Something is amiss at Tapulous, the popular iPhone developer behind the mega-hit application Tap Tap Revenge. In the past week, the still-fledgling company has lost three key employees: Sean Heber, the company’s first employee, Tristan O’Tierney, a senior iPhone engineer, and Louie Mantia, a designer. Together the employees constituted a large fraction of the company’s full-time workforce.
The company has everything going for it - Tap Tap Revenge is prominently featured on Apple’s homepage, and has consistently remained among the top 50 free applications on the store since its debut in July. And the company claims to have nearly two million users across all of its available applications. So why is everyone jumping ship?
The answer is that Tapulous is about to become an entirely different company. A month ago Co-Founder and Chief Architect Mike Lee was forced out of Tapulous, mostly due to the company’s shifting goals under CEO Bart Decrem. When the company was forming, Tapulous was supposed to be a development house for highly polished, useful apps, which is what drew Lee to the project in the first place. Over the last few months Decrem has adopted the view that apps should be simple and easy to produce - he thinks Tapulous should become the Slide of iPhone Apps.
Decrem says that Tapulous’s original engineering team (nearly all of whom have left at this point) thought that the company would be a place for the “independent developer spirit.” But in his mind this isn’t the way to build a successful business. Now that the old team is largely gone, Decrem says that the company is making the transition from an “indie mac” studio to a scalable business, and is hiring a new team of developers.
Decrem may be right to some extent. Building a highly useful program is resource consuming and a risky investment - it could easily go unnoticed amid the countless new applications on the App Store. But Apple’s user base is one that thrives on polished, functional design (there’s a reason the iPhone is popular in the first place), and would gladly pay for applications that are a step above the rest. Tapulous may well wind up making money, but here’s to hoping that its former engineers can find success building something that’s actually useful.
Thanks to Jeff Scott at 148apps for the tip.
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You’re saying Tapulous is going to compete with the simple (and not so useful) iPhone games that I am making in my free time? The mention of Slide and facebook is making me think Tapulous is on its way to Dooms day.
I think Decrem and investors got scared by the rejection of friendBook. Apple is probably making up for it by promoting Tap Tap Revenge. Personally, I doubt if friendBook was rejected for having too many bugs or for being a competitor to the built-in address book. Remember the Podcaster story?
Yeah, this is a good point. The friendBook rejection probably raised a lot of questions for them internally.
FriendBook was not rejected by Apple, it was pulled off the store due to some privacy issues that had to be properly addressed. See: http://tapulous.com/blog/2008/.....eek-later/
One thing I wanted to clarify is that, while the general thrust of this story is fair, we do value the creativity and commitment of quality that the indie developer community brings. We have tried to bridge between those two worlds, and remain committed to shipping beautiful apps that feel just right on the iPhone. But we are also committed to building a successful social company that follows in the footsteps of the most successful companies in the Valley, and that has led to the current transition.
Also, please stay tuned. We will be announcing several new additions to the team over the next few days.
Wow, comment from CEO! (hopefully the real one). Could you please clarify the reason for which Apple rejected friendBook? Come on, there are so many bug-ridden apps in Appstore. If Apple rejected it only for bugs, you could fix them and resubmit it, right? I am interested in knowing because I was thinking about developing an address book app. But I don’t want to risk wasting my time.
- Ramani (iMaze developer)
I can imagine that the people who’ve just left are not going to remain idle while you’re desperately looking for talent to replace them. I’m sure that while you try and become the master of craplets, Slide-style, they’ll keep making great products.
And good luck with finding good engineers when everyone sees how you’ve made your core team literally escape from your company.
Good luck to all the ones that are leaving, but I’m sure they already got other opportunities.
I dunno. I’ve been following Decrem’s career since he was at Eazel. His track record is not so hot: Eazel, Flock, and now Tapulous.
All I know is if you piss off your developers, you’re screwed. They’ll just leave and go work elsewhere.
That depends how much they’re paid big guy. The more money you make, the more crap you’re willing to take. It depends on what you get at work too.
Googlers get free massages by hot-ish females. That’s worth a lot to a programmer. Free meals are worth a lot. Free laundry, which I have never experienced personally, is worth a lot as well.
I think Tapulous is too small for that though.
Honestly, for massages, all free chef cooked meals, and laundry, and low 6 figures, I would put up with software CEO hitler. No lie, he could yell at and harass me for bug fixes all day long.
by all I mean breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Don’t forget Mozilla. They didn’t do too bad.
iphone is the gift god gives,:)
learning chinese online
World Internet Summit dvds
This is exactly the kind of CEO that I really hate, the one that makes the very people who started the company to leave. I dont think the company will last.
John Scully made Jobs leave. Apple is still around.
Keeping people at work is all about work conditions, not so much the work they do. That’s why Google’s retention is so high.
Apple still exists because Steve Jobs returned through an acquisition of NeXT.
Dude! That’s wrong in so many ways…
Louie explains it. Apple is still around because Jobs got it back. It was literally dying by 1996. Jobs needed to mature a bit, but Scully had no clue whatsoever. There would be no Apple today if Jobs had not returned.
