1ft Startup

For a long time, I’ve been dying to get back into the LBS space and make something that offers a true, multi-modal experience; I want to email a URL for a bar around and say “Let’s go here” and not care whether people are reading my message on a Blackberry, an iPhone, or at work.

I’m happy to finally have the chance to build it, and we’ve just launched:

http://www.outalot.com

We’re doing NYC as a testing ground for our service, but we will be expanding it into more metro areas soon!

Also, if you’re into this kind of thing, please keep up with us on the blog as well. And as always, feedback is enormously appreciated.

We originally launched a little game called Mitosis nearly a year ago, as a cool experiment in what it would take to get a basic, unbranded game from nothing all the way through the door and as far as we can take it. Like most geeks, we’ve released very few of our own projects to commercial success, spending our time on other peoples’ projects for the actual cash.

If we were going to, say, write up the process of how we got Mitosis launched, it would look something like this:

- Build a cool game. The fun part. When you think you’ve got something good, you should consider the option to…
- Take it to an agent. We happened to know a few good people who could represent us to the carriers, otherwise we’d have languished out on GetJAR (more on that next time). Your agent will entice you with eye-popping (but un-guaranteed, of course) numbers. Your agent will also give you feedback from carriers, middlemen, basically whoever happens to be nearby, and if you’re lucky, you’ll eventually….
- Get reviewed by the carriers for deck placement. It takes MUCH longer than you think. Dealing with carriers is extremely slow; typically they have review processes that aren’t constant, but periodic: monthly, or even quarterly. If you’re one of the lucky, chosen few, you get to spend about 60 days to….
- Port your app. Foolhardy and spendthrift people that we are, we decided to do this in-house with the help of Device Anywhere. This is a possible option, but porting is never enjoyable. Do not underestimate how much work this is. It’s really a tedious and ongoing process, and some problems you simply can’t get around. Definitely take the time to streamline your build tools as much as possible, and you can survive to see the day that you…
- Get your builds certified. Like Verizon’s relationship with NSTL, T-Mobile now has a for-pay certification program with a company called True North. In our experience, their testing has been fair, and their test cases are reasonable; the true downside is simply that it’s up to the developer/publisher (depending on your agreement) to pay for the testing, and re-testing if you fail. That’s life! And now, there’s not much left to do but….
- Wait for it to show up in the catalog. Maybe we got lucky, but we ended up in some sort of deck-placement purgatory for many months while there was some sort of internal reorganization. Recently, finally, we launched on T-Mobile. Yeah!

Our important take-homes from this whole process:
- Publishing through carriers puts you at the mercy of many, many forces beyond your control.
- Decide what you want your company to be good at and focus on improving it.
- Don’t underestimate the pain of porting.
- The last 5% of the process can will drag on for months.

And most importantly, don’t forget why you’re doing what you are doing. We set out to have some fun, take a little break from our day jobs, and make some great games. And to be honest, we started to get burnt out by the actual business process. Once your game is out the door and in the hands of pre-teens spending their parents’ second mortage, though, there’s really no feeling like it.. And we may be just foolish enough to do it again.

There are two major real-world reasons that the shoestring development world for mobiles is rather more difficult than traditional startup software development:

1. Broad phone support is nigh-impossible on a low budget.
   
   First of all, any BREW phones are right out the window: Qualcomm’s BREW platform is prohibitive to small fries, because they have a strict, expensive testing process for any app to be ‘approved’ for a particular handset/carrier, and customers with BREW phones can only install apps that their carrier makes available. This means you’ll need to recoup thousands of dollars in testing costs, as well as hire someone to manage carrier relationships (or do it yourself, you poor bugger). This model effectively cuts out everyone who’s working from a garage, or anyone who wants to give their app away for free.
   
   So that leaves us with Java ME as the other major platform. Java ME is, of course, sweetly intended to be a “Write Once, Run Anywhere” platform, but the KVM authors are all have their own eccentric disloyalty to the spec. This is the kind of thing that an outside observer wouldn’t believe to actually be a hindrance these days, I mean, it’s the year 2000 and hey, we’ve got flying cars! Alas, it’s truly amazing how cracked out some implementations can be. Coding errors aside, there are intrinsic differences in the handsets’ actual, physical capabilities anyhow: Screen dimensions, resource constraints, whether the phone has a Clear key, etc. These attributes must be addressed across thousands of devices regardless.
2. People buy new phones more often than they buy new underwear. This is really an amendment to the first statement, because it causes two sub-problems:
   1. Your app may not work on their new device, and therefore:
   2. You must test new devices eternally.

   You can still install a good chunk of shareware from the Windows 95 days on a new Vista install without much trouble. Even if you couldn’t, it seems that the replacement rate of phones far outstrips that of computers (though I don’t have numbers for that one… lazyweb?), so people are likely to be making better use of their older apps and older OSs on their computer than on the phone.
   

In this environment, it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll see something similar to the runaway successes that we’ve seen in shareware, selling apps and games that scarcely need updating in a decade to keep doing well for themselves. While the shareware makers on the desktop are kicking back on their porch sipping lemonade and responding to fanmail, all us mobile indies have got the Sisyphusean task of sneaking into the Cingular store to test our apps on the hottest new Nokia.

I hate to leave off here on a down note, but I will be back soon with the more interesting upsides, and how to get rid of at least some of the pain that plagues us.