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Why two engineers left Apple to build a Flash alternative: The Hype (YC W11) story

Published: May 23, 2011


Hype is an HTML5 Animation Builder for Mac OS X. It allows you to build interactive sites in HTML5 that rivals Flash. Hype launched last Friday and they are already the top grossing app on the mac app store.

Earlier today I had a chance to catchup with one of the cofounders, Jonathan Deutsch, to talk about his experience leaving a safe job at Apple to launch a startup, where his inspiration came from for Hype, and his experience with Y Combinator.

Where did the idea for Hype come from?

At one point after a trip to Europe, I wanted to make a photo website that would be as nice as a beautifully bound photo album, and use lots of effects.  Coding this with HTML5 would have been a nightmare.  There had to be a better way, and that’s how the idea for Hype was born.  It stuck with me, and eventually I realized this was going to be a great opportunity for a business.

Where did you work prior to launching your own startup?

I worked at Apple. I was the engineering manager for the Mail.app back end (Mac OS X), but also worked on software updates, automation technology, SJ keynote demos, and other engineering projects.

I met Ryan at Apple as well, celebrating after a successful WWDC kickoff. He was working as an engineering project manager for Mac OS X. It was a really central role; he (and the team he was on) were responsible for coordinating the entire release of Mac OS X. Sometimes at bars we’d run into people who were Apple or ex-Apple, and Ryan would introduce himself, and they’d reply, “Oh, I’ve gotten emails from you!”

What made you decide to leave a “safe job” at Apple and build a risky startup?

I had always wanted to have my own company; I suppose its “in the blood.”  It was getting to be pretty clear that there was a new wave coming to the web, much like “Web 2.0” but instead of it being called “Web 3.0” it was called HTML5.  It’s a marketing term really, generally referring to new HTML5 tags, CSS3 styles/animations, and better JavaScript performance.  It also refers to being able to have the full web on your phone.  It was always in the back of my mind that for any technology shift you’d need tools to help out.  I’m really a tools guy, though we tend to call them “apps” nowadays.

I was faced with the decision of continuing to work with the great people on my team on a clearly high impact project, living with the “what if” syndrome, or trying to forge my own path.  “Regret Minimization” is what should win out in life, so it did.  I had done a lot of different projects at Apple, and felt I made my mark both internally on the company and externally on Mac OS X.

I had established a fair number of relationships at Apple, and felt if my startup failed I could always go back.  At Apple the question is often “how many times have you worked here?”  When you’re hired, you get new hardware… so I like to joke that the worst case is I’d end up with a new Mac Pro out of the deal.

Walking away is bittersweet, and there’s definitely a social and professional net that you leave behind.  That’s one of the main reasons we decided to pursue Y Combinator.  We didn’t want to be on an island by ourselves.

Apple is publicly against Flash. Did this have any influence on your decision to build Hype?

Not specifically.  While Flash enables some really great content on the web, there’s lots of people who aren’t favorable on it due to its lack of accessibility, CPU usage, or crashes.  It isn’t appropriate for mobile.  To Adobe’s credit, they’ve been more active lately in trying to address these issues.

What perhaps had more of an influence is Apple’s driving the web forward.  WebKit is really a great project.  I think a lot of people forget that innovation in the browser was basically dead until Safari.  The canvas tag, while controversial at first,  showed that new standards could be made and adopted by other browsers.  The JavaScript performance wars have moved the world forward.  Now WebKit is on almost every smartphone.  It’s great to see HTML5 as a new platform, and Apple deserves a lot of credit.

How did you get into to Y Combinator?

We got in through Y Combinator through the normal interview process. Ryan and I both found the questions from the initial application were great for helping to clarify our business plan, realizing our target markets, and helped ensure the two of us were on the same page. I’ve recommended to everyone I know that even if you’re not going to apply to YC, fill out the application.

What has been your experience with Y Combinator?

YC is definitely worthwhile. The network effects are staggering… it gives any YC company an advantage in making the right contacts, finding investment, and being in a support net with others in the same boat. And if you’re starting a company, why wouldn’t you want every advantage available to you? Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, and Harj Taggar all give great advice with brilliant ideas sprinkled in. The dinners are fun, and there’s a lot that we learned from the speakers. Most founders would come early before each dinner just to hang out and discuss their startups or demo their products. The atmosphere is electric and contagious.

