Making Money with AIR – TweetDeck Gets Funding

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Congrats to Iain of TweetDeck! According to TechCrunch they have secured about $500,000 of angel funding in a very, very tough economy from Betaworks. According to TechCrunch:

TweetDeck is the work of one man, British programmer Iain Dodsworth, who says the TweetDeck Adobe AIR-powered and hence cross-platform desktop application has been downloaded 250,000 times since he launched it over last Summer, and that users are pushing 120,000 messages a day to their Twitter followers using the software.

Iain and TweetDeck are a great example of how you can quickly and easily create a desktop application with a great user interface and make a big impact. Iain did a superb job with the UI, and chose a great platform. I continue to be really, really excited about what AIR means for developers and end users. Great programming model, powerful runtime, and all of it is cross-platform on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s cool stuff.

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  • http://polyGeek.com polyGeek

    That is way cool and a great example for all Flash Platform Developers to follow. And you’re absolutely right about AIR being the platform of choice for apps such as this. When I was working at Smilebox the feature request they got the most – by far – was to make the app work on the Mac. They were just a little ahead of the curve with their business and started before AIR was released. Too bad, it could have saved them a year of development time.

  • http://www.jeffryhouser.com Jeffry Houser

    I’ve seen other posts like this; but I have to question how much AIR had to do with it.

    There is a lot of business skill that goes around getting funding and/or marketing a product succesfully. These things are often more important than the technology of choice for that product.

    I would expected the use of AIR to have had a negligible affect, if any, on the funding.

  • ryanstewart

    I don’t think anyone is saying that AIR was the reason Tweetdeck got funding, but would there be Tweetdeck without AIR?

    The main point is that AIR makes apps like Tweetdeck fairly easy to build, especially for creative Flash/Flex people, so they get to do pretty innovative things. It’s making it easy for smart people to do things that I think is nice about AIR, so that’s why I think this is a success story.

  • http://www.psyked.co.uk James

    @Jeffry – I don’t think AIR would’ve had much to do with the fact that it got funding, but probably had a lot to do with the fact that Tweetdeck was actually made in the first place;

    Without AIR as a viable platform for creating the service that Tweetdeck offers, the project (if it had been made) would have been developed as an online Flex application. An online Flex application would then be directly competing with an online Twitter – and if you’re a 3rd party competing in the same medium as your source, you’ve really got to pull out the stops to stay ahead of the source in terms of functionality, and you’re at a disadvantage because you don’t actually control the services you use.

    By creating your application in AIR you’re reducing these factors, and you’ve more chance to survive – which makes more sense. Without AIR, Tweetdeck probably would not be around.

    But hey, that’s speculation. What’s important, I think, is that this is an AIR application that has got itself funding after starting out without any, which proves that as a business model, it’s not impossible.

  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky Emanuele Cipolloni

    @James, you mention “business model” while infact there is none. Not one at the original Twitter (how they intend to make money out of this is still very unclear) and any derived application that uses its API is forcely without a solid BM as well.

    This guy got funding, kudo on him and maybe who has invested the money has no clear idea of what (s)he dropped in.

    Regarding AIR, I see a lot of Twitter apps done with it, but any capable programmer with half a brain can create a multiplatform native version without needing a runtime in a week or two; we used to make multiplatform applications far before AIR arrived, claiming that TwitterDeck would not have existed without AIR is a bit simplistic. You also say that by making the application online “one has not actual control of the services you use”…. but this guy, AIR or not, do not control Twitter at all, nor the its runtime, a double risk rather than an opportunity.

  • http://www.jeffryhouser.com Jeffry Houser

    @Ryan

    Your post headline was “Making Money with AIR”. To me that insinuated that AIR was a contributing factor in the funding.

    @Ryan @James

    Would there be a Tweetdeck without AIR? I suspect yes. Entrepreneurs tend to find a way to fill needs.

    Does AIR make building such an app easier than, say, C++ or Java? Perhaps. But, such a discussion has nothing to do with making money. I think Emanuele stated that point nicely.

    @Emanuele
    There are commercial Twitter clients; so someone somewhere is making money off Twitter. It is possible to build a business model that rely upon free services.

  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky Emanuele Cipolloni

    James, sure you can create commercial solutions on top of free services and make a few bucks out of it, but here we are talking about funding a company that builds a FREE solution on top of a FREE service. You can build any kind of business model you like, you just need to find the wally that will drop the money in….

  • http://www.jeffryhouser.com Jeffry Houser

    @Emanuele

    I would assume that for TweetDeck to receive funding they must have some plan for generating income. [I may be wrong about that of course].

    I’d expect to go to some kind of “standard vs Pro” model; where the standard is free, but the Pro version costs something.

    Don’t assume that today’s model is the same as tomorrow’s model.

  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky Emanuele Cipolloni

    @James,

    I don’t make any assumption on the model, something instead that the developer of TwitterDeck has made, since he doesn’t control at all the service he relies upon.

    The message that passes here is “develop with AIR and you are going to make money (for sure)” like the former implies somehow the latter.

  • rob rhyne

    I wonder how he is going to monetize his app?

  • http://www.kelvinluck.com/ Kelvin Luck

    @rob rhyne – we’ve recently developed a system which allows developers to monetize their Adobe AIR applications. You might be interested in checking out Sharify:

    http://www.sharify.it/