After close to six years as a senior software engineer at Apple, Laurent Sansonetti decided that the time had come to move on. In the fall of 2011, he packed his bags, left San Francisco for his native Belgium, incorporated a company called HipByte, and set out to disrupt iOS app development.
Six months later, Sansonetti launched RubyMotion, a toolchain to write native iOS apps using Ruby. The product was an instant hit with the developer community, and thanks to a successful launch and cautious growth from then on, HipByte has been 100% self-funded throughout its five years of existence. Today, RubyMotion also supports Android and enables cross-platform development using a single language and IDE.
Meet the startup founder whose first product launch crashed the payment platform and who’s currently busy kicking off a consulting business in Mexico City.
What is the elevator pitch for your product?
“RubyMotion lets you quickly develop cross-platform native apps for iOS, Android and OS X. RubyMotion apps are created from the terminal command-line, so whether you belong to the vi or the Emacs camp, you can continue to use your preferred editor and the awesome Ruby language you know and love.”
What problem does your solution solve?
“Our goal is to simplify cross-platform mobile app development.
“When you want to develop apps for both iOS and Android, you are dealing with two different worlds, with two different ways of doing things, and the learning curve can be very steep. Also, having to constantly switch between programming languages and development environments can be a royal pain.
“With RubyMotion, you only do the development work once for both platforms, using Ruby as a common language. On iOS and OS X, RubyMotion implements Ruby on top of the Objective-C runtime and Foundation classes. On Android, it implements Ruby on top of the Android Java runtime, Dalvik and ART.
“Thanks to its unified runtime approach, you get to call into the native platform APIs. And when you’re ready to deploy, the Ruby source code of your project is transformed into optimized machine code with an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler. Once compiled, a RubyMotion app looks pretty much the same as an Objective-C or Java app.”
Can you describe the journey from initial idea to product launch?
“At Apple, I created and led the MacRuby project, which was an implementation of the Ruby language on top of core Mac OS X technologies. It was one of Apple’s rare open-source projects. But when I understood that Apple wasn’t going to continue investing in it, I decided to go out on my own in order to push Ruby where it had never been: the iOS operating system.
“I incorporated HipByte in November 2011 and coded on my own for about six months. RubyMotion 1.0 was launched in May 2012.”
Do you have direct competitors? If so, what do you offer that others don’t?
“Our biggest competitor is Xamarin. Their solution solves the same problem as RubyMotion, but it’s based on C# programming instead of Ruby. Xamarin was recently acquired by Microsoft and it will be interesting to see how the solution evolves going forward.
“RubyMotion specifically targets the Ruby developer niche. The typical Ruby developer is a little different from developers who prefer C# or Java. A lot of them work for startups, although over time, some of these startups have been acquired by larger corporations and brought Ruby with them, so we’re seeing more Ruby developers in large companies as well now.”
What was your most challenging moment so far?
“In fact, I would say that the most difficult time in the company’s history is now. The market has become a lot more challenging. To draw a parallel, in the ’80s and ’90s, many people made good money with compilers. Today that’s not possible anymore, because there are so many open-source alternatives. And I think mobile development is moving in the same direction.
“Facebook, Google and Apple are all working on solutions for mobile app development. Take Facebook’s React Native, for example: It isn’t a direct competitor to us from a technical point of view, but there’s a lot of marketing power behind it, and these solutions do make it harder to sell RubyMotion and keep the product relevant. We have plenty of faithful customers who renew their subscriptions every year, and we don’t have any financial problems, but we also know that the market isn’t going to remain what it is today.
“So while RubyMotion is still going strong and we just released v4.12 with lots of new features, we are also diversifying our activity. We already offer consulting services, including to some very big customers, and we are now stepping up the game with the establishment of a consulting branch of HipByte in Mexico City. We are also working on new products and services, including another tool for developers.”
And the most exciting?
“There have been so many! But I will never forget the launch of RubyMotion. I was sitting on my couch. I emailed the launch announcement to my list, sent a Tweet about it… and 20 seconds later, the orders were pouring in. In no time, I received more money than I had ever had before. It was so crazy, I thought there had to be a mistake somewhere and I would start to get requests for refunds. But, no, they were real orders. In fact, the launch was so successful that the payment platform broke after one hour. And in the first week, I made enough money to keep the company afloat for two years.”
What do you think HipByte will look like in a year?
“It will be a larger and more structured company. Today we have an extremely informal and decentralized structure, with everyone working remotely. The consulting branch we’re setting up in Mexico, on the other hand, will have a more standard company structure, including a manager in charge of all the consulting activity. Personally, I will direct my focus to building new products.”
What would be your #1 advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs?
“Bootstrap if at all possible. Don’t take other people’s money unless you really have to. Bootstrapping gives you the freedom to develop the company on your own terms in the beginning, and to focus 100 per cent on your product instead of worrying about keeping investors happy and planning possible exits.”
What are your values in terms of work culture?
“We are a very diverse and extremely autonomous group of people, all of us working remotely in different corners of the world and using online chat to communicate. I hate meetings with a passion, so we don’t have them. When a new project comes in, I talk to the team and suggest how to split tasks between us, then we all go off and do our things. We do make sure to meet in person at least once a year, but on a day-to-day basis, we are on our own. We have no regular working hours, no fixed number of vacation days, and no sort of tracking system.
“This way of working has many advantages, but as a result of it we don’t really have a strong company culture and I am sometimes a little jealous of startups that do.”
How do you handle a particularly rough day?
“About a year ago, I took up running and, now, if I get stuck on something, I go for a run and it often helps me to see what needs to be done. Cooking can also have the same effect. I cook every day, and I find that taking my mind off work and focusing on a practical task can be what it takes to find the solution to a problem.”
Is there an app you can’t live without?
“It’s a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot, but I’m not that into apps… I don’t even really like smartphones! That said, I am quite active on Twitter.”
Learn more about RubyMotion here.
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