Company Spotlight - PointAbout

Washington, D.C.-based mobile app developer PointAbout just launched AppMakr, which slashed the cost of application development, enabling users to get their content into the mobile world overnight. The news about AppMakr is exploding on the Web, and dcTechSource sat down with PointAbout—in the midst of a blitzing product launch and an across-town office move—to talk about where the company is at right now.

By Avery Fellow | January 15, 2010

Washington, D.C.-based mobile app developer PointAbout just launched AppMakr, which slashed the cost of application development, enabling users to get their content into the mobile world overnight. The news about AppMakr is exploding on the Web, getting featured by bloggers such as Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki and Geoff Livingston. "We saw mobile coming and knew it was going to be big," said PointAbout chief strategy officer Sean Shadmand. dcTechSource sat down with Sean—in the midst of a blitzing product launch and an across-town office move—to talk about where the company is at right now.

PointAbout cofounders Scott Suhy, Daniel Odio, Sean Shadmand and Isaac Mosquera launched the company in July 2008.

What was the evolution of AppMakr?
People don’t remember that two to three years ago, iPhone was a fad. I remember sitting with Daniel at a conference and everyone had their iPhones out and was playing with them and no one with Blackberries was touching them. I said to Daniel, "This is kind of interesting." The speakers were talking about how much iPhone was a fad. Now it’s easy, but at the time everyone said, "This is going nowhere--in six months it will be over."

AppMakr went through a lot of iterations. The product was created to help out the consulting side of our business at the beginning. Daniel and Scott were going out on sales calls and they needed a boost. So instead of telling clients what we could do, Isaac and I built AppMakr, first round, over the weekend. Then we could go into meetings with companies and say, "This is what we can do, and we can do more than this." It was still a two or three hour sales meeting, but it was something.

We kept building AppMakr out to do a lot of different things. It became kind of a Frankenstein. It became extremely complex--learning how iPhone works, plugging things in--it just got messy. But more and more we saw that the need was there and it wasn’t being filled. Then we stopped, built it from scratch, and gave it a public launch.

What is the key to AppMakr’s success?
What we’re really trying to focus on with AppMakr is the idea that someone who has really good content just wants a way to distribute it. A newspaper was black and white for a hundred years--and that worked. So we’re basically taking someone who doesn’t have ten or twenty thousand dollars to spend on marketing and saying, "With a hundred bucks, you can get on the biggest mobile device right now, and your content will be distributed and downloaded, people can access it on the Metro— mobile platforms offer a lot of capabilities the Web can’t."

Do you guys do Web?
Eventually we will, but there are still problems. We actually started out creating Web stuff. A lot of people are creating Web stuff now. We started that way. But it was a hard sell. You still need developers. You still need HTML. That’s resources. So we simplified, simplified, simplified. We say to customers, "We’re giving you a specific system that will always work. It will be clean. You can change images and colors, but most importantly, your content is out in an hour." That seems better, even though at first it didn’t.

People are saying that AppMakr is democratizing app development. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s a big thing to us. We invest a lot of time and money in not looking for money in a lot of ways. Eventually we hope it works. A lot of our competitors charge $199 just to register and then charge $30 a month. We let people test and play. If you want to build and it looks good, then you can pay us. It’s a relaxed group, and I think that came out in the product.

What hurdles are you facing with AppMakr?
There’s Apple. We can’t really say anything bad about them because our business is built on them in a lot of ways. We will be moving to other platforms. But the approval process at Apple takes awhile. It’s tough because, to a novice, it looks like we are doing the whole process—designing the app and putting it up on the store—but we would finish an app, send it to the store and it would take a month. Luckily they are starting to speed up. We are seeing approvals in two, three and four days.

How are you gearing up for the release of Apple tablet?
Were really excited about that. It’s funny when this stuff happens. iPhone comes out, people say iPhone apps are a fad. Then they realize its not. They shoot themselves in the foot a little bit. In the case of tablet, is everyone eager because they were bit from the last mistake, or what if this time it really doesn’t do well? We’re really excited about it, though.

We are going to be very careful getting into tablet, but because it’s Apple to Apple and because the stores are the same, the technology behind it is going to be very similar. We have people researching it right now.

Originally there’s Web. It’s fairly quick to develop, with a lot of content, a lot of breadth and depth. The whole design structure of the Web was great. And then the mobile device came out. Suddenly you don’t have all that space. It brought people back into the efficient world—putting a slick design around a lot of content. Then the tablet comes out. It has the size of the Web, but it has the hardware of the iPhone—the GPS, the touchscreen, the flip, the slide. I don’t think it will be realized at first, but this is going to be a whole new design platform. It’s the depth and breadth of the Internet and the ergonomics and interaction of the phone in a whole new system. So if someone, hopefully us, can figure out a way to make that work, that’s great.

Plus you have the apps store. There’s a whole new marketing and business structure around it, so it could be very exciting. Every industry that has a factory that walks around and does checklists can take this with them. I don’t buy technology a lot. I try to wait, and be calm. But I think I really want one.

What direction is the company taking?
It’s really important for us to not do what we did in the beginning. If you build a store that sells keys and sandwiches and fixes your shoes, that’s the equivalent of saying, "I’m going to do iPhone work and Web work in my first month, and then I’m going to do consulting." We did that at first, which always happens, but focus is really important to us.

Our main focus is make sure the content gets to users quickly, gets to them well, and the experience is really clean. Like Facebook vs. MySpace. MySpace is widgets and Facebook is a little stricter. I think some of the critics would say that our product is too simple, but I’d rather be too simple.

How do you come up with your ideas?
When I try and be creative I try not to think about what people will do, but slap myself on the hand and see what I missed so far. Before augmented reality, everything was a list--location, height, north, south. All the data was there. We had a knife, we had bread, but no one made sliced bread. We have motion, we have rotation, we have location—it’s going to be up to people being creative as to how to put that together.

You just have to keep your eyes open, and adopt quickly when people beat you, and think of things and put them out in the market as fast as possible.

For details on PointAbout’s new AppMakr service, visit www.AppMakr.com.

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