Development Plan

Here is how we broke down our app features to 3 separate milestones.

Prototype Phase 1 (86 hrs):

• Application architecture and data model (22 hr)
• Gesture recognition with standard library (14 hr)
• Camera view and making photo (28 hr)
• Focus & Capture (12 hr)
• Camera - Zoom, Flip, Flash (10 hr)

Prototype Phase 2 (80 hrs)

• Gallery View (20 hr)
• Gallery - Zooming (12 hr)
• Gallery - Timeline (8 hr)
• Gallery - Select, Select Multiple, Deselect (8 hr)
• Gallery - Share menu UI + Sharing to Facebook (14 hr)
• Gallery - Focus on a picture (6 hr)
• Filter control (12 hr)

Prototype Phase 3 (72 hr)

• Gallery - Delete (4 hr)
• Gesture Guide (10 hr)
• Camera - Burst (6 hr)
• Filter applications (52 hr)

Logo

So my partner and I have been going back and forth on what the logo should look like. Originally it looked like this:

Then like this...

Then like this...

Then like this...

We decided on this one for now. We will see how it goes and review it again later.

Rough App Animation 1

Here is the initial rough animation of the app.

Kickstarter Plan

I've been reading a lot of articles and researches on other campaigns. And below is the plan I came up for the Kickstarter campaign plan.

Key dates:

• Submit the Campaign to Kickstarter: Oct 8th
• Kickstarter Campaign Period: October 14th (Mon) - November 16th (Sat)

I've based the dates on the following factors:

• We will be getting the most traffic in the beginning and end of the campaign.
• The highest traffic on Kickstarter happens during weekdays.
• More people participate when beginning and end date of the campaign is around their pay days in the middle of the month.
• We maybe able to get some video of the prototype by then so we can include it on our page and get around the Kickstarter restriction.

Sources:

• https://www.quantcast.com/kickstarter.com/traffic
• http://www.gmsarligames.com/2011/05/18/15-steps-for-a-successful-kickstarter-project/#.UjnmMGTwKGe

Until the campaign starts I'll get as many people as possible to sign up on our emailing list and join our Facebook fan page:

• Facebook Contest: "Help us name a filter for $100 cash prize"
• Hire interns to have people sign up (Pay $1 for every person)
• Reaching out to someone at Dallas Morning News to see if anyone wants to write an article about our company.
• I have about 10 meetup opportunities with various groups, so I'll get people to sign up as well.

Kickstarter Rewards

Our product is not a physical object, and we don't offers services, so types of rewards we can offer is very limited. I looked at all the past Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns for software related products for some inspirations.

Most of them had some sort of services or physical accessories that worked with their apps, so their reward models don't work for us, but I found one successful software campaign that could work for us:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cesarkuriyama/1-second-everyday-app?play=1&ref=search

The campaign was for an app that allows you to record 1 second of everyday of your life and turns it in to a long video. Their campaign offered a lot meetups, parties, skype chats, etc with their founder. Their goal was $20,000, and they ended up raising over $50,000. So I decided to take the same reward model.

Kickstarter Restrictions

We decided to go with Kickstarter because they have the most traffic, and it's growing every year (https://www.quantcast.com/kickstarter.com/traffic)... but they have the most restrictions. Here are some of their rules that are causing us issues:

• Kickstarter cannot be used to fund software projects not run by the developers themselves. 
• No contests, raffles, coupons, or lifetime memberships.
• Kickstarter cannot be used to sell equity or solicit loans.
• No product simulations or photorealistic renderings.

Because my partner and I are not developers, it made us question if having a developer on the team is enough or if we are supposed to make him a co-founder, which is a problem because we are using a Ukraine firm, and we are paying them with cash (You can't really be a co-founder unless you are taking significant amount of risk for the company, and receiving cash compensation is not considered taking a significant amount of risk.)

My partner said we should offer some sort of coupons as one of the rewards, but Kickstarter doesn't allow that.

I wanted to offer equity for some of the higher level rewards, but Kickstarter doesn't allow that.

Since we didn't have the product built yet, we asked our animator to put together a realistic animation of how the app would work based on the visuals I've put together, but Kickstarter doesn't allow that. 

What's weird is that I've seen plenty of realistic renderings of the products on Kickstater so... what's up with that?

Crowd Funding Video

The video is one of the most important components for running a crowd funding campaign, so I found an awesome film director / animator to put together our video.

Our director wanted us to talk naturally in front of the camera without a script, but my partner asked for a script. I put one together, but my partner couldn't make it to the video shoot, so I just took it as a sign and decided to go off the script like the director suggested. I messed up a lot, but he says he can do his magic to make it seamless. 

