Avocode application to YC S14
How we didn’t get into YCombinator
In March 2014, our team has decided to apply with Avocode to the world’s best tech accelerator, YCombinator in Sillicon Valley. I have learnt many things during the process of creating this application. Even though we didn’t get in, I would like to share our application with you. It might not be the best application out there, but it might help you with writing your own.
Please note that a lot of things changed since then and some information can be out of date. There are also some grammar mistakes, but we want to present you the text as is. We’ve also redacted some parts we want to keep for ourselves. We were not accepted and we didn’t even get an interview, but that did not stop us from pursuing our vision.
Feel free to email me at vu@madebysource.com or post comments here!
Your YC username:
helloiamvu
Company name:
What is your company going to make?
Avocode is a service that helps front-end developers with building websites/apps from Photoshop designs.
Designer will share the PSD with the developer using our Photoshop extension, that automatically uploads and syncs the PSD with our servers. Thanks to Generator API, we get all the bitmaps and a json file with all the properties about Photoshop layers. Developer then uses the Avocode app (mac/windows/web) instead of Photoshop to view the design and to get assets that he needs — Images, vectors, CSS, dimensions, colors, fonts, text…
Grand vision is to become a platform that lets you to design websites/apps with interactions and rapidly switch from prototypes to production.
Please tell us about the time you, helloiamvu, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
We have successfully hacked our local food delivery service called DameJidlo (similar to Seamless.com). They used to have this referral program — if someone buys food using your custom url, DameJidlo would credit $20 to your account. We have bought couple of $100 Google AdWords vouchers on ebay for $2 each and we set up AdWords campaigns using the same text and banners as DameJidlo itself, but using our custom links as a target. This resulted in 2 months of free food worth $4000. ROI of our adwords campaign was about 201%.
Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.
All of us originally started as consulting company abdoc.net and we have created all of these products together:
madebysource.com — A place where we sell and update products below; in total we have [redacted]k customers in our mailing lists;
csshat.com/ — Photoshop plugin that translates layer styles to CSS3 with a single click; made $[redacted] first 24 hours, generates $[redacted]/mo
plugin.subtlepatterns.com/ — Access to the online library of repeatable images (patterns) directly from inside of Photoshop; generates $[redacted]/mo; 350k unique visitors/mo
lesshat.com/ — Open-source LESS mixin library developed and maintained by our team, 1247 stars on Github
pnghat.com — A better way to slice Photoshop Designs; generates $[redacted]/mo
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
We have met 4 years ago and we are working together ever since. We sit next to each other every day in our offices in Prague.
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?
We have started a web consulting company 4 years ago so we know how much pain it is to build a website. Based on our knowledge we have started making useful tools like CSS Hat (Translate Photoshop Layer Styles to CSS) or PNG Hat (Tool for slicing images from PSD). From our stats we can clearly see that people are having problems with current workflow and they are still using Photoshop in combination with our apps to solve it. Although it’s still manual in many ways. It just makes sense for us to continue with Avocode and take the workflow to a next level.
We talk to our users (80k) and influencers about Avocode. These are testimonials from some of the top influencers in the web development industry:
Chris Coyier (WuFoo, Codepen, CSS-Tricks)
– Looks pretty neat. I like the idea of focusing on things that would be hard to do even if you have Photoshop. Like exporting a layer as a cropped single image file, that looks handy. And providing code where it makes sense.
Paul Irish (developer advocate for Google Chrome)
– This is dope. So dope.
Simurai (exMotorola Mobility web developer)
– Quickly checked it out and looks pretty awesome. The fact that you don’t need Photoshop is cool. Because yeah.. most developers just need the assets, some colors and so.
What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?
Teams of any size working on a website/app have these basic needs:
(1) Designer needs to deliver a PSD to front-end developer. Now they use e-mail, FTP or Dropbox. All of these solutions are manual and you lose control over versions. Avocode has a Photoshop plugin, that automatically syncs the PSD with our servers and it instantly notifies the developer.
(2) The design changes often on the go and developer needs a latest version of the PSD. Version control in Avocode solves this need. Whenever designer changes a font or a button, the developer will instantly see it and with few clicks he can make the change in the code too. Think of git for PSD files.
(3) Frontend developer needs to get assets (images, css, dimensions, colors) from PSD. Now they use Photoshop in combination with apps like CSS Hat, PNG Hat or Slicy to do so. This is a very incomplete solution and it still requires a lot of manual tasks — sprites, fonts, svg… Avocode makes all a lot easier and it’s Photoshop independent for the developer. Thanks to Generator API we know everything about the PSD and we can provide all the assets that developer needs.
