This week we talk with Jonathan Deutsch, founder of Tumult, the software outfit behind Hype. If you're not familiar with Hype, it's a Mac app that helps users create stunning animated and interactive HTML5 content, and it's used by both beginners and pros.

Jonathan covers how he got his start, the importance of a support network, how your product itself can drive marketing, why you should use a public support forum, and much more.
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Show notes

Jonathan Deutsch: Website, GitHub, Twitter
Tumult
Hype: Website, Twitter
HypePro
HyperEdit

Transcript
Alexis: Jonathan, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jonathan: Glad to be here.

Alexis: So before we get to Tumult and Hype, tell us a little bit about your background.

Jonathan: Sure. Before Tumult, I started in CS at Purdue University and right out of college I was at Apple and have worked some various jobs at Apple for about six and a half years. I always wanted to start my own company; Apple was a little bit of a detour and so the opportunity came up in the HTML5 space. I had been there long enough that I felt I had accomplished what I wanted to do, and so I left and started Tumult.

Alexis: Alright. Let’s take another step back here. How did you learn how to program? What got you interested?

Jonathan: I would say having a TI-82 calculator was probably the first thing that really sparked my interest in programming. They were programmable calculators; you could do BASIC programming on it. You could also do Assembly programming, which I didn’t do much of, but I thought it was so much fun that I could write a little program – and usually they were text adventure games, is what I really started doing.

I did Escape from West Middle – West Middle was the middle school I was at, and so you could choose one of different routes. It was very much like, if the user chose this, go that way; if the user chose that, go this way. It’s like you would have to start in your classroom and then eventually you’d escape out to the hallway. You’d have to avoid the administration and try to get your way out.

That’s what started me; it was really just more fun and games and if I could impress my friends and I’d give them my calculator –.

Alexis: I’ve got to say though, I did daydream about escaping from middle school or high school, but putting it into a text adventure is taking it a step further [chuckles].

Jonathan: Yeah, I think it’s every kid’s dream. In fact, I would do it in BASIC, but I also did Hypercard versions of it as well. We had like a QuickTake 100 camera so I’d take photos around the school, and then each card would be a photo so you could choose to go right, go left – things of that nature – and you could digitize videos, so I’d have you interacting with various students along the way. I had this recurring theme and all the projects I did was trying to get out of middle school.

Alexis: [Chuckles] But man, that sounds like a calculator project that would have been very simple, but you even had a full-motion video and –.

Jonathan: Well, the Hypercard version had video.

Alexis: The Hypercard version, okay.

Jonathan: The calculator ones, you couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot with – but that at least sparked my interest. I had been into – for Hypercard, I was more into video projects. I like doing video editing as well, so I was really doing more of the multimedia stuff side of using computers at the time.

Through sheer luck, I happened to get a job at a dotcom company, and they were a search engine. You would enter in audio and video manually into the database so that users could search for streaming audio and video.

And so I did this little project to help enter links in faster and the next day everyone was using my little JavaScript project.