Y Combinator is also heavily focused around finding additional investment. Startups always need more cash! Finding funding was not a major concern to our us, as our “old school” business plan was to sell Hype from the get-go, and we had confidence it would be able to generate revenue. In that regard, we didn’t take as much advantage of YC as other companies are able to. We did make several strategic connections through investors to other companies and individuals in our space that have already been of benefit.

As an aside, during the YC timeframe we were so focused on developing our product that Paul Graham actually emailed us and was concerned that we hadn’t gone to enough office hours!

Don’t forget to checkout Hype!

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

Weekly reader question: How has your startup “failed faster”?

Published: May 20, 2011


Yesterday I spent the day in Grand Rapids, Michigan, checking out The Michigan Lean Startup Conference. Eric Ries gave a fantastic talk about building lean startups and how to discover if people actually want what you’re building.

The key principel behind building a lean startup is “failing faster”. Before you spend months building a “perfect system” you should spend a few days on crappy code to prove your concept. The goal is to to learn fast and iterate quickly.

My question for TSF readers, is “How have you applied these principles to “fail faster”? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments or via email (tipbox@thestartupfoundry.com).

Angel Investors Need to Get Their Hands Dirty

Published: May 19, 2011


This is a guest post by Jason Lorimer. Jason is an entrepreneur @CulturaHQ, advocating on behalf of those with the ambition to do more than just entertain ideas.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain

The Low Hanging Fruit is Picked Clean

In the post-internet age — out of all the ambitious would-be entrepreneurs in the world, only a small percentage of them are being well served by the early stage venture capital system.
Serving that select few – say 5% (some say less than 1%) of entrepreneurs who have some technical savvy and can clearly communicate their idea — these funding-seekers kept the early stage capital engine running without anyone having to get their hands too dirty. Now, with a number of different early stage investment and incubation vehicles to serve that same small percentage of entrepreneurs, there are simply not enough early stage companies that fit into that mold and too many entities vying for the attention of the relatively few that do. These capital providers are now finding themselves, instead, in the humbling position of having to compete and eventually market themselves to those best packaged investment opportunities.

Instead of competing with each other and with the highly desirable incubators, they should change the hunting game.

Those Damn Incubators

Good for that small, elite percentage of entrepreneurs — and bad for Angels – incubators are cropping up everywhere – becoming the go-to for the savviest of entrepreneurs with refined concepts.

At first, Angels’ knee-jerk reaction to this change inferred that they believed they either were left to watch incubators feed on their game – or compete.

And competing is likely the path of most resistance.

It is difficult for Angels to compete on deal terms with an incubator because they typically are founded by proven entrepreneurs, have large panels of mentors and provide an environment that promotes collaboration.

Incubators are very seductive, if an entrepreneur gets accepted into one of these programs, especially the likes of Y Combinator and Tech Stars, they are going to go regardless of what an Angel is offering. They see their chances for success as greater with an incubator. Whether that is true remains to be seen.

And here Angels made another play.

When it became clear that competing with incubators was futile, Angels moved to position themselves as advocates for these programs. Solid logic here: Let the incubators work with the start up — get a viable product in market and you will be there on graduation day ready to cut a check. This strategy has two flaws, one more significant than the other.

First, not all incubators are created equal. The proliferation of the incubator or accelerator as they are now more fashionably referred to is upon us. There are now hundreds of programs out there. When the smoke clears, all the early stage capital sources are going to be competing to get access to deals from the same handful of these programs.

Second, instead of working together to hedge your risk and share deals, Angels are forced into competing with one another because of a shortage of what have to date been considered viable deals to invest in. While this may bode well for the entrepreneur in the short term, over time, what will essentially become a price war is bad for the entire system of early stage capital.

One need only look at the announcement that Yuri Milner, Managing Partner of Digital Sky Technologies, investors in the likes of Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, to find a case and point
for both of these issues. Mr. Milner, using a separate entity, aptly named the Start Fund with partner Ron Conway, decided to make a blind, blanket investment of $150K into each and every single accepted applicant in this years Y Combinator class. They removed the possibility of having to compete with other funds for the attention and deal flow of the most well-known accelerator in the US.

