When the X Factor finalists take to the stage this weekend, they will be vying for favour among some 18 million viewers, should last year’s figures be anything to go by. With just shy of a third of the UK’s population watching, the show will be in the running to be one of the most watched on Britain’s shores this year.

Anywhere up to a million of those viewers will be interacting with the show live through the official X Factor mobile phone app, created by Matt Millar’s company Live Talkback. The app – introduced during this year’s competition – allows users to tap their screen to ‘clap’ or ‘boo’ while the acts are live on stage. A measure of the overall balance from all users is displayed alongside the graphic in real time.

Live Talkback provides the app platform that it has built for multiple TV shows, including Sky News, Liverpool FC’s dedicated channel and ITV’s other flagship TV performance contest, Britain’s Got Talent. It also has its own branded app, TellyBug – a social-based environment where users can rate and converse about the latest TV programmes. None of these have been on the scale of the X Factor project though – when The Cloud Circle met Millar at the recent UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) Tech World conference at the Excel Centre in East London, the app had just received its one millionth download.

You’d expect an achievement of this magnitude to have taken a fairly sizeable team with a mature operation and significant investment. But Live Talkback is only three years old, employs only five people and doesn’t even have its own premises. “Skype is our office,” explains Millar, in somewhat triumphant fashion. “The one millionth download is a massive feat for us and we’re very proud. But none of it would have been possible without cloud.”

He explains that cloud really has been the key enabler of the business so far, discounting for a moment the talents of himself and his colleagues. As well as providing the collaborative functionality for Live Talkback’s small team to work remotely – therefore cutting the costs of commercial premises – the company uses Amazon’s EC2 elastic public cloud for its bandwidth and compute power and delivers its platform on a software-as-a-service model.

“It also means that we are able to innovate by continually developing and testing out new ideas,” says Millar. “We can push out the platform to more apps as and when we want to increase the pace, investing only what we need to as we go.

“Scaling in the cloud is very simple and that’s the core thing we focus on. We now scale to a level of broadcast television, something which would have cost millions before and took an army of people to look after the servers. We do it with five people. ”

Cloud is enabling a sea change in product innovation. It allows companies like Live Talkback to respond quickly to what both TV executives and their audiences are crying out for – direct interaction between viewer and show – and to react quickly to changing market or sociological conditions.

“The days when you get a two to three year roadmap in place and then go off and implement against it are long gone,” Miller asserts. “You need to be much more agile and to be able to learn about what you’re doing all of the time. We plan on a two week sprint cycle in terms of development and making sure we align those with what the shows need.

“During the course of the X Factor we’ve done multiple incremental changes to advertisement features and we continue to do that as we roll out new shows. The important thing is the pace you can develop. It’s not what you have now; it’s how you can innovate. Scalable cloud is the only way that is technically achievable.”

The cut of his cloth

There’s another reason why Live Talkback has been able to successfully secure and deliver upon the application contract for Britain’s biggest television show – Millar’s unrelenting drive and entrepreneurialism.

He might not don the usual attire (both times we’ve met he’s been in jeans while others around him sport shirt and tie), but he certainly demonstrates the habitual traits of somebody intent on success by his own hand. He is unwavering in his focus; he doesn’t see obstacles, only challenges; and he says he is “rubbish at working for other people” because he has to drive things. He articulates with a self-belief that could be construed as arrogant if it wasn’t for one thing: he is only too ready to admit where he has made mistakes in the past and knows he’ll make more in the future. Yet what’s already come to pass matters only in that it informs the choices of today; that he has the utmost confident in his strategy in the here and now is abundantly clear. Mistakes in the future matter somewhat more, but you get the sense that prophecy has a dreamlike definition.

“I have to describe myself as a serial entrepreneur,” states Millar, almost like it’s a slur. In reality, the only reason why he’d reject the title would be the perception of arrogance that sometimes comes with it, or perhaps the fact that it has become tarnished by the many false claims laid upon it.

Millar has done enough, while still the formative side of forty, to completely warrant the description. Following a degree in physics at Oxford University, he spent the next decade working in the developing mobile phone industry, first for Symbian and then Adobe, before leaving to begin his own company, Mobile Innovations Ltd. This he sold, four years later, to the latter of his employers and there he returned for a three year stint as director of mobiles and devices. This took him to 2008 when he left once more, this time to start Live Talkback. Three years on and the company is already profitable; while there’s many success stories among the influx of tech startup companies that have flooded London and California over a similar timeframe, the mass majority can’t claim that. If all of that wasn’t enough his expertise are keenly sought; he’s a board advisor for two other tech startups, map rendering outfit CartoType and social connections network SONAR. 

To Millar, there was never any question over which television show Live Talkback would be gunning for. “If we we’re going to be successful we had to get the biggest TV shows out there. What’s the biggest? X Factor.”

