As I was traveling back from London to Brussels earlier today, a few days before shipping the beta version of our mobile (web) app, I watched the video of a presentation by Guy Kawasaki at Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO Summit on October 6, 2011. It was a very special occasion since Steve Jobs passed away the day before and Guy replaced the speech he was expected to give by an inspiring tribute: “the 12 lessons I learned from Steve Jobs”.

Of course, when you’re a few hours away from launching your product, you’re kind of hyper confident and you tend to interpret your alignment with any inspiring advice as a reinforcement of the success you’re dreaming of. So I might be a little biased ;-) But let’s be crazy and let me explain you why I think adsy will bring something truly amazing to mobile users, freely quoting Guy Kawasaki’s Steve Jobs-inspired statements.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could create free mobile apps instantly in the browser of your smartphone ?”

This was the trigger of one year of development. One year of highs & lows, motivated throughout our entrepreneurial journey by an exciting challenge: to prove that Steve Jobs was actually RIGHT when he invited developers to create web 2.0. apps on top of safari in 2007.

Even if, as Rene Ritchie wrote it in July 2013, it was too early back then: “the limitations of web apps, their lack of access to core functionality, their relatively poor performance compared to native apps, and the difficulties involved in charging for them proved to be insurmountable problems. As a solution, web apps were more sour than sweet.” http://www.imore.com/history-app-store-year-zero

Simultaneously, our goal was to prove that it would be WRONG today to think that native apps are the only way to go.

It might sound paradoxical to prove Steve Jobs right & wrong with the same project but, as Guy Kawasaki states it in his presentation,

changing your mind is a sign of intelligence

Which means that Steve Jobs was timewise RIGHT when he dropped the web approach in favour of native in 2008, launching the Appstore, but one would be WRONG to turn a blind eye to the evolution of browsers capabilities / development languages (JS-HTML5) / mobile CPU / data networks which make it possible TODAY to prove that Steve was actually RIGHT back in 2007. I would have loved to discuss all of this & much more with the man himself…

What’s crucial is to make sure that things WORK and to choose the best solution to make them work. The best solution in 2008 might not be the best one in 2014.

This brings me to some other statements from Guy Kawasaki’s presentation:

experts are clueless

I can’t tell you how many naysayers I’ve encountered over the last twelve months. And the more they told me “you’re getting nowhere”, the more I was convinced we were onto something great. It‘s maybe because my parents used to tell me when I was a teenager “don’t mistake your dreams for reality” that I developed a strong tendency to chase the wildest dreams. Thank you mum & dad for your lack of early encouragements, they transformed me into a crazy entrepreneur ;-) I owe you my destiny.

customers cannot tell you what they want

You know this one obviously if you’re familiar with all the literature about Steve Jobs and Apple. And yes, I do believe that you can’t ask customers what they want if you’re developing a genuine innovation. You might be wrong, you might be right but you should believe in your instinct (and, to some extent, in your experience) to pursue your vision.

some things need to be believed to be seen

I would see this as a corollary to the previous statement. You’ve got to believe in your innovation power to transform dreams into reality. We dreamed up the adsy platform to empower anyone to become a mobile web designer.

the action is on the next curve

we might have developed a new photo sharing app or another angry bird clone, obviously as a native app, but we wanted to make a real dent in the mobile universe so we set the bar very high and decided to bet on an unproven ecosystem because, as Guy said it:

the biggest challenges beget the best work

OK, one year is long in the tech world and we might have shipped something faster following this advice

real entrepreneurs ship

even if the first version is crap, but we are convinced that

design counts

and we didn’t want to ship a half-baked product (+ we are a 3-person company…). There will be bugs in the beta version, some of it will be crappy (“don’t worry, be crappy” as Guy said it), no doubt, but the overall experience will be great, which is crucial when you’re shipping a design-driven product. adsy will be the best piece of web crap(P) ever shipped in the mobile browser !

I won’t comment too long about “value VS price” since it’s far too early in our development process. But here are the two statements linked to those aspects:

value is different than price (don’t compete on price, compete on value) marketing = unique value (be unique & valuable for your customers)

We’ve opted for a “traditional” freemium model, so we will offer a zero-priced version but we will also market value added services (like affordable bespoke apps, special plugins or exposure boost) that we expect people to pay for. I let you judge by yourself how much unique & valuable adsy will be. By now, you’ve understood how much we believe in it ;-)