscend'. What concept does it use?

For publishers and marketers alike, mobile has become a distribution channel that offers an unprecedented level of interaction and connection with users, therefore opening up new paths for monetization and awareness.

The development of feature-rich, cross platform mobile applications is, however, still a fragmented and a costly, time consuming process. And there are few relevant management and intelligence tools for the applications out there.

Appscend solves this problem by offering an online, cloud-powered dashboard for application deployment and management. This helps our customers save time and, therefore, money by simplifying every step in an application's lifecycle - from rapid development and deployment to content management, to monetization and analytics.


What inspired you to create 'Appscend'? Tell us about its inception.

A lot of companies tackle the issue of costly application development, and we as an agency have actually used them. The downside of the way they solved the issue is that all of the apps made with these services look and feel alike, and that is not necessarily an issue for their target audience (individuals and maybe SMEs) but makes them unusable for bigger companies and agencies.

Based on our customers demands, we realized that there's a need in the market for a "Wordpress for mobile" software, and that was Appscend's inception. We envisioned Appscend as a complex solution for our user's needs, so we focused on:

- creating rich, complex and super-customizable apps in record time, and

- creating a set of related tools that integrally handle all the issues of mobile application management.


Once the user creates an application, then what next? Would you like to describe the whole process involved?

Creating an application is easy using our drag-and-drop builder interface, and users have access to a lot of modules for displaying content, photos, videos and music. We even have a maps module, a QR code scanner module and a Layar-powered augmented reality module.

Also, while building your app you can test it live on your device by downloading our test application from the App Store.

After you're happy with your app and you want to publish it, you have two options. If you have an Apple Developer account you can download the app and publish it yourself, under your own account - the downside is that getting a Developer account takes some time and you need a Mac computer to finish the publishing process. If you don't want to go through all the hassle, we also offer the option to manage all of the publishing process for you.

After the app is live, you can use all of the other tools that we have created:

- our Push Notifications server, to keep users connected and engaged

- the Social activity tracking panel, giving our customers insights on how users are interacting using their app

- the streamlined In-App Purchases, another feature unique to Appscend

- the hosted Ad management system, integrated with the largest mobile ad networks on the market, for easy monetization

- application analytics via Flurry or Google Analytics

Of course, you can already begin working on the next version of your app! We make new tools and modules available all the time for our users, so you can keep enhancing your application and updating it.


If you've to list Appscend's three top features/advantages, what would they be?

- Appscend lets you heavily customize your applications and gives you the tools to create mobile experiences that really stand out. From structure and interface to content, your Appscend app will be unique!

- We focused on monetization, so whether you choose to charge for your app, run ads in it or charge via In-App Purchase, we make it easy for our users to turn their content into revenue.

- Social interaction is a big part of our vision for Appscend, so we enable your users to log in, share their favorite content, interact with each other and submit their own content in your app. We'll also soon be releasing a commenting system, activity points and badges, check-ins and other means to integrate game mechanics in your app and engage your users.


Could you share your pre-launch experience with us, what was the major difficulty?

The biggest challenge was creating the software infrastructure needed in order to bring our vision to life. New ideas seemed to be popping up every day, and we just had to prioritize, focus and work hard on delivering this product to market.


Share the best incident that you encountered on this journey from conceiving till present.

The best thing that happened is not actually a "thing" but rather a "process" - the whole journey so far, taking a vision from zero to market, has been for us a wonderful learning experience and it really brought each of us out of their comfort zone, but the most important thing is not to give up, listen, learn, adapt and just keep believing. It's by no means a light process, you learn to deal with failure, people not believing in you, financial problems, and these things consume you. But you also learn to pick yourself up, dust off and just keep going, day after day, after your dream. Until you make it happen :)


Would you like to share your dreams/vision for 'Appscend' with us?

Our first concern is with fully realizing our vision for Appscend, and that means building native Android apps as well. For our customers, that means they can basically cover all the users with smartphones while developing their app one time, inside a drag-and-drop dashboard, and that's a big part of the value proposition we envision for Appscend. We plan for a first Android release this winter.

But in this stage, the thing that matters most to us is getting as much feedback about Appscend as possible, better understanding who our customers are and what exactly are their needs, so that we can continue fulfilling our vision of creating a product that users love. Something that is crucial to our company culture is always challenging our beliefs - we think it's the only way to constantly evolve.


What message do you have for our readers?


Be brave enough to be happy. Find out what makes you happy and just do it, you'll be great!