Have you written to Dylan from Figma? He was around 20 when he came up with the idea for Figma and got funders behind him. You NEED to make this happen, Alyssa! This has been a need for very very long.

I think you can almost jump past the MVP stage for validation, this is a pure execution problem and you need to get money, make this your full-time job, and execute asap given your excitement on this problem!

Figma is such a nicely polished product. I've only used it in fits and spurts, but it's easily as good an experience as Sketch. Our design team uses it all the time, and their technical blog posts have been incredible reading.

I know about his story with Figma, and AFAIK he managed to push it forward through the Thiel Fellowship (which I've considered myself too).

Honestly as I've mentioned in the post I've been quite excited about the product (specially when I managed to make the MVP useful enough to replace AE for simple GIFs, I even use the tool for that purpose) and my initial plan was definitely to make this happen, but I haven't really seen a solid way to go about it full-time without taking a huge risk, specially at my age.

Your age is exactly when you should be taking huge risks.

If you want to stay independent and go(?) open source then going on patreon might work. At least it works modestly for others[1].

[1] https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk

Taking risks is only going to get harder the older you get. Now or never!

Take the risk! It’s clear that you have a very rare combination of design, programming, communication, and marketing skills. The sky is the limit :)

I only noticed at the end, but it appears the author is only 18, which makes this even more impressive.

The author, Alyssa X, is apparently quite prolific: https://makermag.com/2018/12/21/top-women-makers-2018/

One style of program that you might want to have a play with, is a node based editor.

To me it makes complex motion graphics much easier to understand, and from a UI point of view I think there is much to innovate.

nuke, combustion, natron and blender(although the node based bit is hidden somwehere) are all good examples of the rough idea. However they were all copying a previous bit of software.

As you're seeking to fill a different segment, you'll have the luxury of not having to make it handle like shake, Flame or others.

Have you tried SideFx Houdini? Basically everything in it is a node.

I'd forgotten about houdini, mind you thats harder to get hold of.

Since version 12 it's been somewhat more easier to use.

Somewhat interesting read regarding your approach to developing the UI, but I can't provide much feedback without at least seeing a demo of the tool in action.

You're right, there is a gap in the market for a web-based, Figma style animation editor. I myself went with Tumult Hype (MacOS), as it was the closest equivalent to Adobe Flash-style rapid prototyping that I'm used to. But there isn't much online chatter about web animation in general. I guess everyone has simply moved to Adobe AE+Lottie, SVG+GSAP or the like.

If you decide to build a public-facing version of this, I hope you'll include a flat fee option instead of the monthly subscription BS all the startups are going with (Haiku Animator being one of many). Tumult Hype has a $100 flat fee price, which I love.

Good point. The article was mostly focused on the design and conceptualization of the tool in order to keep it short and concise, but I certainly had a lot to say about the development itself. I've been considering open sourcing the project in GitHub so people can check it out & build upon it, but that might take a while to polish and ensure it's stable. In its current state though I do use the editor to create video pitches and GIFs since it's considerably faster than After Effects.

As per the pricing, my plan was to make it free, or at least have a free plan. It was one of my main reasons why I started the project, and one of its biggest selling points.

If you do end up deciding to charge money, depending on how niche it ends up being, Aseprite could provide a good model of an (extremely) reasonably priced tool that fills a specific need: https://www.aseprite.org/

But I also have a ton of respect for the desire to offer it free!

As for pricing, I'd like to mention that the creator of Inkdrop chose the monthly subscription model for his app and shared his reasoning behind this choice in his blog: https://blog.inkdrop.info/how-i-built-a-markdown-editor-earn...

I'm not really familiar with animation tools, but isn't this exactly what Flare does?

https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare

Flare lacks video and audio support since it's aimed to be used to create assets and interactions for apps and games.

What sort of export does the tool have? Would be great if this exported to a json file Lottie could use, or something that could be converted into a GSAP timeline easily

I set up a custom JSON export to save and import animation files from the tool. I could definitely make it work with Lottie and other formats, that is if I continue pursuing it ^^

This MVP already looks very polished and I think the design is innovative. I coincidentally noticed the gap in open-source for motion graphics, but never got passed the notebook phase. One of the pieces I kept getting stuck on was the way to correctly model all that timeline data and applying it to the scene. Could you comment on your approach to that for this product? I also would like to echo the desire to see it open-sourced.

> The UI of Adobe After Effects can be quite overwhelming to a new user.

I suppose so. When I was learning Mograph in school, After Effects was the most intuitive tool among many others. Combustion, Motion etc never quite managed to pull it off in balancing simplicity, ease of use and versatility.

AE aged very well IMHO and to this day is the weapon of choice of Mograph.

Awesome. I'd love to find a market niche for a professional tool one day and turn it into a business. Really inspiring!

Can't wait to use this. The many times I've wanted to have simple motion graphics in FCPX but didn't want to shell out for Motion or AE, I wished something like this was available. More power to you

Have you checked shapeshifter.design, Tumult Hype or Keyshape? They are very similar.

Yep, but they have different purposes. These focus on HTML5 animations (super useful and handy for web), but mine is meant to be used as a simple tool to make videos and animations of different formats. It also has video and audio support (I believe unlike the two tools you've mentioned).

What you are building looks really nice and seems like it could totally fill a niche of its own. I've done a lot of work in similar areas and I'm very impressed.

BTW, as a creative person, I personally can't stand it when people's only comment is "have you seen X Y and Z which are similar to what you've built?" I get it, reinventing the wheel isn't always the best use of time, but I wish people realized how much of a wet blanket that sort of comment can be, especially if it is unaccompanied by any other insights about your work. It seems to imply that you haven't done anything worthwhile or unique, and your efforts are a waste of time.

I hope you continue to build this out into a product. Good luck with it and congrats on all your successes at a very young age.

Please, if you're open sourcing this, could you consider a Electron - since this is web based?

>My plan was to build the product in 6–12 months (for an initial MVP)

For the kind of product being described, 6-12 months seems way too long for an initial MVP. I also think statements like "build the entire tool" conflict with the concept of delivering something actionable / people-will-pay-for within a short amount of time.

Except that usually 1-month MVPs become 6 to 12 month projects, unfortunately. Making conservative estimates at this stage of the process is the proper way to go, imho.