Pixate - beautiful native mobile apps with CSS

The risk, of course, is that a huge goal is less likely to be reached than a smaller goal. The ideal situation is that you have a reasonable goal that will actually help maybe some outsourcing or consulting costs or distribution set-up or what have you, blow away the goal early, and keep interest to drive revenue.

Personally, I don't find this kind of Kickstarter project very interesting, and I believe it's a suboptimal way to launch a product that could instead just be released as a MVP and iterated on based on user feedback.

Q. What's your background?

Paul and Kevin were accepted into Y-Combinator this summer to launch Pixate into it's current prototype phase

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the Kickstarter concept. But in practice, their scaling seems to quickly be turning hem into a sales platform that has no controls or accountability.

And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something cool, so give me cash". And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that -- by all means, people should be free to do what they wish with their money, and the Kickstarter campaign will probably work out beautifully for them. That's great.

But this whole perception of Kickstarter being a place for bootstrapping interesting projects is turning into a dangerous myth. Like many things before it, Kickstarter is becoming a place for people with money (and/or obvious ability to make money), to make even more money, though marketing under a vague guise of "bootstrapping", with no checks or balances to keep people honest.

This isn't an accusation leveled at Pixate -- I don't believe they're doing anything wrong and I have huge faith in YC's filtering. But once enough clever people figure out that you can earn a killing or huge bonus on top of anything, just by tacking on a nice Kickstarter campaign, it will become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. And then people will move on to the next thing, and the cycle will repeat.

</bubble-y doomsaying>

There is a balance to be made between 'we have this idea and need money to build it' and 'we are serious about this, we have done X much already, we need money to go over the finish line'

Huh? For a $99 pledge, you get the $299 license when it launches, it looks like.

This looks like every other product kickstarter, which essentially are saying, "We've invested considerable time and money. We're committed. We'd love to have you pitch in to help accelerate us and get us over the finish line. In exchange, your pledges entitle you to discounts and other favors."

As to performance, it depends how they do it. I wouldn't want to comment until they revealed some more technical details about this 'graphics engine'. They say 'style native apps and components', but it's unclear to me whether this means they are interpreting CSS and applying these styles to UIKit elements or rolling their own UIKit-like elements (I suspect the latter, but I might be wrong).

Also code once run anywhere doesn't work for native apps. You usually get an Android app that looks like iOS. Barf. Or your have to use some new UI paradigm foreign to both. Chance of being featured in either market without conforming to UI guidelines: 0%.

This only really works for games and Unity has that covered.