A lot of people, both within the investment community and outside of it, balked at this idea – seen as a reckless and ultimately unnecessary way to invest. Those people are likely short-sighted and are missing two key points that it would seem the Start Fund fully understands:

1. He who invests first controls the deal going forward.

2. See point #1

Remember, one win pays for all the losses. That is the fundamental model at play in early stage investments and subsequently the logic behind the incubator. One Facebook pays for 9, or in their case, 900 companies that fell flat. The people that invested in the seed round for Facebook are sitting pretty right about now as they were first in line to invest in each subsequent round of capital infusion.

Investor and all around smart guy Chris Yeh has a great guest post on Tech Crunch about how the Yuri Milner/Y Combinator deal affects the ecosystem as a whole. He talks at length about the idea of investing first. I highly recommend giving it a read.

Enter the Big Boys

Adding insult to injury for the average Angel investor is the emergence of the biggest of players like Google and Microsoft into the early stage equation. Without knowing Mr. Milner personally I would also have to guess that the catalyst, at least in part, for making what has been considered such a bold move is the Googles and Microsofts getting aggressive in this space.

These large companies, with the resources to catapult about any entrepreneur into the life they are after, have started to position themselves along side Angels in the deal-flow and they’re offering the accelerator programs perks like exclusive access to certain technologies and customers. These programs in turn using the same to help better position themselves to get applicants from the best of the best start-ups.

For these big organizations, positioning themselves in this fashion is also a way to identify and get their hands on great developers through early acquisition. Development talent being something there is a great shortage of right now.

If You Can’t Join Them — Beat Em’

In the end, there are simply too many of these programs and not enough entrepreneurs that fit the mold investors have come to rely on: technical founders who can not only clearly communicate their idea, but also build the minimum viable product and prove it in market prior to taking on a seed round.

It is likely that we will now begin to see a series of unsustainable strategic partnerships between investors and the accelerator programs. Don’t be surprised if it starts to get gimmicky or, for better or worse, you start to see government subsidies playing a major role.

All of this is a temporary band-aid on what is fundamentally a market problem that only a new model can fix.

A new way of doing things that takes into account the other 95%.

That group is made up of entrepreneurs who may not be able to code and often times are not able to quickly and concisely convey their idea at first. These ambitious, intelligent people make up the largest opportunity for early stage investors to ever come down the pipe. The only catch is that Angels are going to have to get their hands a little dirty. Angel investors who still insist on playing a primarily passive role must evolve or face the fact that like many of the industries they invest in, a fundamental shift is forcing formerly sustainable parties out of the ecosystem in which they are a part.

Don’t Overshoot the Mark

Some individuals are already partnering up with fellow investors and entrepreneurs to form their own accelerator programs. There are seed funds with an advisory board of some kind and space from which entrepreneurs can work. While you will likely see some successful ventures born this way, I would argue this is too short-sighted thinking — skating to where the puck used to be if you will.

These programs still serve the same small percentage of entrepreneurs and leave the largest market untapped. All at a time where cost of entry is nominal and problems to solve using inexpensive technologies are abundant. In terms of opportunities to build products and platforms people can find utility in — to participate in and add value to their own experiences — we are just getting started.

I don’t expect every investor to roll up their sleeves and partner with entrepreneurs to build and run companies in the earliest and most important phases of a start up. It is my position that the next evolution of this industry is in strategic relationships with hybrid development teams. Teams with the ability to cost effectively and efficiently build, incubate and iterate new ventures to a pre-scale position. One where the investors capital is most useful and for that matter — measurable.

Vested Deployment Teams

To be clear, the answer is not in going out and finding a design/development team. Hiring them to work with your entrepreneur(s) will often be throwing money down the drain. A lot of money.

In the end it is not a question of quality, but of motivation. A typical developer or digital agency as the larger ones are being called is in the business of building solutions for their clients and charging more per hour than it costs them — simple math. Some of these companies take on certain side projects on an equity basis but without focus, any start up, no matter how good the idea or the team is doomed. Ideally, the deployment team you work with would, like us, work exclusively in vested relationships.

Create a vested deployment team of your own, employ an incubation staff or call us.
Just make sure you are doing something to get out ahead of the shift in this industry and soon.