Grand Vision is to become Photoshop independent entirely — already prototyping this.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
The closest we have seen was css.markupwand.com (YC backed), but they have failed to execute the product.
Photoshop > Reflow Edge totaly makes sense and looked promising, well until we actually exported a PSD into reflow — https://upx.cz/RO0 , it fails to display basic shapes, colors and fonts. Absolutely unusable… But Adobe is planning on secret fireworks replacement, which might be interesting
Layervault — they are focusing mainly on version control of PSD. But there are no tools to export assets from PSD.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?
- Automatic converters PSD to HTML/CSS don’t work, auto-generated code is not good
- Fireworks is dead and most of the designers will stick with Photoshop, although Sketch or Macaw looks awesome
- Designers won’t design in the browser, although Webflow looks pretty awesome
- Some designers code, but the majority does not know HTML/CSS at higher level, so it’s always up to the front-end developer to do the job
How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
Current plan is a freemium model. You can have your first project for free and we will charge $[redacted]/mo for additional projects. Also public projects are free of charge and you have to pay for private projects only (Github Model).
Teams are already paying big money for Photoshop and other apps to make development faster. But not everybody in the team really needs Photoshop and Avocode can replace it for developers. Companies could actually save money for using Avocode. There will be tiered pricing for business accounts
If we can maintain our mailing conversion rate of [redacted]% (it’s [redacted]%-[redacted]% now), we could be making around $[redacted] the first month. And if we could grow by min. [redacted]% each month, we could get to $[redacted] in revenue after 12 months. But this is a pesimistic guess.
If you’ve already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?
3 months, 17,000 lines of code. We are using AngularJS, Firebase, WebGL, NodeJS.
How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you’re launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)?
Avocode is in development and we already have a working prototype and we are testing it in our team.
We will need about 4 weeks to enter beta testing and about 3 months to launch a version that we could charge for.
We have previously launched few Photoshop Plugins solving web development problems and they are currently generating passive revenue for our team. And thanks to these products we also have a mailing list ([redacted]k users) that is highly relevant to Avocode. Here are some stats about our sales:
CSS Hat ($34.99; csshat.com) — avg. [redacted] licenses/mo
PNG Hat ($39.99; pnghat.com) — avg. [redacted] licenses/mo
Subtle Patterns Photoshop Plugin ($11.99; plugin.subtlepatterns.com) — avg. [redacted] licenses/mo
Social Kit (Free; socialkit.madebysource.com) — avg. [redacted] licenses/mo
Our email open rate is around [redacted]%, click rate is [redacted]%, conversion to sale is [redacted]% when it’s a related product. Less related products are about [redacted]%-[redacted]%
If you have an online demo, what’s the url? (Please don’t password protect it; just use an obscure url.)
Here is a screencast: [redacted]
And online prototype: [redacted]
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won’t be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
- Avocode is pretty useful tool so it’s easier to get users
- We already have around [redacted] people in our mailing list
- Public projects will be free of charge (GitHub model)
- Social marketing, Tutorials, remarketing, press, partnerships with schools and tech companies, influencers, working with bloggers (affiliate), we have impact on dribbble, designer news, designer newsletters — experience with CSS Hat…
- We have a partnership with Morten Lund and we will provide our tools for his companies
If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?
All of us
Do any founders have other commitments between June and August 2013 inclusive?
nope
Do any founders have commitments in the future (e.g. finishing college, going to grad school), and if so what?
We are committed to our company
Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?
We are currently based in Prague. We will set up one more in Bay Area. We would like to keep the Prague offices because we already have a good brand for hiring and there are some really talented and cost-effective developers here in Czech Republic.
Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? Will any be working as employees or consultants for anyone else?
Nope
Are any of the following true? (a) You are the only founder. (b) You are a student who may return to school when the next term starts. (c) Half or more of your group can’t move to the Bay Area. (d) One or more founders will keep their current jobs. (e) None of the founders are programmers.
(Answering yes doesn’t disqualify you. It’s just to remind us to check.)
No
If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for. Often when we fund people it’s to do something they list here and not in the main application.
Photoshop Plugin Marketplace — We already built a store, installer, update system, dev stack for photoshop plugins for our purposes. It would be easy to open all of these things to 3rd party developers
Marketplace with design content — Similar to creativemarket.com
All of our ideas are related to web development/design industry
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)
Confirmed by one of our friends at Facebook, the PSD to HTML/CSS workflow is no different from the standards anywhere else. They are having just the same problems as we do — there is a huge opportunity.
