The Background
After graduating with Computer Science degree I started looking for a change of pace and moved up to Seattle and landed a job at, Übermind, a software development company working on a lot of Apple related projects. After a couple of years I'd become a decent cocoa programmer, working on projects ranging from iTunes content delivery to Aperture plug-ins. Then along comes the iPhone… You can say what you want about the phone, but its a great device to work on if you are really interested in aesthetic and user experience. So after attending the World Wide Developers Conference '08 (WWDC), our company decided to have a contest for employees to present their best iPhone app ideas, a couple of which we would plan to develop. We had more than a handful of ideas, some better than others, but at the end of the day mine was one of the winners because it wouldn't take too long to create and would do an excellent job of showing off the iPhone's capabilities and our ability to take advantage of them. And what was that idea you ask?
Back at WWDC I was hanging out a bar with some other attendees and someone needed a lighter for a cigarette and I (half) jokingly said "Wouldn't it be great to have a virtual lighter on the phone?", thinking it could use the accelerometer to move the flame and would be a novelty at concerts where cell phones are already used like lighters. Now I realize there is currently a plethora of lighter apps out there, but understand that despite the fact that you might think this is a brilliant idea or the most useless waste of bits, it was perfect for what we as a company were trying to achieve with a quick app. Something that was straight-forward, visually appealing and used a lot of the features of the phone. We began developing the app about a week after WWDC, with myself as the primary developer.
Now this is where things get interesting…
I'd been working for a few weeks really trying to create the best possible lighter app I could imagine, fully interactive, OpenGL flame, dynamic sound effects, high quality lighter images, case selection, the list goes on. We even had an OpenGL expert help us with the flame since its a very complex problem to solve (and its why all the crappy lighter apps on the store now use simple images which are far less interactive and get boring quick) As we started to see the app come along, we realized that it was really quite a compelling product. We thought there was a fighting chance it might end up being one of the top apps. Not only that, but by showing it to a few contacts it was starting to create some nice buzz about us as a company, which was our primary goal to begin with. Now, being a small company in any industry means that people don't really have any idea who you are, thus having a relationship with larger companies is an essential aspect to progressing your business. It occurred to us that lighter companies might be interested in the opportunity to get their name on an app that was high-quality and would give them exposure to the tech-crowd which inevitably has money to burn. And what bigger name in the lighter world than Zippo…
So out of the blue we contacted Zippo and told them about our app and some ideas for how we could both benefit from it. Immediately we got a response from Zippo's Marketing Communications Manager saying they were very interested. At the time it was great news because it was a big company that thought we were worth paying attention to and working with. Within a couple days they said they were interested in the deal we'd suggested to get their name and brand on our app. He even had their marketing team supply us with high quality catalog images of the case designs to use. So now I'm working hard at putting the final touches on the app and getting their case designs in so we can show them how the final product will look. Meanwhile discussions are continuing to iron out the specifics of the deal. They wanted a video demo to see if we actually knew what we were doing. I threw one together that looked nice and sent it their way. (One side note to make here is that we found out this contact at Zippo couldn't play the .mov file we sent him because he's on windows. But what that really meant was that he'd never used iTunes and therefore definitely didn't own an iPhone, since quicktime gets installed when you install iTunes on Windows, and thats required for an iPhone. This reinforced our idea that they probably aren't on the cutting edge of technology and an iPhone app would be a nice new market for them and something that they otherwise wouldn't have focused on)
Its at this point that we noticed a change in the communication. We've shown them a video demoing all the features and we're planning on releasing soon. But now we find out from Zippo that there's some complications because their normal marketing firm started wondering why they weren't involved in all of this. I can understand that to a point, but it also seems ridiculous that a marketing team would control what Zippo can do and limit them from entering a new advertising arena that their slow-moving marketing team didn't think up on their own anyway. Not to mention the fact that they were already advancing their discussions with us before bringing any of this up. We keep waiting for a response. Finally they do respond saying they were impressed with the video and that they had some requests to change the position of the lighter a bit and a few other minor things. So I quickly change a couple things to suit their requests. Now we're yet again looking for a final answer from them.
