Antair Blog Growing a software company in Brooklyn

Lunch time + Energetic Dog + Yellow Balloon = Empty chairs and wagging tails…

(I was going to go into a whole Lamorisse skit here, but alas, our balloon is yellow.)

Yes, we are a software company.

Wil Shipley announced the recent launch of Delicious Library 2.

Congratulations to Wil. His software has always been top notch, and I don’t expect anything less from DL2.

Delicious Monster has been one of a few companies that we follow closely. Certain companies have admirable business practices. Others have interesting product release strategies. Running a growing software company is difficult, and trying to adapt some of the working strategies of other companies is understandable. Companies of all sizes continuously scan and assess the playing field.

But it isn’t the product announcement that got my attention in that post; it’s the announcement of the founding of Golden % Braeburn.

Wil has founded the new firm as part of a plan to license out the technology behind the embeddable e-commerce infrastructure which is used within Delicious Library. In a nutshell (if interested, you should read more about it – the infrastructure seems very well architected), the code allows Mac software vendors to embed purchasing logic directly into their applications rather than having their potential customers go out to the web to pay for and receive their registration codes.

I agree that it would have been a waste not to license out the technology – what bothers me is why this necessitated the founding of a new company.

Now, I’m not saying that Wil necessarily made a mistake with this. No-one knows Wil’s market better than Wil, but building a company with differing product lines is something that’s been on my mind for a long time, and the more I ponder over it, the more I lean toward the opinion that differing product lines do not justify the founding of separate corporate entities.

I understand that when you’re a small software firm, and your entire revenue stream comes from one product, it may seem somehow cleaner that, with an introduction of a seemingly unrelated product, one would need to set up a dedicate entity responsible for that product. I understand this completely. I’m just not sure if it makes sense.

Setting up corporate subsidiaries is something that larger companies do frequently. But this is mostly for accounting and tax purposes.

When a small product company does something like this, it’s always obvious that the founder is worried that his or her customers will somehow be confused by the introduction of this new thing – that somehow sales will slow or stop as this once streamlined sale pipeline is all of the sudden halted to by customers sitting in front of their computers, holding their credit cards, waiting to buy your popular product A, but not pulling the trigger because of the presence of this new product B. They don’t know what product B does — it’s confusing – it has the words API and SSL in it. Maybe this product A that they were really looking forward to is not looking so good anymore?

Nonsense…

We make BlackBerry applications and BlackBerry games right now. It wasn’t always so, but that’s the market we’re in now. We make great software for the BlackBerry. Our customers love us as a company and love our software. We’re in this market for the long-haul. But it wasn’t always like this – Antair used to make developer tools and browser plugins for the desktop. And it won’t always be like this – Antair Games will be launching soon, as will several additional products targeting the small business market and the financial market.

But none of these products will hide from the Antair brand. Quite the opposite – we don’t even have cutesy names for our software. Our spam filter is the Antair BlackBerry Spam Filter. Our Call Screener is the Antair BlackBerry Call Screener. Our upcoming desktop games will simply live on a separate domain – but I can’t justify putting up a DBA or a subsidiary out of a belief that people will somehow stop buying our BlackBerry applications because we have a dedicated games division.

The range of products sold by the larger software companies of the world is massive. Don’t like that example? OK – try Stardock – award winning games, enormously popular UI customization software, several websites (not to mention a distribution and publishing division). One person could be using their UI customization software and playing one of their games, and not even know the two products were made under the same roof – it doesn’t matter. They probably don’t cross-sell one to the other – different markets. But they also don’t try to hide it – there’s no reason for it.

Different companies do things differently. Some companies don’t have any issues with licensing out their infrastructure as part of their business model. Wil’s decision may prove to be the right one, or it could be a mistake – only time will tell.

But from the perspective of a growing software company that just went through a massive office move and hiring cycle, I couldn’t image balancing the logistics of founding another company on the side.

Antair E-Mail Auto-Responder

To be released in the Summer of 2008, Antair BlackBerry E-Mail Auto-Responder will allow BlackBerry owners to set up automatic e-mail responders to deal with their incoming e-mail.

The application will support both BIS and BES users. It will also support multiple e-mail accounts, multiple responses per e-mail account, and will allow for fully customized response messages.