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

What startups can learn from a LivingSocial marketing misstep.

Published: May 18, 2011


This is a guest post by Jason Lorimer. Jason is an entrepreneur @CulturaHQ, advocating on behalf of those with the ambition to do more than just entertain ideas.

Recently I was working out of one of my favorite Philadelphia coffee shops and I had the pleasure of meeting a young woman who works for the Adventures vertical of Living Social.
This venture, formerly Urban Escapes out of NYC was acquired by Living Social late last year.

This person who I very much enjoyed meeting and whose anonymity I will preserve herein, overheard me on the phone talking about an upcoming trip up to NYC to visit a client in the “Daily Deal” space. Naturally in working for Living Social, my chatter perked her ears. The conversation began with her asking me if I was running a deal with Groupon and having me explain that I work with early stage companies, some in the social commerce space. The discussion continued focused mainly on the shift towards experiences over discount vouchers and how that is being driven by two main factors:

  • Business owners are being inundated with pitches to host deals from dozens of daily deal companies each month. All of them with virtually identical offerings.
  • The widely held perception of business owners is that those who opt-in for a daily deal are simply discount hounds, never to return. I disagree but this is the perception.

I talked a bit about how I felt the industry was moving towards discount as a secondary motivator with experience as the thing that drives the opt-in. I also spoke of WAAG, a recently launched venture out of NYC that leverages this premise to connect those who wish to network themselves offline with small businesses and brands who want to host events at their locations.

My new friend was very enthused about the adventures Living Social was promoting. She made them sound like good fun. As we were talking, I ran a Google search to find the home page for Living Social Adventures. Clicking around a bit on my laptop, I could not for the life of me find a place to enter my email to be notified. Perplexed, I asked:

Me:
Where do I opt-in to get invited to the adventures?

Anonymous:
You don’t.

Hmmm….It turns out that you have to go to the main site and opt-in to receive the daily deals in order to get the adventures invites.

I have no way of knowing what was on the minds of the executives at Living Social when they acquired Urban Escapes and re-branded it as Adventures but it would seem to me they are missing a huge opportunity to bring new people into the fold. The much larger marketplace of people open to the idea of passively participating by opting-in to receive invites to cool new social experiences but are not so keen on the idea of using a discount voucher at their local pizza shop. Now, certainly the master list of email addresses should be leveraged for Adventures but why not market it separately? Send a few timely emails to all existing users asking them if they wish to receive adventures in their area but focus on driving new membership to adventures specifically and then cross market those people into the more profitable daily deal list.

Living Social trails Groupon, their biggest competitor at almost every turn. The Adventures play  is an opportunity to stand out to the larger portion of the public and businesses, both sick of the daily deal speak. Use some of that advertising budget to really push this new, experience based vertical and take a chunk of new market share in the process.

 

There isn’t a speed limit: Line up customers before you ship

Published: May 17, 2011


After seeing a fantastic pitch from a startup I asked a simple question. “How many users do you have”? They replied with “We haven’t launched yet”. I reworded my question slightly and asked “How many customers have you talked to?” and they replied with the same line: “We haven’t launched yet.”

This startup was following a broken formula. It’s horribly inefficient and causes companies to fight a needless uphill battle building relationships with customers. The formula is done sequentially and it looks something like this:

1. Build a product.
2. Ship.
3. First contact with customers.
4. Convince customers to sign up.

Why the model is broken

The broken model I just described takes you a step away from your customer. By building your company in this way you’re essentially saying that you know the customer better than they know themself. If you’re not talking with your customers, how are you going to know the best way to position your product?

This is a better model

1. Build relationships with customers.
2. Build a product and convince customers to sign up
3. Ship.

Before you write a line of code, you should have a clear understanding of who your client is. It’s much better to build relationships asynchronously as you’re building your product. These early relationships are instrumental to your success. By talking to your customers early in development, you’re creating a fantastic feedback loop that you can easily leverage and bounce ideas off of.

There isn’t a speed limit, you can (and should) work asynchronously.

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

Embracing Chaos: Random Participation and the Web

Published: May 16, 2011


This is a guest post by Jason Lorimer. Jason is an entrepreneur @CulturaHQ, advocating on behalf of those with the ambition to do more than just entertain ideas.