Others might have reproached themselves with illusions of grandeur; Millar sees only opportunity. “You should never underestimate yourself,” he says. “And if you don’t think you can do what you want to do then you either find out how to do it or you stop altogether. Entrepreneurs don’t want, they do. But if you feel like you are being held back because you don’t know what to do and you don’t know how to get started then you have to get over it – you will come up against this all the time in business.”

There are certainly risks to starting up a company, especially in a budding industry like web applications. Millar professes to a perennial state of fear – but he thrives on it. “If you ever feel like you’re in a comfort zone, kick yourself out of it,” he says.

As well as “ruthlessly prioritising”, he urges budding entrepreneurs not to be put off by the thought that their idea might not be unique – it’s all about the execution. “Ideas are cheap,” he says. “If you’ve got an idea and you think no-one else has thought of it, you’re either a genius or a fool. And you know what the overwhelming odds are? You’re probably not a genius. Your advantage comes from how you can deliver on it better than anyone else.”
One idea isn’t enough either, nor is a handful. “Our ratio of ideas to implementation is probably a hundred to one,” says Millar.

 And don’t trust your own instincts on the value of the idea you choose – remember your customer is king. “Work out who your customers are and get out and talk to them as early and as often as you can,” he advises. “While it may seem like a good idea, if it’s not a good idea to your customers, it’s not really a good idea. There’s honestly no better way to get feedback than to ship a product. If you’ve got a good idea today you should be able to ship that product at very little cost in a very small amount of time – months, maybe weeks. Go to friends and family – if you can’t find 100 people who think it’s a good app and a good idea then it isn’t one. That should be easy.” 

Finally, he says you have to keep it simple – building an app to do one job and to do it well. He actually flouted this rule himself, though. The X Factor app doubled in complexity during the development stage – “first we just had ‘clap’,” says Millar. “Then we added ‘boo’.”

UK – primed for profit?

The backdrop to our conversation, the Tech World conference – a showcase for UKTI’s work in helping to grow the ‘Tech City’ area of East London to rival Silicon Valley in the US – naturally leads us to the question of whether the business ecosystem here in the UK really does now lend itself favourably for tech start-ups to flourish.
“Honest answer?” asks Millar, eye cocked, perhaps expecting that we were looking for some glorification. “It’s not the best in the world.”

He explains that Live Talkback itself does enjoy a lot of advantages of being in the UK, as opposed to one of the other tech startup areas like Seattle or California’s Silicon Valley, because the TV producers, broadcasters and advertisers it works with are mostly all concentrated in a small area of London.

“We can walk from Hammersmith and White City, through Soho, down to the Southbank and over to Horseferry Road and cover all of the people we work with,” he reflects. “If you’re in the US you need Silicon Valley for the technology, LA for the TV producers and New York for advertising. So we certainly have a significant strategic advantage being based in London.”

“Many others won’t have similar benefits though. They have a smaller consumer market and a poorer investment circle, in that it is much smaller, even though some individual investors here are excellent. It’s not that you can’t be successful here – there are some very smart companies in and around London who are doing things that suit the area. Others might struggle because they have competitors in better business environments. You have to choose where you want to be and look at the advantages.”

However, Government, for its part, puts “remarkably few barriers” in the way of business growth, Miller thinks. The UK’s R&D tax credits certainly meet his approval – especially since he’s recently received “a rather sizeable” cheque from Inland Revenue himself.

But the Tech City initiative, he’s not so sure about. “I am sceptical on its value,” he says. “There are a lot of good things that they are doing but I also think it is somewhat distracting. If you look at maps of Tech City you see that it is widening to include creative and digital agencies. To my mind, they are not tech startups – they have fundamentally different business model. They are fantastic companies with huge benefits to the UK economy and it’s a lost opportunity to not focus on them as an individual sector.

“The other thing is that the very nature of this business means it is difficult to create a one-size fits all strategy for growth. We are all unique and, as entrepreneurs, we thrive on differentiation. I am certainly quite contrarian – if everyone is going to zig, I’m going to zag.”

So does Matt Millar’s entrepreneurial spirit extend to a little educated gamble? It’s hard to pick a winner for the X Factor final this weekend from the infectiously upbeat scouse hairdresser Marcus Collins, teen comeback queen Amelia Lily and lollipop girl quartet Little Mix. You’d think Millar, though, should be very well placed to say, based on the clap and boo data his app has received throughout the series.

Unfortunately, the indications from the app don’t correlate with the vote. “With our app people judge every act, not just one, and they make different decisions when it comes to actually making a decision on their favourite,” says Millar. “As such, our business plan doesn’t include a bet on the winner based on our data. The bookies would love it if it did – we’d almost certainly lose.”

You’ll just have to settle for those one million downloads for now then, Matt.