The next thing we hear starts to make us very uneasy. Zippo tells us there's an issue with the arrangement because their marketing team already has a mobile initiative which they've been working on for a while. Oh yea, Zippo? At that time, I looked around google trying to find any links that might prove they had a mobile initiative. I did a search limited only to the zippo.com site and found no results for "cell phone" or "mobile phone". Also, I did a general search for "zippo cell phone" on google which produced nothing related to having a lighter display on your phone, at most all they had were generic wallpapers for some cell phones and PCs. Some solution you've got there guys…
So now we're waiting for a final yes or no answer from them, since we're ready to release and now the only thing holding us up is Zippo. We push them for an answer and our contact tells us he'll get back to us the next day. That day comes and goes. We send another email. He says he's really sorry, his day was busy and that he'll have an answer the next day. We wait the entire day and then finally at the end of business we get a standard legal response basically telling us that Zippo wants nothing to do with this project and that we should not proceed using anything related to the Zippo name. We didn't even get a personal response from their marketing manager, just a door slammed in our face after they'd asked for videos, changes to the app, and spoke about a soft agreement on revenue and genuinely expressed an interest in working together. So what do we do now…
We figure screw it, we don't need Zippo, everything that makes our app cool is agnostic to the specific lighter brand so why not just release it on our own. So thats what we plan to do, we remove everything Zippo related after being delayed for about a week. By this time one or two other lighter apps have appeared on the store, which although it was a bummer, didn't bother us too much since ours blew away the others and we were only charging 99¢, the minimum amount we could charge on the store to make up for our development costs.
We released iLightr on Aug 11th, it went smoothly and we even gained some traction in the top apps section. We were kind of annoyed by the fact that people that released free lighter apps and then changed them to paid got ahead of our place in the rankings (one of the many current flaws with the app store) but eventually we hit #15, a decent achievement for our company's first iPhone app release and we had completely earned our way there.
So some more time went by and our app continued to do well, maintaining a steady download rate. Then about a month ago (Sept 18) I discovered something that although I really shouldn't have been too surprised, left my jaw open nonetheless. Zippo released a lighter app, copying basically every feature we had, but not only that, they did a really poor job at it. They even released it in conjunction with another company called Moderati. Now I have no idea if this is the marketing firm they work with, or if one of the Zippo execs had some buddy with a tech company and threw them a bone to copy our app. All I know is the graphics are worse, the animation is choppy, it crashed four times before I could get the flame lit once, the sparker isn't easy to spin, the flame is just a set of static images which does move, but gets really boring after a few seconds. Plus, since they didn't do OpenGL for the flame, they just have the phone vibrate when your finger touches the flame, how ghetto is that!? (this is all so they can claim the same feature set, ie "interactive flame", in their description which might influence someone's downloading decision, even though their app blows chunks)
So obviously its upsetting but really its more amusing. I mean think about it, we're a small tech company and they're a HUGE $100+ million company. In their infinite wisdom they decided to not work with us (a very cheap deal for them), but instead copy us and release a piece of crap app that gives their brand a bad name when all they were going for was to get their brand out there in the first place. By the way, thats also why their lighter bodies take up most of the screen and the flame is so small (which was one of the requests they made to us, which we pushed back on because we knew customers would dislike the flame being so small). All in all my impression of Zippo has changed dramatically through this saga. I used to think they were the brand to own as far as lighters go, now I know that the people at the top running Zippo are simply unimaginative and have no problem stealing someone else's good ideas and claiming them as their own.
I for one will never purchase another Zippo product in my life and I wanted to let other people hear this story so that when they make a decision about purchasing a Zippo they will know what kind of people they're giving their money to. If you want to leave a comment about their app all you need to do is go to the iTunes store and find the "Virtual Zippo Lighter". You'll also see that they had their marketing team hype up the app because in the first day they had people commenting about how awesome the "physics engine" is and such, when in fact its just showing a handful of the same images over and over and has no engine at all. Maybe y'all will have some more appropriate comments for them or will at least rate my comment with a link to this story up to get it in the top 3 so that people know the truth ;)
If you want to check out a lighter app that actually has a lot of time and dedication put into it, check out iLightr. If you're not into lighter apps on the phone then at least understand that it took a lot of work to pull off and is technically quite challenging, thus its unfortunate to see a company like Zippo behave the way they did. iLightr has been a huge success for us, not only because we've gained more revenue than we would have with the Zippo deal, but because we've achieved our more important goal, to create an app that demonstrates our talent and creates more business opportunities for us, which it already has. Thanks for taking the time to read my story, I hope it gives you some insight into how large companies sometimes take advantage of "the little guys".
NOTE: This story expresses my own views and opinions and no one elses.