It’s been more than a year since the video chat site Chat Roulette took the world by storm. The mainstream media jumping at the chance to expose the site to the public while many of the sites early users were much more interested in exposing themselves. The hype around the site has died down and the traffic has flattened out. It seems the young founder was not prepared to leverage the phenomenon he created with this platform for random interaction. None of us would have been I suspect.
I very much view the overwhelming public interest in this simple chat site as an early indicator of peoples willingness to participate in random interactions as a way to increase the return on their experiences. There are plenty of less well known examples of this like that of Japans’ Ogori Cafe where you get what the person in front of you ordered for lunch or the application I use as a screen saver in Map Crunch. It takes random Google Street View images and rotates them randomly at your behest or on your behalf. Most of what exists to date would be widely considered novelty but that is about to change.

In the post-internet economy, people have access to whatever they want, wherever they are.
Their ability to participate passively in exchanges where they can add their own value to things they buy and services they use will be essential. Experience based commerce will become the standard practice across industries. Companies competing to create and package compelling experiences in a world where the lowest price is accessed easily from our cell phones and the concept of scarcity is abolished by platform marketplaces where people can buy and sell from each other directly, all but eliminating the ability for brands to control the perception of one or more of their products being rare and thereby valuable.

Take Etsy for example. I am a big fan of this platform filled with handmade products from
around the world and as such, often post ideas for their site. In this case, a simple function focused around a prominently placed button would randomly populate an artisans profile, complete with their available products. This fun and productive interface would expose
vendors to additional prospects and customers to interesting products they might have not otherwise have had occasion to search for. All this in a mostly passive way, taking the existing behavior of window shopping and leveraging it to increase sales.

I am extremely surprised that social networks have not embraced randomness to any notable degree as of yet. Think of randomly populating a fellow student from your high school on Classmates.com or an available member of the opposite sex in your area on Match.com

Think about mobile commerce melding with social in a random and ultimately profitable way.
One example would be taking the the much talked about Groupon Now application which while pin pointing your exact location, asks you simply: Are you Hungry or Are You Bored, then populates deeply discounted deals for businesses on the platform by distance on your phone.
The same basic application could be used to match people interested in the same categories, currently in the same vicinity. So, essentially you could click a button and be matched with a person or people and a deal. You could mutually choose to accept the occasion or pass right from the phone. Something randomly fun to do and someone to do it with, all in a few clicks.

How would you work randomness in to your model to improve your customers experience?

 

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Calculating your customers lifetime value (with code)

Published: May 13, 2011


This is a guest post written by Auston Bunsen. Auston is the organizer behind SuperConf, an awesome conference for web entrepreneurs which I had the privilege to attend in February. If you’re in the South Florida area, make sure you go next year!

I watched a Mixergy interview with Jason Fried [link] and at one point he talked about how they (37Signals) hired a data guy to generate metrics, more specifically Customer LTV.  Andrew asked how LTV  is calculated & if there was software available to help figure it out.

This is my answer to that question. It’s how I’ve done Customer LTV calculations & segmenting at companies I’ve worked with/at. Hope it’s useful!

Disclaimer: Code may not be 100% working & some of this stuff is very lego-like. Take this with a grain of salt, it’s just how I do my LTV stuff.

The Customer Lifetime Value Formula

For a SaaS startup today, the formula in it’s simplest form is as follows.

Customer LTV  = Revenue Per Month * Number of Months being a customer

Getting The Necessary Data

If you’re lucky, you will have a record (in a table or datastore) of all payments (& hopefully declines) that a given customer has made.

If you don’t have this you may be able to get it from your payment gateway via their API. If you can, do yourself a favor & do a retroactive import of this data & store it on your servers. It’s important!

Once you have this data, you can just create a script to run through all customers & generate an average LTV. Here is an example in SQL:

Segmenting Your LTV

For more meaningful metrics, you’ll need more data than just your LTV.  You need to be able to properly separate customers with High LTV’s from customers with Low LTV’s. To do this, simply add a “group by” & “order by” to the above SQL statement:

That covers how to get a granular look at your customers & their lifetime value. But now that you’ve got that, you’re probably going to want to see where the bad customers came from. Conversely, you might have some intuition that certain traffic has a lower or higher LTV than others. Basically, you’ll want to go deeper.

