#mobileroadie

In December 2008, I knew I was in trouble. Lehman Bros. had just failed, and the ripple effect throughout the economy were wreaking havoc on my design agency Fluidesign. Within months contracts were cancelled, people stiffed us for money, and the business contracted significantly. It was in this context that my creative director - Brock Batten - came to me with an idea. We were building a lot of custom apps at the time - and we wondered why we couldn’t standardize apps more, cut costs, get them to market more efficiently… kind of like a “wordpress for apps.” Two weeks later I green lit what would become Mobile Roadie, and somehow found $40k to fund the initial work.

We launched at SXSW in March of 2009. I remember the endless cycle of working in our room, running down to the lobby for a meeting, running back up for a call, running out to pass out flyers targeting musicians, and passing out by my laptop around 3am before doing the same thing the next day. And it worked. There was no better feeling than seeing people order your product on day one.

By the end of 2009, we had turned down two acquisition offers, signed up Taylor Swift and Madonna, taken on investment from great LA angels like Mike Jones, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, and we were off to the races.

The last six years have been filled with all of the extreme highs and lows that come with entrepreneurship. I’m so proud of the company that we’ve built, a company that powers apps for names like Disney, the Wynn Las Vegas, Taylor Swift, the Dallas Mavericks, NYU, and the World Economic Forum. From the beginning we wanted to make apps accessible to the masses, and democratize the whole industry. There are now many companies that do this, but we were truly the first guys out of the gate with a do-it-yourself platform. I’d like to think we played a small part in the now burgeoning app ecosystem.

I believe a Founder should always know his/her place, and above all keep in mind what’s best for the company. I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s best for Mobile Roadie is to have fresh blood at the top. So, starting today, we are promoting our COO - Andrew Mains - to be the CEO of Mobile Roadie. I will step away from the day-to-day at the company, although I remain a significant shareholder and the company’s biggest fan. I’ll continue to support these guys in any way I can.

It’s been a long and winding road, and when you start a company you never imagine yourself leaving. You just imagine building, scaling, growing, expanding, becoming something great in the world. I believe Mobile Roadie is something great in the world, and I believe that the team in place with the roadmap in front of them will bring the company to new heights of greatness.

Since my switch from a AAA video game to an application, I've had to go back and look through the various app building sites to find an appropriate fit. At first, I was convinced that AppMakr was the perfect choice, because one of their app examples was ARMY News, and my app is centered around military life. I couldn't click through to it to see all the features, though, but I was nearly sold.

But to give credit to the other sites, I decided to go ahead and click through them as well. There were a few I liked better in terms of the website interface, but no samples included a military-based application like AppMakr.

The last site I clicked on was Mobile Roadie. At this point, I was already planning my post about AppMakr. But Mobile Roadie blew me away. The website was gorgeous, the interface was easy, and their samples of apps fit a lot better with my idea for my military spouse/partner application (which I direly need to name).

There were core and pro features that I need to explore more in-depth, but I was really impressed with the companies that have built apps through Mobile Roadie already, such as Animal Planet, San Diego Zoo, Radio Disney, etc. They also offer support for iPad app making, which I found to be extremely beneficial.

Above is an example of an interface design Mobile Roadie offers. Image courtesy of http://mobileroadie.com/pdf/Mobile_Roadie_Capabilities.pdf. I'd like to have a similar look for my app, with various photos of military couples as the background and the tabs on top. Because each branch of the military uses different colors, I'd like to keep the homepage black and white, very neutral. Then, perhaps, when a user navigates to a certain branch page, the colors will change to parallel that branch. Green and yellow for the army, blue and red for the marines, etc.

Last week I travelled over to London for a small tour. Playing our first gig on Thurs night. I had played The Regal Rooms a couple of times before, and each time was always a high light for me. I had, up until now always played there solo, but this time round I had Gary and Ben with me, so I was really looking forward to it. It’s a lovely little venue and they always put on good acts, so it yet again it didn’t disappoint! Only three shows in total, the 3rd being the City Showcase: Spotlight London, in the National Geographic shop on Regent St and the main reason for the tour in the first place. Turned out to be a really nice vibe in there as shoppers stopped to listen to us play. They could have done with turning up the air conditioning though! We also popped into Soundcloud and Mobile Roadie on Friday evening to play a private gig for all guys in there, which was very relaxed and chilled over a few beers. Massive thanks to Steve  in MobileRoadie for hooking us up!! Shout out to Dave from Soundcloud (thanks for the T-shirt), Will, Stuart and to all the guys at Moo.