Buy Me A Pie!, the cloud-powered grocery list maker for iOS, has finally made good on its promise and brought the app to Google’s Android mobile OS.
Similar to the iPhone version, the Android offering comes in two flavours: a free Buy Me A Pie! app that shuns the cloud synchronisation which lets shopping lists be shared across devices (and family members), and a paid-for version that, along with cloud support, offers additional features such as multiple shopping lists, and list sharing via SMS, email and with other apps.
It also comes at a time when, having seen the iOS version of Buy Me A Pie! approach nearly 4 million downloads for both the free and paid-for app combined, the Russian company has decided to focus 100% on the app. As a result, it’s shuttered parent company Skript, which along with the grocery list app was working on mobile games and other side projects, to incorporate as Buy Me A Pie!, and also made a change at the top. Co-founder Oleg Nederev moves to the position of Head of Marketing as new partner Serge Bulaev becomes CEO.
Asked about the decision to direct all resources to Buy Me A Pie!, Nederev tells TechCrunch that the team have a “very long term vision for our service”, including potentially moving to a different revenue model and away from the existing premium play.
“Right now we are working on finding a new business model for our app which will allow us to make the whole service free,” he says. “As you know at this moment we earn money by selling the app, not a good strategy for massive user adoption. We already have some ideas like working with brands, integrating coupons, working with services like groceryserver.com, integrating food delivery mechanics etc. There are many ideas and we are in the process of testing them.”
At the same time, Nederev concedes that Buy Me A Pie!, despite those nearly 4 million downloads, still needs to achieve the kind of scale required to generate revenue if the app is given away entirely for free. “The problem is that to fully test the potential of these ideas we need to have like 10x times more active users so it’s a typical chicken & egg problem for our company. As you know we are fully bootstrapped so it makes the problem more difficult.”
That’s right, Buy Me A Pie!, despite being somewhat of a Russian success, hasn’t taken any outside funding. As for traction, Nederev is being slightly modest. I understand the app is seeing around 80,000 people use it daily, amounting to 500,000 monthly active users. That’s not too shabby.