Wednesday, the founders of Macaw – Tom Giannattasio and Adam Christ – launched a Kickstarter for their web-design tool that they claim has the world's most intelligent design-to-code engine ever. Based out of Canvas/co near D.C.'s Dupont Circle, the Macaw crew knew they had something special, but didn't know what to expect in their fundraising. Surely they didn't expect what happened in the first day. Their goal for the 30 day period until Nov. 1 was $75,000. In less than 24 hours, they had already surpassed that.
"We were a little conservative in our goal," Giannattasio said of the Kickstarter. "We thought it'd definitely get us where we needed to be, maybe a little tight, but we'd survive. We hit that in just under 24 hours, which we were not expecting, nor were we really prepared for that. Then we were like, 'We have 29 days to go, now what do we do?'"
But with such a truly innovative and necessary tool, it's no wonder why people have responded so quickly to Macaw.
As a designer and developer himself, Giannattasio came up with the idea for the tool mainly to bridge the gap between his two roles. "I've been doing design and front-end development on the web for about 17 years or so and there's always been this big gap," he said. "As designers we've always been stuck using tools from the print era that we sort of inherited, and the web has evolved more quickly than adobe could put out new tools to support." The idea was simple: Designers needed a tool that felt like Photoshop or other image editors, but also that understood the language of the web. The implementation, though, would be the hard part.
The biggest piece that the founders of Macaw have been focusing on is, "To this date there's not been a tool that actually does a good job of automating HTML and CSS, because it's a really, really tricky problem to solve," Giannattasio said. "Finding a way to automate that process is a tricky thing. We've come up with a really good balance of how to do that."
Macaw puts all the semantic power in the designer's hands, but then automates the rest, bridging the gap between designers and developers. "I've worked in companies where designers sit in one part of the building and developers sit in the other part," the co-founder said. "It's like left brain and right." With Macaw, though, they will be much closer, and their jobs, much more integrated.
The founders designed Macaw to piggyback off of habits of designers like specifically naming layers in Photoshop to keep track of things. "That also carries over into development," Giannattasio said, adding how the design layers can correspond to coding elements for seamlessness. "It's a lot faster than writing out HTML yourself. It can write faster and more efficiently than a human actually could because it can look across multiple pages."
It's quite apparent that Macaw could be huge, with sights set on "being everything that Adobe is not," Giannattasio said. They could easily attract the capital of deep-pocketed investors, but instead they've chosen to go a non-traditional route. Their use of Kickstarter is a classic example of a company wanting to stay lean and fearing outside influence on their product. "We had been talking to a lot of VCs and angels and a lot of people seemed interested. The problem is we're a small team and we want to stay a small team," Giannattasio said of Macaw, which in addition to he and his co-founder, employs only a few part time developers to help with things out of their grasp. "Macaw is such a pro-level tool that it needs to be nurtured by people who have a deep understanding of the problem. So we're hesitant to let too many people who may have other objectives on." Sure, big investment could help them sell more products more quickly, but they're not trying to reach more people, they're trying to reach "the people," Giannattasio said.
Giannattasio said they plan to launch Macaw in November to specific audience members who could give them the best feedback. The full launch, though, is planned for January, with first dibs on Macaw going to Kickstarter supporters. Soon after that, they'll likely go with a full-on open-to-the-public launch with a flat rate price of less than $200 for Macaw.
