I tried; with Flextras ( http://www.flextras.com ). I wanted to build a set of UI Components which would extend Adobe's Flex Framework. For various reasons it was a failure; and I shut down the "commercial" portion of the company in January of this year.
At the time I launched the business; Flash was still viable and Adobe was pumping a lot of money into growing Flex--which was basically "Flash for programmers". Adobe was trying to grow the user base for Flex to a million developers and I wanted to get in early and ride the wave, so to speak. I thought there would be a market for high quality components that extended the Flex Framework and Adobe stated they wanted to focus on the tooling and infrastructure while leaving components to third parties. I thought I was in a good spot.
When I was preparing to launch Flextras, I was planning for a 70% drop in income [compared to consulting rates] and hoped it would grow from there. I ended up with a 90% drop in income; so that hurt a bit.
We launched with a single component, and the first year only had one sale, and all my energy was spent on building out our Calendar component. [which took a year and I threw everything out and restarted from scratch 3 times because I decided the API/implementation wouldn't provide enough flexibility].
I think it was in our second year released the Calendar component and an AutoComplete component. A "Spark" Version of our AutoComplete came out later to integrate w/ Flex's new component model. Then we released some mobile components. We were growing from our "first year" revenue and averaged about $10K per year before shutting down. The business was growing, but very slowly. Then Adobe had some bad PR mishaps and sales stopped overnight.
I could go on and on about problems and mistakes I made along the way.
I focused on the wrong things--I think I spent three months creating transitions on our Calendar component. Business users don't care about such things [although I got a lot of 'hey cool' during demos]. During this development time; the new version of Flex came out [a point release] which broke all of that work.
The model of selling individual components is inherently flawed. It does not present recurring revenue. I hoped to combat this by releasing a lot of products; unfortunately that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. Components took longer to build than I anticipated [especially the Calendar].
We should have had a package of some sort [one price gets everything we built]. We should have had a subscription [one yearly price gets everything we built; plus everything we will build]. My attempt to switch our business model was a colossal failure on many levels.
I tried; with Flextras ( http://www.flextras.com ). I wanted to build a set of UI Components which would extend Adobe's Flex Framework. For various reasons it was a failure; and I shut down the "commercial" portion of the company in January of this year.
At the time I launched the business; Flash was still viable and Adobe was pumping a lot of money into growing Flex--which was basically "Flash for programmers". Adobe was trying to grow the user base for Flex to a million developers and I wanted to get in early and ride the wave, so to speak. I thought there would be a market for high quality components that extended the Flex Framework and Adobe stated they wanted to focus on the tooling and infrastructure while leaving components to third parties. I thought I was in a good spot.
When I was preparing to launch Flextras, I was planning for a 70% drop in income [compared to consulting rates] and hoped it would grow from there. I ended up with a 90% drop in income; so that hurt a bit.
We launched with a single component, and the first year only had one sale, and all my energy was spent on building out our Calendar component. [which took a year and I threw everything out and restarted from scratch 3 times because I decided the API/implementation wouldn't provide enough flexibility].
I think it was in our second year released the Calendar component and an AutoComplete component. A "Spark" Version of our AutoComplete came out later to integrate w/ Flex's new component model. Then we released some mobile components. We were growing from our "first year" revenue and averaged about $10K per year before shutting down. The business was growing, but very slowly. Then Adobe had some bad PR mishaps and sales stopped overnight.
I could go on and on about problems and mistakes I made along the way.
I focused on the wrong things--I think I spent three months creating transitions on our Calendar component. Business users don't care about such things [although I got a lot of 'hey cool' during demos]. During this development time; the new version of Flex came out [a point release] which broke all of that work.
The model of selling individual components is inherently flawed. It does not present recurring revenue. I hoped to combat this by releasing a lot of products; unfortunately that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. Components took longer to build than I anticipated [especially the Calendar].
We should have had a package of some sort [one price gets everything we built]. We should have had a subscription [one yearly price gets everything we built; plus everything we will build]. My attempt to switch our business model was a colossal failure on many levels.
I covered quite a bit of the business failures in a presentation called "How to Fail Fantastically" at the 360|Stack conference ( http://vimeopro.com/360conferences/360stack-2013/video/72773... ).