Chaotic Moon talks about their skyrocketing success
6th January 2012 · 0 Comments
Ben Lamm
Chaotic Moon bills themselves as “the most experienced, innovative and Awesome Mobile Studio out there,” and having started the company at SXSW in 2010, it’s hard to disagree when the company has revenue in the eight figures for 2011.
We talked to CEO Ben Lamm about the idea behind the company and how they bootstrapped it so quickly.
TXEN: What’s the idea behind Chaotic Moon?
LAMM: our goal was to build an engineering and design company with a focus on mobile, that develops experiences that transcend software and hardware products by empowering people to complete various every day tasks- paying a bill, reading a digital magazine, playing a game, ordering coffee, or communicating with their friends and family- all from their mobile device. At its core it’s a pervasive computing mentality.
TXEN: How did you get into the mobile application space?
LAMM: I was recruited by my two partners, Whurley and Mike Erwin. Both were tracking the mobile space for several years and were looking for a third partner with whom to start the company. Whurley actually founded the iPhonedev camps and many other mobile software events and was planning his entry into the market in 2010.
Instead of seeking investment, one of our co-founders (Whurley) told me in the beginning that all software engineers need are laptops, so we decided to focus our efforts on building software for which people would pay top dollar. We were lucky because we started the company with several customers already in place who were willing to take a chance on us and wanted us to start immediately.
TXEN: So your business model is ultimately defined by our customers and not the other way around?
LAMM: That’s correct. But don’t get me wrong–we wanted to do everything but the kitchen sink, and still plan on it. For us, there are so many areas in mobile, software, and design where we can make a material impact. We had to pick our projects wisely and passed on some great opportunities so we could focus on these initial projects. The challenge when you have an extremely hardworking and passionate team is that they really don’t want to miss out on big opportunities.
TXEN: What’s next then for Chaotic Moon?
LAMM: We’re just getting started. We plan to announce some rather large acquisitions early in 2012, as well as several really exciting products. We could not be more excited about our company’s market leading position and will continue to expand the business in new avenues in 2012. In addition to our software products, we have our first hardware product coming out in 2012, which we are very excited about.
Incidentally, we threw a launch party at the beginning and had several companies including Microsoft, Whrrl, and Intel fund the party. We knew that if we didn’t make it in software, we could always go into party planning since we actually made money on our launch party!
