bcbusiness.ca
How do you keep your relationship with your
co-founder stable and productive?
If: Not kill each other. [laughter]
JB: It really hasn't been that much of a challenge
for us: Igor and myself had been friends for about
five years by the time we decided to start the
company, and more or less we've managed to
remain friends since. One part of that is providing
feedback to each other, letting each other know
when there are areas for opportunity, when
we're not addressing the most pressing chal-
lenges head on.
You shifted your company's focus after your
first big sale, to TransLink. How did you come
to make that decision?
If: One of our core values is to always grow; we
wanted to have a growth company from the start.
That means adjusting to the market and looking
for opportunities. When we tried to grow the
business with that one text messaging applica-
tion, we cold-called Winnipeg and Edmonton and
asked them to purchase the system from us, and
they kind of laughed us out of the office over the
phone; they didn't need the system at the time.
We tried to sell the system in the States, and the
SMS infrastructure was different. We felt caught
in the
SMS market and we couldn't expand, so we
started trying new things focused on mobile apps
and mobile web, and a new market in which we
could sell.
JB: I also don't think we thought of it as a pivot
at the time; we just recognized a bigger oppor-
tunity. We were working with TransLink so that
they could put links to mobile optimized websites
inside those messages, and when we were doing
that we found that really there was a bigger
opportunity around building out those mobile
websites.
62 BCBusiness april 2014
Igor Faletski
CEO,
Mobify Research and Development Inc.
Age: 29
SFU computer science student Igor Faletski was
regularly missing his bus. His solution? An
SMS
service that delivered TransLink schedules to
his text message inbox. Along with co-founders
John Boxall and Peter McLachlan, Faletski has
grown Mobify from a three-person shop run
from a basement in Burnaby into a global mobile
software company with just under 80 full-time
employees, with no external capital and offices
in the U.K. and Japan.
30
UNDER 30
p38-67_30Under30_april.indd 62 14-03-07 2:06 PM