If you are expecting e-mail from clients, Antair E-Mail Auto-Responder will automatically let them know that you have received their e-mail – you don’t need to keep checking your INBOX every few minutes.

If you are in a meeting and expect to receive personal e-mail from a family member, your Antair E-Mail Auto-Responder will let them know exactly where you are, and when they can expect to receive a reply from you.

With support for multiple responses, you can have one auto-response going out to your co-workers, while a different one goes out to your family members – even for the same e-mail account.

If you are interested in being notified when the application becomes available to the public, or if you would like to sign up for the beta-test program, please visit the Antair E-Mail Auto-Responder product page.

When we were setting up the new Antair offices, we were trying to be as cheap (thrifty?) as possible when it comes to nonsense, so that we can afford to spend good money on things that count, like chairs, desks, computers, etc…

When it came to buying cups, I decided, based on my immense experience in office management (none whatsoever), that it was worth buying LOTS of cups in bulk to save a few pennies on each. After all, Andrey though, cups don’t spoil — bring on the cups!

We ordered 2,000 cups.

Read that again …

2,000 cups!

Do you have any idea how much space is needed to store 2,000 cups? Neither did I. Sure, they stack, but they don’t stack THAT much.

In case you’re wondering what 2,000 cups look like, sorry, I can’t help you. I couldn’t fit all of them into the camera viewport — but here is what a fraction of that delivery looks like several months later.

Wait … there’s more in that batch:

How many cups do we actually use?

So, as a follow-up  …

That’s right, the Apple & Cheese snack may just contain an apple or two…

So … who writes your company’s EULAs?

Since one of the last positions to be filled in a growing company is a dedicated office manager, we all pitch in when it comes to restocking the office. For food and drinks, we get a weekly delivery from FreshDirect.

With two vegetarians in the office (and a dog), our dietary needs are all over the place — chips and coke alone simply won’t do (not with the hours we pull). 

Fruit & cheese cups, granola bars, orange juice, beer, popcorn, coffee, chicken soup (I’ve been fighting the flu for a week or so), dog food, and yes, chips and coke - everyone seems satisfied for this week.

Want to work for Antair? Well … how good of a gamer are you?

The thing is, we’re getting a little tired around here of having our butts handed to us every single time someone is dumb enough to challenge Ania in a video game.

Me vs. Ania - Halo 3 - Several matches in, I’m whimpering under my desk.

Me vs. Ania - Burnout Revenge - After a few minutes I’m making excuses that works needs to be done and I’m behind schedule … crawling back to my workstation.

You should see the girl on the guitar in Rockband!

I stopped playing against her — there’s no chance.

Nick thought he could do better against her in that Wii air-hockey thing (picture below) — turns out Nick was wrong.

So, if you’re applying for a job at Antair, your qualifying interview requirement is being able to beat Ania at any XBox 360 or Wii game at the office.

A customer misinterpreting the BlackBerry device PIN during checkout is a common occurrence for those processing BlackBerry software purchases. If you are interested in validating BlackBerry PINs on your servers during checkout, the following bit of code (Perl) may be of some use:

// — START OF CODE –

my $pin = <get PIN from submitted web page data>
return “Error” if !defined($pin);
$pin = &trimAndUpper($pin);

# Test for length validity.
return “Error” unless length($pin) == 8;

# Test for hex validity.
return “Error” unless ($pin =~ /^[[:xdigit:]]+$/);

# Good PIN at this point.

sub trimAndUpper {
  my ($str) = @_;
  $str =~ s/^\s+//; # left trim
  $str =~ s/\s+$//; # right trim
  $str =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/; # to upper
  return $str;
}


// — END OF CODE –

This week, as I walk into the office each morning, the project planning board shows me this:

It could be Antair’s next big application which will take the world by storm … OR … it could be a way to make ordering lunch much more efficient. You decide

In an office full of programmers, it’s clear that mental work is favored over physical labor.

Take a look at our back office intranet system — beautiful, clean, a pleasure to use. 

Now take a look at the machine that the back office intranet is running on.

It’s been two months since that machine was put on the network. Do you think any of us will ever actually get around to cleaning it up and putting it into its proper place? I doubt it.