Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Calvin Carter, Founder and President, Bottle Rocket (Part 1)

Calvin Carter is the founder and president of Bottle Rocket, one of the market leaders in high-end mobile app development. In this interview he describes the development of mobile apps from his company’s standpoint and shares his vision of mobile apps and the future of mobile apps. He also gives us an interesting definition of the mobile space, describing it as not only just apps, but user experiences.

Sramana Mitra: Calvin, let’s start with providing our audience with some background about Bottle Rocket as well as yourself.

Calvin Carter: Bottle Rocket started the day after Steve Jobs opened the iPhone platform to third-party developers and the world. He did that through one of his many famous keynote speeches on March 6, 2008. It is a very simple story, but we started the business March 7, 2008. We started in a very small way by buying graph paper and pencils – the same tools that we use even today – and we started sketching apps. I started sketching apps, trying to get an idea of what would be needed, how we would use this phenomenal, new and fully transformational new device, ecosystem and platform. It started small – even before the App Store. Imagine the time before the App Store or Apps as we know them to be in the modern app era. Before any of that happened, we started a business to help make that happen.

SM: What is your personal background that gave you sufficient insight to make those kinds of decisions?

CC: My background is a combination of application and business. It has always been through creative means. In previous businesses I always provided services that were technology enabled and with focus on marketing and communication. At the end of the day, I feel that all boils down to creating user experiences. I had a good background in user experience, human–computer interface, and creating value through technology.

But frankly, it was more of a feeling than anything else. It wasn’t an existing industry I decided to go in to, with an existing model and having an idea of what might be expected. I was obviously not the only one, but those of us who jumped in there completely right at that moment were doing it on a feeling and a vision we saw. When I saw Steve’s keynotes later – Apple at that time did not do live streaming of its keynotes – it struck me. It felt right. I didn’t know where it was going to go. It was not my vision, it was Steve’s, but I saw it. I saw that this is something that was going to transform a lot of things I had done in the past. And it was going to affect my life and the lives of millions of people. I wanted to be part of that and I wanted to be a very important part of that.

The first thing that I could do was reach out and start getting into it. So I started sketching and reaching out for ideas. Then I went to Craigslist trying to find people who were like-minded, interested in or curious about the platform. I created this lose band of contractors who at first were spread all over the U.S. to build the first nine apps we launched in 2008. The fact that we built multiple apps was on purpose. Early on, I wanted to build a brand and to send a message to the universe that we were in this in a big way. This was not something we were trying – it was not a fantasy.

SM: What were those nine apps you built, and what was the thought process behind deciding what to build?

CC: It was very opportunistic and it came down to a lot of ideas. I probably sketched 20 to 30 different ideas all over the board. There were no metrics of what worked and what didn’t on the App Store. There was no metric on what would provide return and what wouldn’t. Some of them were business tools, some of them productivity tools, and some of them games or casual widgets. One of the apps was just a way to record notes to yourself and share those. They were little and simple things, because you had this unbelievably powerful tool in your pocket. You had it with you all the time. It is the first thing you touch in the morning and the last thing you touch at night. So you start thinking through a user’s day. They might want to track a FedEx shipment, for example. We had an app for that. They might want to [take] time off and maybe play around. We had a casual flight simulator.

So it was very opportunistic. We are a self-funded company, so we had to pick some and we picked the nine and moved forward with them. This is very different from a lot of other groups, which maybe picked one or two. We wanted to send the message that this was not a hobby, but a business

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Calvin Carter, Founder and President, Bottle Rocket
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