Deeper Segmentation

If you’d like to segment your customers by traffic source/medium/campaign, you need to get that data somehow & analytics like Google/Clicky don’t have granular data export (each visitors ip/browser/os) in their API. So, you will need to collect that data & somehow pin it to customers record at the time of signup. You might have to update your database/store to accomplish this. It’s actually really simple to do, just grab the url params & pass them through to the sign up page. Here are a couple of examples…

in Python (django):

in PHP:

Once you do that, things get fun; you can:

1. Mash up data from google analytics with your own data by using their API [link].
2. Segment your customers by sex, age group, education, marital status, etc using the Rapleaf API [link]
3. See if customers in certain cities or states have higher LTV (using SQL)

Tons of fun with data

With the above information, you can create dashboards for realtime campaign tracking (or just dashboard widgets, like one for geckoboard [link]), daily emails with metrics, create upsells to your customers based on LTV (in order to raise low LTV or increase revenue in high LTV customers), re-focus your marketing/pr efforts where they will make the most impact based on historic data & if you’re really nerdy (& smart) run ML/Pattern recognition on your data to find patterns that may be interesting.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this, you can follow the author on Twitter @Bunsen.

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry.

How Jared Tame bootstrapped his startup by writing “Startups Open Sourced”

Published: May 12, 2011

As Jared Tame was finishing up school, he decided to build a startup. He didn’t want to raise money (at least in the early stages) so he did what any “Grade-A” hustler would have done. Jared wrote a fantastic book on popular startups, Startups Open Sourced, and invested the profits into his idea.

In this interview Jared talks about where inspiration came from, measuring advertising efforts, and why Twitter isn’t an effective medium for advertising. This interview is worth investing 15 minutes into.

Final Thoughts:

Jared’s story reminds me of a previous post, You’re not entitled to anything. Hustle for everything you’re worth. Jared perfectly embodies this attitude.

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

How a solo, non-technical founder hustled her way to launching a startup

Published: May 11, 2011



As a solo founder, what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

In a nutshell, you don’t know what you don’t know. You have to be more of a generalist as a sole founder vs. being able to really deep dive into any one expertise. So there is always a bit of unknown with regard to making sure you’ve covered everything. The best way to work around this is to meet with experts and mentors in areas you don’t know a lot about and ask them to grill you with questions about what your doing in that area of expertise. For me that meant meeting with several engineers, asking about development, database structure, hosting, security, coding etc. and finding out how to ask the right questions when finding an outsource firm. Whenever I get stuck now, I continue to reach out to my mentors and experts to ask for quick feedback or to ask the simple question, “What am I missing here?”

Tell us about your experience outsourcing development.

In the past I’ve had great luck outsourcing to sites like: Elance, Odesk, RentaCoder (now vWorker.com) etc., for coding projects. All of those projects, however, were very simple, non-complex type of development projects and outsourcing to these resources worked great. When it came to Swayable, I’d built a massive spec document, did a viability survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and got to my minimum viable product spec so I was ready to go. I initially used Odesk and interviewed 5 firms as I wanted a company vs. an individual so I had a larger support team for the project as it grows. I found a firm that seemed to be able to complete the project but after a month past the first deadline, milestone 1 wasn’t met. I paid them for the work they did complete and ended the relationship. I then decided I needed a U.S. Based firm with U.S. Based accountability and then development could be done oversees. I hired Beyondsoft Consulting and they have been phenomenal! They’ve built both my iPhone and Web app as well as provided not only support, but they do a great job of questioning the direction at times and offering up better ways to execute if there are more efficient ways than what I’ve suggested. I couldn’t be happier with an outsource firm and will continue working with them for the foreseeable future. Lesson learned from this is really just jump in, try things out and don’t be afraid to move on to a better fit, after all it’s your product and money.

If you could do it all over again, what would you have done differently?

