

Ask HN: Ok, so what do I do now? - jawngee

I’m in a bit of a predicament, so I’m seeking advice from the more business minded side of HN.<p>I do a lot of “experiential retailing” type of work for some big brands in NYC.  Basically, informational type iPad apps that get embedded in store displays.  Because the apps are similar to each other, I decided to create an authoring environment to build them.  I looked at Adobe DPS and MagPlus and designed&#x2F;built the authoring environment to work similarly.  You design the “app” in an Adobe Photoshop, press the publish button and voila you have an app.  No need for doing anything in Xcode, etc.<p>So once I finished writing this authoring app, a light bulb popped inside my head and I thought, “Why not use this for tablet magazines?”<p>I’ve been going back and forth between NYC and Vietnam for the last two years.  So after I finished the authoring environment, I thought I’d publish a magazine using my tool as a means to eat my own dog food. Sitting around a table with some local friends we iterated over a lot of ideas that we could produce cheaply&#x2F;easily.  We thought of a lot of ideas, but since most of my local friends work in the fashion industry, we settled on a fashion magazine.  It would mostly be media, little to no text, etc.<p>So, we’ve produced the first edition of our magazine and are about to publish it.  What started as an experiment, is now a very real thing here in Vietnam.  Our Facebook page for the magazine hit 100K likes with an advertising spend of only a few hundred dollars.  This reaction has caught everyone by surprise.  We’re more popular on Facebook than the four leading Vietnam fashion magazines combined.<p>Here is my predicament: I don’t know what to do with this tool.  I thought bootstrap it, but I think it’ll take a lot of cash to position it against Adobe DPS and MagPlus.  If I seek funding, I’d probably have to return the US permanently and abandon this magazine, which might be a hard thing to do if it proves popular.<p>Any advice?
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jawngee
Here’s a video of the authoring tools:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXlHFhbqzHU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXlHFhbqzHU)

Here’s a video of a sample built with the authoring tool (mildly NSFW):

[https://vimeo.com/68565914](https://vimeo.com/68565914) pw: finalaspektdemo

And more information about the magazine I’m publishing:

[http://emoi.me/](http://emoi.me/)

