Jen Grant
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Turbo Systems becomes Appify and launches app marketplace
When Jen Grant joined Turbo Systems, the no-code mobile application platform, as CEO in March, she came on board just as COVID was shutting down businesses. But she went straight to work, and over the last six months she has led two major initiatives that the company announced today: a name change and a new app marketplace.
For starters, the company is changing its name to Appify to more accurately reflect its mission around building mobile apps. She says that they found most people related the term “turbo” to cars. They began looking for a better name that was more closely aligned with what they do when her team stumbled across Appify .
“We had been playing around with different names and what we are about, and a lot of what we’re about is amplifying your business and your systems and your people with apps. And so when we kind of stumbled across Appify and the domain name was available, we moved quite quickly,” Grant explained.
While she was at it, Grant was talking to customers, and while the core company mission is to make it easy to build mobile apps, especially in the field service space, she felt that they could make it even easier. Rather than asking customers to build the apps themselves, they could provide a marketplace with some pre-built apps and simply let them customize them for their workflows.
“What we have done with the Appify Marketplace is instead of saying, here’s a box of parts, now fix your business problem, we’re saying, here’s an app that you can launch in minutes. It has all of the functionality that you will need […] and you can then very easily customize it using this no-code platform to make it specific to your business,” she said.
The marketplace is launching today with a couple of apps aimed at the company’s core field service market, including Field Sales, which allows salespeople in the field to send a bid or quote from a tablet directly from the field without having to return to the office. The other is a Field Service app for repair people, which provides all of the information about the repair, while allowing the service rep to update the customer record from the field using a mobile device.
Grant says this is just the start and there are many apps on the road map that they will be releasing in the coming months. Eventually, they may have systems integrators use the platform to build apps for specific industries as they move forward.
Appify was born as Turbo Systems in 2017 and has raised more than $11 million, according to PitchBook data.
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Turbo Systems hires former Looker CMO Jen Grant as CEO
Turbo Systems, a three-year old, no-code mobile app startup, announced today it has brought on industry veteran Jen Grant to be CEO.
Grant, who was previously vice president of marketing at Box and chief marketing officer at Elastic and Looker, brings more than 15 years of tech company experience to the young startup.
She says that when Looker got acquired by Google last June for $2.6 billion, she began looking for her next opportunity. She had done a stint with Google as a product manager earlier in her career and was looking for something new.
She saw Looker as a model for the kind of company she wanted to join, one that had a founder focused on product and engineering, who hired an outside CEO early on to run the business, as Looker had done. She found that in Turbo where founder Hari Subramanian was taking on that type of role. Subramanian was also a successful entrepreneur, having previously founded ServiceMax before selling it to GE in 2016.
“The first thing that really drew me to Turbo was this partnership with Hari,” Grant told TechCrunch. While that relationship was a key component for her, she says even with that, before she decided to join, she spoke to customers and she saw an enthusiasm there that drew her to the company.
“I love products that actually help people. And so Box is helping people collaborate and share files and work together. Looker is about getting data to everyone in the organization so that everyone could be making great decisions, and at Turbo we’re making it easy for anyone to create a mobile app that helps run their business,” she said.
Grant has been on the job for just 30 days, joining the company in the middle of a global pandemic. So it’s even more challenging than the typical early days for any new CEO, but she is looking forward and trying to help her 36 employees navigate this situation.
“You know, I didn’t know that this is what would happen in my first 30 days, but what inspires me, what’s a big part of it is that I can help by growing this company, by being successful and by being able to hire more and more people, and contribute to getting our economy back on track,” Grant said.
She also recognizes that there is a lack of diversity in her new CEO role, and she hopes to be a role model. “I have been fortunate to get to a position where I know I can do this job and do it well. And it’s my responsibility to do this work, my responsibility to show it can be done and shouldn’t be an anomaly.”
Turbo Systems was founded in 2017 and has raised $8 million, according to Crunchbase. It helps companies build mobile apps without coding, connecting to 140 different data sources such as Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.
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