I was a bit nervous up front to alienate any audience as Swayable can be used in such a variety of ways. So I built the site with more gender neutral in mind, had I done some more surveys about customer segments, I would have learned that women and teens are more of my audience and could have built the website a bit more targeted to them. Without knowing the direction your site will take up front, and who will adopt your product the most (not all products have this problem if it’s a clear niche) it’s tough to figure out the right design and UX components. So looking back, I would have likely done some different branding elements and more gender targeting with design. It’s something I can fix in the future, but am wanting to continue to see how Swayable is adopted before making any drastic changes.

How do you plan to monetize?

With Swayable’s website only 3 months old and the iPhone app a couple of weeks old, some of the monetization options depend on which direction the site goes with the user base. I do have 4 monetization options regardless of direction that I’m working on implementing at certain traffic milestones:
1 – Paid API: Currently when 3rd party sites embed a Swayable I am seeing on average 10%+ click through/engagement with the Swayables. So an API is a natural solution for websites and online businesses & retailers that want to increase user engagement through there site and products and allowing users to create & share Swayable’s directly from there product/service pages without going to Swayable.com
2 – Selling Swayable advertisement spots – Soon, advertisers can purchase Swayables to get a more integrated/interactive advertising campaigns where users actually interact with the brand by “Swaying” on a Swayable.
3 – Viglink.com – Affiliate program, already installed on the site.
4 – Banner Advertising – Traditional banner advertising on the site.

How have you gained traction

If you really target an audience and learn how to connect with them, you should see traction (this does not mean you have to spend money to do this). In my opinion, If you don’t start seeing the traction you want, then you should be questioning either your product or pivot your product to see where you get traction. With Swayable, I have 3 primary audiences I am targeting initially and one of those audiences is teens (13 to early Twenties is how I categorize this). I’ve targeted them via content that they consume regularly online i.e. Celebrities fan sites via Facebook fan pages, blogs and twitter content that target these celebrities. I create content the teens want to consume and use Swayable as the medium in which they consume the celebrity content. As the teens visit Swayable to vote on celebrity content, they get engaged by first creating yet another celebrity style Swayable. Once the start seeing others vote on their Swayable and the addictiveness of seeing feedback real time, they start to create content in other categories and topics, which is exactly what I was hoping for. So far in 3 months I am doubling in visitors each month, tripling in page views, and increasing time on site each month. Best of all, users that don’t care about celebrity content can just filter by topic to not have to see any celebrity Swayables. My users are engaged, creating content, and over 50% of my visitors are returning back to the site to create and consume more. I am also seeing quite a bit of traction with website owners who are embedding Swayable’s right on their site, they are seeing on average 10% click through on the Swayable’s, getting more user engagement and interactivity without sending visitors away. Once a website owner has embedded a Swayable and seen the engagement, they are coming back to create and embed more Swayable’s on there site.

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Lindsey Harper is a solo founder who doesn’t code. In all essence she is the antithesis of Valley culture. Yet this hasn’t stopped her from building a startup, Swayable, that’s gaining teen users hand over fist. I had the chance to catch up with Lindsey via email to talk about the challenges that she’s faced and how she overcame them.

What is Swayable?

Swayable helps you get opinions online quickly. For example:


As a solo founder, what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

In a nutshell, you don’t know what you don’t know. You have to be more of a generalist as a sole founder vs. being able to really deep dive into any one expertise. So there is always a bit of unknown with regard to making sure you’ve covered everything. The best way to work around this is to meet with experts and mentors in areas you don’t know a lot about and ask them to grill you with questions about what your doing in that area of expertise. For me that meant meeting with several engineers, asking about development, database structure, hosting, security, coding etc. and finding out how to ask the right questions when finding an outsource firm. Whenever I get stuck now, I continue to reach out to my mentors and experts to ask for quick feedback or to ask the simple question, “What am I missing here?”

Tell us about your experience outsourcing development.

In the past I’ve had great luck outsourcing to sites like: Elance, Odesk, RentaCoder (now vWorker.com) etc., for coding projects. All of those projects, however, were very simple, non-complex type of development projects and outsourcing to these resources worked great. When it came to Swayable, I’d built a massive spec document, did a viability survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and got to my minimum viable product spec so I was ready to go. I initially used Odesk and interviewed 5 firms as I wanted a company vs. an individual so I had a larger support team for the project as it grows. I found a firm that seemed to be able to complete the project but after a month past the first deadline, milestone 1 wasn’t met. I paid them for the work they did complete and ended the relationship. I then decided I needed a U.S. Based firm with U.S. Based accountability and then development could be done oversees. I hired Beyondsoft Consulting and they have been phenomenal! They’ve built both my iPhone and Web app as well as provided not only support, but they do a great job of questioning the direction at times and offering up better ways to execute if there are more efficient ways than what I’ve suggested. I couldn’t be happier with an outsource firm and will continue working with them for the foreseeable future. Lesson learned from this is really just jump in, try things out and don’t be afraid to move on to a better fit, after all it’s your product and money.

