How Mobile Apps Help New York Startups Connect With More Customers
A founder I met at a Queens meetup told me about the week she realized her startup was talking to the wrong city. She'd built a neighborhood grocery delivery service, nothing exotic, a way for people to order from the independent shops and bodegas near them. The first version of the app was polished, fast, and entirely in English. It launched to a modest wave of downloads from the parts of the borough where she and her friends lived.
Then she spent a Saturday on Roosevelt Avenue handing out flyers and noticed that most of the people stopping to talk to her switched languages within the first sentence. Spanish, Bengali, Mandarin, Nepali, Tibetan. The shop owners she wanted as partners and the customers she wanted as users were overwhelmingly people for whom an English-only app was a door...