For top coders, the work they do is by definition a BIG part of their work conditions. The best people don’t stay at Google because of the food. They stay because Google has a lot of very interesting work to do in a wide array of domains, and you can spend 20% of your time doing a project of your choosing.
@Fredo, you should think about why people joined firstly, you have a long learning curve ahead
i can agree with both parties. cool apps will help keep the company name a buzz in the community and they can become the slide of iphone apps, but for the developers cool apps mayn’t be there passion they probably got bored making quick apps that doesnt push iphone hardware to the limits. the ceo better find good talent to replace those that left because mike and crew were very talented.
I don’t think Tapulous will be able to replace the originality that Mike and crew brought to the table. Their apps have a certain polished feel to them and it will be difficult for any new team to recreate that.
this sounds like complete spin by the tapulous CEO
niiiice. just wanted to send a shoutout to louie mantia! props on getting techcrunched.
you guys can check out his great work at
http://www.louiemantia.com
keep up the good work man!
So THAT is where the look and feel comes from! hahahahaha
I’ve had my iPhone for 6 weeks now and am one of those users who “would gladly pay for applications that are a step above the rest.”
However… 95% of iPhone apps are absolutely useless crap. And the stock apps that come with the iPhone are 100% crap.
I bought it for business… and it’s turned out to be nothing more than a bloody gadgety iPod with a shitty phone shoved inside it.
I’ve been waiting for the release of a halfway decent contact manager … although all Apple seems to do is allow the release of another version of sudoku.
Somewhat confused. I thought something like Slide was what Bart wanted all along.
I think you meant to say @Frodo in your comment. My nickname happens to be Fredo, and I happen to be Bart’s former cofounder at Flock and not the author of Frodo’s bilious persiflage. Tapulous will figure it out and it’s smart that they are eyeing a platform play early on. I think it is a smarter play in the long haul and I suspect that, if executed successfully, they will delight more developers than they might upset in short term. And man, is it me or are TC comments getting more and more slashdotty?
@Fredo, correct its @Frodo and I agree with your comments.
sounds like they are ready to go indian
This article reminds me of my current employer! A totally different company than I worked for when I got hired. A business should always *attempt* to make their workers (developers) happy, if developers are not happy then they will not produce the best work!
no wonder Jeff Clavier didn’t wanted to say much when I chatted with him about Tapulous at TechCrunch50…
Its sad, because they had a good team put together, that isn’t as easy as you would think, and a key to success.
Its easy to blame the CEO, but he has some points, bigger software projects are always risky. Add in other factors, especially Apples ability to kill your project in its final stage and it sounds like a better option.
Even if Apple doesn’t kill your product it in effect can by simply burying it. That isn’t something you can advertise your way out of. So lets not put all the blame on the company here.
maybe they want work in Android app…looks interesting this decision
I just hope that someone will “finish” Twinkle 1.2
Love that app ( as do others ).
Or maybe a new company from the “old guys” will create “Twunkle”
YEAH! Twittle hahaha
Twinkle 1.2 was pushed to the app store last night. Should be out soon.
Actually the one thing I was waiting for to come from Tapulous was “FriendBook” and it seems it’s never going to happen…!? Too bad…
I tried using “Twinkle” a while but I never liked that it made me set up a separate account…and honestly, I never understood the appeal of “Tap Tap Revenge” anyway…!? Seriously, why is that so popular…?! I tried a few times to get into it, but you just keep tapping the screen…it is so boring…!?
Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye out on the company, since “Twinkle” is a nice and well executed app, even though I don’t use it and because “FriendBook” was promising enough — but I don’t really expect anything big in the near future…
These guys seem pretty full of themselves. They think they are going to be a billion dollar company (don’t all start ups?). I’ve been in to see them and they basically raped me for ideas and showed me the door. I understand that happens, but they aren’t making any fans in the community that builds and manages apps.
Still, they have some cool products so far.
It looks to me like some fairly junior and unknown engineers who were cleaning up a set of apps that other people built are not longer with a company they don’t agree with the strategy for. This was a gutsy move by the leadership of the company. Everyone needs to row in the same direction …and if you aren’t get out of the boat and swim to shore or a different boat.
Junior engineers? Yeah cause having people that worked at companies like Apple and VMware are “juniors.” And if you consider Mike Lee unknown in the Mac world then you truly have no idea what you’re talking about.
It has been my experience that people who use the classic row boat or football team analogies don’t understand creative software development. This approach is fine for corporate software, especially large projects with many players across an organization and clearly defined goals.
But I don’t think it’s right for iPhone apps at this point. This is a fluid market and the people who get a piece of it will be those who come up with something new, worth having, and unique. An app that is easy to develop will also be easy to imitate.
All this attrition reminds me, metaphorically, of my favorite Leper joke…
Q: What did the leper say to the prostitute?
A: Keep the tip!
http://cackl.com/joke/view/791.....prostitute
This worries me, whenever a brand new company (or relatively new company) loses most of its original employees it usually loses its way and ends up closing its doors.