If you could do it all over again, what would you have done differently?

I was a bit nervous up front to alienate any audience as Swayable can be used in such a variety of ways. So I built the site with more gender neutral in mind, had I done some more surveys about customer segments, I would have learned that women and teens are more of my audience and could have built the website a bit more targeted to them. Without knowing the direction your site will take up front, and who will adopt your product the most (not all products have this problem if it’s a clear niche) it’s tough to figure out the right design and UX components. So looking back, I would have likely done some different branding elements and more gender targeting with design. It’s something I can fix in the future, but am wanting to continue to see how Swayable is adopted before making any drastic changes.

How do you plan to monetize?

With Swayable’s website only 3 months old and the iPhone app a couple of weeks old, some of the monetization options depend on which direction the site goes with the user base. I do have 4 monetization options regardless of direction that I’m working on implementing at certain traffic milestones:
1 – Paid API: Currently when 3rd party sites embed a Swayable I am seeing on average 10%+ click through/engagement with the Swayables. So an API is a natural solution for websites and online businesses & retailers that want to increase user engagement through there site and products and allowing users to create & share Swayable’s directly from there product/service pages without going to Swayable.com
2 – Selling Swayable advertisement spots – Soon, advertisers can purchase Swayables to get a more integrated/interactive advertising campaigns where users actually interact with the brand by “Swaying” on a Swayable.
3 – Viglink.com – Affiliate program, already installed on the site.
4 – Banner Advertising – Traditional banner advertising on the site.

How have you gained traction

If you really target an audience and learn how to connect with them, you should see traction (this does not mean you have to spend money to do this). In my opinion, If you don’t start seeing the traction you want, then you should be questioning either your product or pivot your product to see where you get traction. With Swayable, I have 3 primary audiences I am targeting initially and one of those audiences is teens (13 to early Twenties is how I categorize this). I’ve targeted them via content that they consume regularly online i.e. Celebrities fan sites via Facebook fan pages, blogs and twitter content that target these celebrities. I create content the teens want to consume and use Swayable as the medium in which they consume the celebrity content. As the teens visit Swayable to vote on celebrity content, they get engaged by first creating yet another celebrity style Swayable. Once the start seeing others vote on their Swayable and the addictiveness of seeing feedback real time, they start to create content in other categories and topics, which is exactly what I was hoping for. So far in 3 months I am doubling in visitors each month, tripling in page views, and increasing time on site each month. Best of all, users that don’t care about celebrity content can just filter by topic to not have to see any celebrity Swayables. My users are engaged, creating content, and over 50% of my visitors are returning back to the site to create and consume more. I am also seeing quite a bit of traction with website owners who are embedding Swayable’s right on their site, they are seeing on average 10% click through on the Swayable’s, getting more user engagement and interactivity without sending visitors away. Once a website owner has embedded a Swayable and seen the engagement, they are coming back to create and embed more Swayable’s on there site.

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

Inside LaunchRock- A behind the scenes look with co-founder Jameson Detweiler

Published: May 9, 2011

Seemingly overnight, LaunchRock became a “startup darling”. LaunchRock is now the de-facto platform for pre-launch startups to start building some traction. I had the privilege to catch up with Jameson Detweiler (a LaunchRock co-founder) at Funded By Night in Detroit and we decided to bring him on TSF so he could share their story.

In this interview you will learn how LaunchRock hustled to gain some serious traction in the early days at SXSW, where they are going, and a few ways startups can increase their odds of going viral.

If you prefer audio only, download Inside LaunchRock.mp3

For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.

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Hi, I'm Paul Hontz.

I'm a YC alumn and I love startups. I created TSF to highlight companies I find interesting. You can learn more about me here.

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