I can't wait to see how it turns out, or how much I messed up. lol

LegalZoom

Some people warned me about LegalZoom and how it's a scam, but some other people told me it should should be ok for simple incorporation, so we decided to give it a try.

First, we chose Delaware for the incorporation because of the following reasons:

1. Flexible Laws.
2. No Wildcard Juries.
3. Precedence = Less Litigation
4. It’s almost free
5. Privacy

(Source: http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/top-5-reasons-to-incorporate-in-delaware)

We decided to go with c-corp instead of s-corp or llc. My partner said he is going to raise money from his Angel and VC friends pretty soon. Since most of them require the company they invest in to be c-corp, it made sense to go with c-corp.

When we got to the equity structure page, we set up the equity structure to be 10% common stock and 90% preferred stock. Then we assigned 20% of preferred stock for me and 20% of preferred stock for him.

On the directors and officers page, LegalZoom suggested the President and Secretary to be two different people, so we put down my partner as the President and me as the Secretary and Treasurer. 

On the contribution page, I put down $5,000 as my cash contribution.

So that was about it, and the total came out to be around $700 (there were about 5 more pages, but they were just LegalZoom trying to sell their shit to us). Now we will see if it goes through smoothly or if we are gonna run into issues like other people warned us... If it goes through smoothly, $700 would be virtually nothing compared to what I would have to pay a real lawyer to handle the incorporation.

Equity

I've been talking to quite a few people who are interested in joining, and I had to look up the best way to explain the equity structure for employees. And the following 3 links seem to have the most relevant information for a startup equity structure:

• http://www.thedailymuse.com/toolsskills/getting-start-up-equity-everything-you-need-to-know/
• http://www.quora.com/How-much-equity-(-)-should-be-in-the-employee-pool-at-an-early-stage-(angel-round)-company
• http://mashable.com/2011/07/18/negotiating-equity-tips/

Bottomline is to give 0.2-0.5% for regular employees and contractors. 1% for directors. And 3% for VP levels. If they have any cash contributions, they could take more equity.

One of the most important things is to implement 1 year cliff and 4 year vesting period, even for the founders. If things don't work out with your employees or co-founders, you have one year to let them go without giving up your equity. It sounds harsh, but it provides protection for the company. Trust me, you will run into plenty of people who make a lot of promises and never follow through.

Prezi

Prezi is the shit (in a good way).

That's what I use to lay out my wireframes. Because it allows me to zoom in and out almost infinitely, I can zoom in to lay out all my pages with all the details and zoom out to see the overall structure and flow.

Its drawing tools are a little clunky, so I just use indesign to create all the elements and import them into Prezi.

I pay $13.25 a month so I can have a desktop version as well, but it's totally worth it.

Crowd Funding Sites

My partner asked me to look into all the crowd funding sites and find out which one is the best option for us. Below is the list of the most popular sites and their differences:

Indiegogo

- Free to create campaigns.

- Pay 4% if you meet the goal or 9% if you don't.

- I don't see many fund raise for apps.

- Average apps raise about $6000 to $8000.

- These apps usually come with physical accessory as part of the product or offer branded t-shirts.

Kick starter (http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines?ref=footer)

- Kickstarter cannot be used to fund software projects not run by the developers themselves.

- Kickstarter cannot be used to sell equity or solicit loans.

- No product simulations or photorealistic renderings.

- All-or-nothing funding.

- If your project is successfully funded, Kickstarter will apply a 5% fee to the funds raised, and Amazon will apply credit card processing fees (between 3-5%). If funding isn't successful, there are no fees.

Fundable

- You can offer equity option.

- Equity option is only available to accredited investors only.

- $99 flat fee.

- No percentage fees.

Rocket Hub

- No up front cost.

- Keep the funds we raise.

- 8-16% commission.

- Low traffic...

Crowdfunder

- Site loads extremely slowly.

- Seems to be available only for accredited investors.

Crowdrise

- It's mostly for charity or cause related fundraising.

Filters

I met up with a few photographers in town to pick their brains on how to develop the camera filters.

One of them mentioned that the trick Instagram uses is "flattening" of contrast and colors. By evening out the difference between the darkest part and the lightest part of a picture, it allows color filters to be applied evenly without distorting certain parts of the image.

One of them sent me a whole list of filters he uses for his wedding photography. There were some gorgeous filters I could definitely modify and use for my camera app.

I just bought them a couple of beers and dinner, and it was totally worth it! :D

iOS vs Android

I decided to target the prototype for iOS 7.

Currently there is way too much fragmentation in the Android market. Below infographic shows how Android devices are fragmentated.

