Life is Beautiful

Do we really need Flash on iPhone?

As one of iPhone developers, I've enjoyed reading about the issue with Flash for iPhone (see "Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not easy"). Flash lite is a joke (not compatible with Flash on the web today), but the latest Flash is too big and too heavy for iPhone. 

What is the answer? More memory and faster CPU on iPhone? Re-architected Flash that can take advantage of iPhone's powerful GPU?

I think the answer is 'No'. We don't need Flash on iPhone. 

If you want to develop a serious graphical application on iPhone, get Xcode and write code in Objective C - just like other thousands of iPhone developers do (including myself). It is different from C++ or Javascript and requires a little bit patient at the beginning, but it's really fun and and easy development environment. 

If you want to add some eye-catchy animations on your web site that are also accessible from iPhone. Use Javascript (see our web-site). Latest browsers are powerful enough to handle most of animations you need. The development environment is not as rich as Flash, but it's 100% free and there are a lot of open source libraries out there (such as ianime.js, which is a light-weight animation library optimized for iPhone).

It is important to recognize that Safari on iPhone already takes advantage of its GPU. This is why the Javascript-based animation is quite feasible on iPhone. Flash has a very CPU-heavy architecture, and this is why it is so difficult to run Flash (real Flash, not Flash lite) on iPhone. 

Is this a good time to raise money from VC?

I have started Big Canvas in April 2008. Because this is my second start-up, I have decided to apply everything I've learned from various mistakes I made in the first start-up. 

Here are the basic principles I had.

1. Don't raise money from VC until we become ready. 

2. Stay small so that we can run it for long time.

3. Don't spend too much time in building strategy or writing business plan.

4. Launch the first product quickly, observe customers, learn from it, then build a business plan.

5. Create something valuable for customers, then generate revenue with it.

Here is the scorecard after 11 months.

1. We did not raise money. It allowed us (especially me, CEO) to put 100% of my energy in building products and providing services to customers.  

2. We still have only three people including me. As the result, our burn rate it very low. It allowed us to make mistakes (yes we made many mistakes, of course), learn from those mistakes, and adjust our strategy. 

3. Our strategy evolved over 11 months, and it finally became very clear to us. I finally wrote our business plan this afternoon, for the first time. 

4. We've released our first product, PhotoShare, in July 11th 2008. Observation of our customers helped us to design other products. We've launched five more products after PhotoShare, and additional five more products will be released this month. We are going to have eleven products on the market before our anniversary. 

5. Even though the number is not so large yet, we have many happy customers. As the result, many of them are keep buying our products.

We now have a clear business plan with a decent marketing/product strategy and well-defined value proposition. We have competitive products, happy customers and small but steady revenue stream. 

I think we are ready to raise money from VCs. I am ready to make a pitch - probably a decent pitch, describing my vision passionately ("the Internet is a Big Canvas. Be creative!" vision), explaining why I am so excited with this mobile market and its potential, and describing what we are doing today and how it fits into our overall business strategy.  

I, however, started wondering ... is this a good time to raise money? Once we raise money from VCs, we have to grow rapidly taking many risks - that is their expectation. Is this a good idea to take such a aggressive strategy in this recession? Isn't it much smarter to keep the company small and go for cash flow positive first? 

I wish I know the answer, but I don't. Does anybody have opinion?