George Spanoudakis

Pinnatta was an interactive multimedia communication app for iOS and Android. It brought the wow factor of a personalized and interactive greeting card to daily communication.

Imagine this: It's your best friend's birthday. Instead of sending a classic text message, emoji, or gif, you could go to Pinnatta, select a birthday cake among a long list of options, personalize it by writing your friend's name on top of the cake with your finger, add their age so the right number of candles are placed on top, add your personal message as a card, and send it directly to their smartphone.

They could receive it without having to download the app. And when they open it, they can see the birthday cake, listen to the happy-birthday song and blow on their device to put out the candles before reading your message. Pinnatta offered that kind of micro-experience for any special occasion or everyday communication.

As the CEO, I led the design and the implementation of the mobile app and the back-end platform, as well as the introduction to the market until we confirmed the product-market fit and achieved a good growth rate. The company was acquired after six years.

Main Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML5, JavaScript, iOS, Android

"What do you think?" was one of the first very successful viral apps on Facebook. The concept was based on a very simple idea: Everyone has an opinion about their friends. The app displayed a list of questions about the friends of the logged-in users in this format: Do you think your friend X would do Y? The friend being questioned was instantly notified and asked to answer a series of questions about their friends.

The app achieved a sky-high viral rate and a tremendous organic growth rate. "What do you think?" was the first big hit of thiinkle (the company behind the app). As the CEO of Thiinkle, I designed the app, led the development and monetization, and managed the full lifecycle of the app until the company was acquired two years later.

Before the company was acquired, we attracted three million users and hundreds of thousands in revenue while spending zero on marketing. Based on the success of the app, I led the team to build and launch a series of 25 social apps in total, achieving more than 23 million users.

Main Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Facebook API

Loop was an exclusive content app that featured celebrities. The app targeted fans of extremely popular global and regional celebrities in emerging markets. World-class footballer, Samuel Eto'o, was one of the celebrities we partnered with.

The company sold the app to several telcos, and they offered the service to their subscription audience. Customers could subscribe to the service through their mobile device (smartphone or older phone), pay through their telecommunication provider, and receive the content in a format optimized for their device (an app for smartphones, HTML/HTML5 for web-enabled phones, or SMS for feature phones).

As a product director, I spearheaded these activities:
- Took over the product in the concept phase
- Led the design and development
- Managed the celebrity sourcing and signing process
- Created marketing and sales materials
- Educated sales teams in 12 regional offices across the globe
- Participated in sales meetings with telco CMOs and other C-level executives
- Led the launch and funnel optimization in multiple countries including Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Kenya

Main Technologies: PHP, HTML5, MySQL, Android

Country-in-a-box is a complete, end-to-end collection of playbooks, guidelines, processes, templates, documents, and examples that describe, organize, streamline, and accelerate the process of launching a localized MVP in a new market within three to six months, using a team of two or three people.

The framework was developed with the following principles:
- Country and partner agnostic
- Flexible but safe
- Fast and efficient
- Reusable but constantly evolving
- Detailed and complete

It covers all aspects of launching a business:
- Market analysis (legal, compliance, finance, technology, culture, and competition)
- Partner selection (ecosystem analysis, partners comparison, benchmarking, negotiation, and agreement)
- Product localization
- MVP launch

The framework can be used (with a few adjustments) to expand or launch any web or mobile product or service in a new market. As an expansion lead, I envisioned, designed, developed, and established the framework as a key component of the company's expansion strategy. I also trained, onboarded, and coached expansion leads for other regions—Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—to use the framework.

Athlenda is a web and mobile platform that enables the developed world to discover, track, and monitor young athletes from areas that, until today, remained untapped. Athlenda is addressing a huge industry challenge: to organize and streamline the chaotic process of scouting new talent.

As a consultant to the company, I drafted a new business plan and worked closely with the CEO to attract new investments. I designed and led the development of a new version of the product for soccer and cricket and helped the company open up new markets, leveraging those new verticals in Europe and India.

As part of the whole process, I introduced two new revenue streams and helped the company sell the new subproducts to basketball teams from the NBA, the NCAA, and the Euroleague. Within the 12 months that I worked with Athlenda, the company doubled its numbers on the supply side (athletes), tripled its numbers on the demand side (coaches, scouts, teams, and non-athletes), and boosted revenue by 500%.

Main Technologies: PHP, HTML5, JavaScript, MySQL, Android

GoCar in the most popular automotive magazine in Greece and Cyprus. GoCar Interactive is the award-winning app version of the magazine for tablets and smartphones. As the head of product for Apps4Mags, the technology provider behind GoCar Interactive magazine for tablets, I led the whole project from end-to-end.

My contributions included:
- Participation in sales meetings and contract negotiations
- Concept design
- Development of complete product specs including the definition of use cases, design of user flows and storyboards, and prototyping
- Development and management of the product roadmap
- Project management
- Direction of product development
- Collaboration with the marketing team to define the go-to-market strategy
- Introduction to market