Interview #2 - Michael Flarup from Robocat / Outside
We are really excited to have Michael Flarup from Robocat for interview #2 on Talking Startups. Robocat have just released Outside.
Outside combines current weather and local forecasts with custom push notifications. Swipe to see the forecast or setup and receive alerts when the weather is just right.
1. Can you tell us a bit about Outside?
Sure, Outside is a Visual Weather Forecasting App for iPhone & iPod Touch. It features a unique, polished and playful interface in which you literally see illustrated and animated weather through a small window. Swiping inside the window will give you access to more information about the current day or the forecast for the next couple of days. On top of this sweet Weather Forecasting App sits a powerful custom Push Notifications engine. With Notifications you can have Outside alarm you when certain weather criteria is met, like if it's raining and you'll need to remember an umbrella, or if it's a certain temperature so you know when to slip on the overcoat. Basically Outside is a brand new simplified take on Weather Forecasting combined with custom Push Notifications.
2. How did the idea come about and what was the main problem with other weather applications that you wanted to solve?
What we tried to do with Outside, was to create a different spin on the Weather application. There's a lot of information thick, statistically pumped, dull Weather apps out there. We wanted to make it refreshingly accessible and playful. Almost begging the user to explore the weather instead of looking over tables of weather data. Ultimately we wanted to create something that wasn't already on the shelf. Another of the original ideas of the app was to help people to choose want kind clothing they should wear for that day without having to actively check the weather forecast themselves - which was our initial motivation for the push notifications.
3. Can you tell us about the Outside team?
Robocat (http://robocatapps.com), as we're lovingly called, consists of Michael Flarup (25), Willi Wu (29) and Mads Hartmann (20). We're 3 nice guys based out of Copenhagen, Denmark. Willi is our resident developer. He's the one who actually make the apps work and the servers hum. Mads is our young gun frontend developer, and incidentally the brother of Michael. When he's not slaving away with the nuts and bolts of XHTML/CSS/jQuery he's got his head burrowed in a Scala book. Michael is a renowned Iconist and Interface designer. He runs pixelresort.com, iconpark.net and a few other online endeavors. He's the one with the crayons obsessing over pixels in photoshop. Together we make up a nice mix of skills, sleeping disorders and unhealthy caffeine intake. All the right ingredients for a successful development team.
4. Did you bootstrap or raise funds?
Robocat is completely funded by dreams and hard work, meaning we fund every cup of coffee and bite of bagel ourselves. Outside was developed in our small Copenhagen apartments and coordinated from various cafés and bars around. Funding never really occurred as something we needed. Developing Outside wasn't a full-time job, we still had to maintain a living and therefore we held on to our "day" jobs. It was always the plan to bootstrap Robocat until we started generating capital of our own and then slowly grow from there. And maybe, at some point in the future, we'll have a monthly salary as well ;)
5. Can you tell us some of the tools/technologies you use for both iphone and web applications?
Well, I don't think we do things so much different than many others. In our iPhone apps we work with a combination of UIKit and OpenGL ES. Everything is designed in photoshop and then taken into the development environment Apple has provided. All our frontend stuff is handcoded by the talented Mads. He uses an oozing mix of modern javascript libraries, regular expressions and good old XHTML/CSS.
6. Outside has quite rightly got a lot of great reviews and press, how are you marketing?
See, thats the great part, we haven't spend a single dime on marketing. A lot of labour has gone into making it easy and accessible to talk about Outside. We've got a press package for download over at http://outsideapp.com and I cooked up a nice video teaser in After Effects () but generally we've employed an ideology of "if it's a good and interesting product, people will talk about it". This strategy has proven to work. This is really satisfying because it basically means that if you create a well thought out and polished product, that's nicely presented, people will applaud it and spread it naturally. There's something wonderfully honest and democratic about that.
7. What are your future plans for Outside and other applications?
We have a very exciting feature Roadmap ahead of us for Outside. We're getting a tremendous response from our growing user base and we take a lot of time out to discuss features with users. Outside is currently only in it's infancy, and we're going to continue to work hard to make a weather application that we'd all want to open every day.
As for other applications, we can't unveil too much yet, but we're currently working on a game that I'm personally really excited about.
8. What mistakes have you made and what impact did they have?
Seeing as Outside was our first large scale iPhone app, we've of course made mistakes during the course of it's development. Most notably was our initial decision to base the entire app on UIKit. We later had to switch over to partly utilizing OpenGL ES for the animations, simply due to performance issues on older models.
Generally I think we've made a healthy amount of experience during these past 6 months. There may have been situations where our first approach wasn't the most optimal one and we had to go back and rethink it - it's all contributed to longer development iterations, but at the same time given us a lot of hands on experience with all the areas of thinking up, developing and launching a high polished iPhone app.
9. In one sentence what would your advise be to someone just starting up?
Just launch something! Do it early rather than later. You can reiterate and improve when it's out, but don't hold back obsessing over details.
Thanks so much to Michael, if you have any questions please ask them below. More interviews coming really soon!