And below infographic shows how operating system versions are fragmented.

And below shows how screen sizes are fragmented in the Android market.

I just don't have the budget, money, or time to account for all those variations. And having to debug issues for all those screen sizes and operating system versions would jack up the development cost.

Since Apple is coming out with iOS 7 right when our prototype is going to be done, I'm going to focus on iOS 7 and do some debugging for iOS 6 before launching. 

Cut, Cut, Cut

After reviewing all 3 development firms' estimates, there was a quite a bit of inconsistencies, so I used those inconsistencies to bring down the cost. Basically, I used the number from a firm who offered the lowest estimate for a function, and asked the other two firms to match it. By doing so, I was able to lower the development cost by almost 5%.

But that wasn't enough, so I looked at other places to shave the cost. I asked the development firms to:

• Remove the QA hours because I'll be doing the QA.
• Remove the Project Management hours because I wanted to work directly with the developer.

But even after that, the estimate was still higher than what I had budgeted for development. So I had to make some hard decisions and cut out some of the features from the prototype. At first, I felt crappy for having to do that, but soon I realized it was forcing me to prioritize and figure out what are truly essential features of this app.

So in a way, having a low budget was a blessing in disguise (let's just hope that I won't have to cut anything else out anymore lol).

Local Developers

Why is it so hard to find a mobile developers with entrepreneurial sprit in Dallas? Every one of them I talked to has either ignored my email or wants cash payment instead of equity. Don't they make enough money already since mobile development is a hot commodity in the market? Why aren't they investing their spare time in something that has potential to get huge in the near future?

I really tried to work closely with the developers in town, but I'm gonna have to outsource it to Ukraine development firm. If I'm going to pay my developers with cash, I'd rather pay $35/hr instead of $100/hr and have a security of working with a bigger firm. If my developer gets sick, the Ukraine firm would have 199 other developers to take his place and keep the project moving.

I've worked with a few development firms in various countries including Brazil, India, and Ukraine. Ukraine seems to have the best eye for design and attention to details, so I won't have to spend so much time pixel-dicking around.

Change of Heart

A potential investor was really excited in the beginning and shared articles for me to read: 

• http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324251504578580263719432252
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/10210480/Apples-new-iPhone-has-fingerprint-sensor.html 

Then all of a sudden, he gets all worried and sent me all these links about the possible issues and competitors:

• http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324063304578524851535732348-lMyQjAxMTAzMDMwMTEzNDEyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email
• http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/hot-startups-gesture-recognition-technology.html
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421849,00.asp
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57593915-92/intel-buys-omek-interactive-for-$40m-report/
• http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/02/technology/gesture-recognition-mouse.fortune/index.htm
• http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/24/technology/innovation/leap-motion/index.html
• http://www.omekinteractive.com/
• http://www.gestigon.de/
• http://www.gesturetek.com/
• www.leapmotion.com
• www.primesense.com
• http://eyesight-tech.com/
• http://www.arcsoft.com/store/bundles.html?gclid=CIS04tWG2rgCFVFp7Aod-2EALA

So I had to write a looooong email to explain what the competitors are doing wrong, what we are trying to do, and how it's different from what the competitors are doing.

Someone told me not to get too excited until I have their money in the bank... and it's turning out to be true. -.-;; 

Tired...

I've been driving the potential advisors and investors around because one of them doesn't have a car and one of them is new in town... Well, I guess I didn't have to, but I wanted extra brownie points.

Convertible Debt Note

A friend of mine sent me links on convertible debt note: 

• http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/07/convertible-note-seed-financings/
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/convertible-note-seed-financings-econ-101/
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/13/convertible-note-seed-financings-part-3/

It's basically giving your contractor options to either take the equity at discount price or take the cash value of their service when you receive funding.

A lot to read... a lot to learn...

Crowd Funding

The same advisor also wants me to research the crowd funding websites and compare all the following: 

• http://www.kickstarter.com/
• http://www.indiegogo.com/
• http://www.crowdfunder.com/
• http://www.rockethub.com/
• http://www.crowdrise.com/
• http://www.fundable.com/

And I have to read this article: 

• http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/04/17/7-strategies-for-launching-a-successful-crowdfunding-campaign/

I'm just gonna have to do this a little later.... because me... need.. sleep.

Meetings

I met up with a few people that emailed me back over the weekend, and they were all excited about the project (One of them even offered to be an investor now and come on board as a CFO down the road. And he was a president of the fortune 100 company!!!

But when I told my friends about it, they told me I shouldn't be too excited until I put their checks in my bank...

We will see how it goes.