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AMA: Hi, I'm Andrew Wilkinson, Publisher of Designer News and Founder of MetaLab. Ask me anything.

8 years ago from Andrew Wilkinson, Publisher of Designer News

  • Peter DedenePeter Dedene, 8 years ago

    Hi Andrew,

    Awesome you're doing this and thanks for purchasing (and saving) Designer News!! Your company and all your work have been an inspiration for us since a long time.

    At what moment in the growth of your agency did you decided to start building products like Flow, Ballpark, etc? As I recall reading MetaLab and all spin-offs are completely bootstrapped, how did you find the time / money to fund these developments and start building these awesome products?

    Thanks, all the best! Peter

    2 points
    • Andrew WilkinsonAndrew Wilkinson, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

      From the start, I knew I wanted to work on our own products. Client work can be great, but ultimately there's nothing more satisfying than building something for yourself, especially when you're solving your own problem. In our case, we were looking for as solution to track all the estimates we were sending. We built a simple internal system to track estimates and invoices, and it ended up turning into Ballpark.

      I did it for less than $30,000. I designed the whole product and did most of the front-end development, and I hired a student developer (still with the company) part-time to build the rails app.

      I started building it in 2008, so just one year into starting the company. It was difficult because I was already insanely busy, but I just worked on it slowly for a couple hours every night. Gary Vaynerchuk puts it best: Want to do something great? Stop watching LOST.

      2 points