Building apps and experience

Imagine, for example, a fitness tracker app that uses motion capture technology to analyze full body movement when exercising. Or a high-tech baby monitor that lets working parents see and speak to their children through their smartphones on the go.

Hasenfratz and his team — comprised of about a dozen or so developers, designers and quality assurance testers — built both.

Recently acquired by Logient, a Montreal-based company specializing in custom software, Mobilogie is a start-up success story with Concordia roots. Its president and founder, Antoine Azar, BA 82, is a Concordia graduate himself.

After earning his Bachelor of Engineering at Concordia in 2011, Hasenfratz joined Mobilogie.

Four years later, he now serves as the company’s chief technology officer.

What drew you to app development?

Michael Hasenfratz: I always had a very strong interest in technology and gadgets. When I was at Concordia, the iPhone had just come out and I decided I learn how to program and start making some apps.

The first was a fantasy sports stats tracker — I sent an anonymous tip to Gizmodo and they actually featured the app on their website!

That hands-on experience led me to a good internship at Blackberry through the Co-op Program at Concordia. I spent four months in Waterloo learning from some of the best developers around. By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to work in software.

Why did you choose to begin your career at a start-up, rather than a larger company?

MH: Through the Co-op program, I had the experience of working at both a big company and a small company. At the time when I was there as a Co-op student, Blackberry was a 20,000 person company and almost 80% of those people were working at their headquarters in Waterloo. As part of my Co-op, I also had the experience of working for a much smaller company with a staff of about 150.

I quickly learned that if I wanted to improve fast, I would have to start at a small company. Working at Blackberry showed me firsthand how these larger companies tend to put you in boxes, giving you very specific set tasks and not letting you do much else. Large companies need to employ that kind of structure and organization of course, or else they’d be a huge mess — but that style wasn’t for me.

How did you get started at Mobilogie?

MH: When I graduated, I had two job offers: one from Mobilogie (then called 2XM Interactive) and one from a larger company of 250,000 people. I ended up starting at Mobilogie as a regular IOS developer, building apps for clients. The company was less than a year old. I was only the 10th employee at the time — and I was promoted to a lead after six months.

Eventually, once we decided to rebrand to focus exclusively on mobile development, we restructured the company and I took over the role of chief technology officer. I built a team, created new work flow plans and structures all from scratch.

It took trial and error, but I think that’s the best way to learn. Because I took a job at a start-up and had to work extra hard, I’ve ended up building a lot of confidence in myself and by abilities in the four years since my graduation up to now.

What’s the difference between developing a website vs. developing an app?

MH: A website is something a customer visits. An app is something a customer owns. So the relationship between the user and the product is very different.

One thing I always push, for example, is the idea of user onboarding — helping users navigate and gain familiarity with the app as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

At the end of the day, you only have a couple of minutes, sometimes seconds, for someone to download your app, go through it and decided whether they want to keep it. It’s not a website where they can always revisit it later — if someone deletes an app, they’re usually not going to download it again!

Good user onboarding can be as simple as having a notification pop up asking the user to allow the app to track their location. The notification needs to clearly explain why this app wants to use their location, because a lot of people don’t realize that certain apps absolutely need your location to function.

If you could go back in time and speak to your newly-graduated self in 2011, what would you tell him? Any advice to fellow Co-op students?

MH: The advice I would give to myself is “don’t take the safest path — take the path that you think is right.” If you’re going to work 80% of your life, you had better enjoy what it is that you do, otherwise your life won’t be very pleasant.

To Co-op students, I recommend using these internships to gain experience in as many different areas as possible. It’s hard to transition from companies early on in your career, so having the opportunity through Co-op to work four months at three different companies is a huge advantage.

Work at a small company, work at a medium company, work at a large company. Work in a sector that you may not have thought would interest you.

Don’t worry about failing, worry about learning. That was something that took a while for me to accept. But when you’re working at a small company and you’re always trying to grow that company as much as possible, you have to go by trial and error and you have to be unafraid to fail. You just have to be sure that you’re going to learn from your failures and use that knowledge to do better in the future.

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