Dear web2.0 community. During last sixteen months our tiny team was absorbed in developing litha-paint.com - javascript-powered vector graphics editor. Me and my friend Alex Padalka have been created core functionality for the product for 4 months of intensive exhausting work. At the time, we were working full time for some software company. But our hearts, dreams and all our free time were dedicated to our project.
We didn't had customers, didn't had investments and even didn't had a business plan. The only thing we had is the faith, that drawing vector graphics in webbrowser, equipped only with javascript - is amazing thing and a kind of magic. But real life had showed that having just faith was not enough.
Internet community warmly met our product and asked for some more features. Many site owners asked us to integrate LiThA engine into their online stores and portals. It was obvious that we need full time dedication to the Litha-Paint in order to satisfy growing demand. We started to search VC but failed very soon. There are no venture capitalists here in Ukraine and obtaining visa to USA is near impossible.
At that time we still had a fuel for one more quick march. We decided reorganize our codebase and extract convenient API to our drawing engine. That process took us three monthes. We finished the task in May 2007 and started working with webdesk.in, supporting them with their wDraw.
Soon after that we received more inquiries from entrepreneurs related to using litha-paint on their sites. We couldn't accept any of proposition, because it would requires a lot of customization works. We just haven't resources for managing all such things.
We decided to sell Litha-Paint.com on eBay. It was very personal decision for me and Alex. Both of us should agree that we can't materialize or dream. Both of us should accept that we understand nothing in business. In context of amount money and emotional and intellectual power we spent on LiThA-Paint, we started to think about product as of our own child. But delay may mean death for the project. There still is a niche not taken yet by Flex, Sliverlight and JavaFX. There still is demand for lightweight software. We started an
auction on 04.11.2007 with starting price = 0.99$.
If there would be a person who would want to do something with the product, we will help him. We will provide all sources, scripts, manuals, our knowledge about sourcecode, server infrastructure, etc.
The auction would last for ten days.
sincerely yours,
Vyacheslav Evgrafov.
Labels: auction, codebase, eBay, source code, startup