Last week, the company announced the addition of C3 Presents to its client roster with a contract to build mobile experiences for more than 40 music festivals worldwide, including Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza.
The apps will include easy-to-navigate festival maps, artist lineups and schedule planners, as well as integrated Spotify playlists, messaging and other features.
AVAI CEO Rand Arnold said the two companies are a natural fit because C3 needs to build and maintain a large number of similar apps while pushing updates, tracking analytics and placing ads across all of them — an apt use of AVAI’s homegrown mobile dev environment, which Arnold likens to “WordPress on steroids.”
“It takes away 98 percent of the effort of building code from scratch,” Arnold said. “But we know people will want to customize their apps, and we celebrate that. We’re not trying to be anyone’s industry expert, so we’re not telling C3 what an app needs to do for a festival.”
Instead, the two companies will coordinate app production on AVAI’s production platform, with the AVAI team implementing customizations along the way.
In fact, it was this dynamic that Arnold believes won him the C3 contract.
“They’re frankly the kind of company we’ve been looking for for a while,” he said. “The pain of building and managing all these individual apps is just… and having to maintain it, is just too much. We made the short list first []in their selection process], then finals and finally we stood apart.”
The AVAI Mobile team
AVAI’s staff of designers and devs (pictured above) has grown over the last few months through ongoing hiring and a recent acquisition Arnold declined to name.
“We have a very technical, but very entrepreneurial executive team,” said Arnold (pictured right), whose education and early work experience went deep into engineering, system integrations and IoT long before the term was coined. “If you’re going to work here, you have to like to work. Work isn’t a bad thing. We define work as taking something you don’t like and making it how you want it to be.”
Beyond the gritty ethic, Arnold said AVAI employees enjoy flexible schedules and the standard startup perks, like free snacks and Red Bull. But Arnold, a self professed coffee nerd, takes particular pride in the company’s collection of espresso machines.
“We just got a Jura F7,” he said. “It makes this double thick espresso, it’s like chocolate syrup coming out of the thing.”
The AVAI office features one of the few roll-up garage doors found in office space, allowing the team to take the ping pong table outside when the weather cooperates.
That modular flexibility reflects AVAI’s entire approach to software development.
“The power between client devices and the central server is always going back and forth,” Arnold said, likening hardware improvements and cloud migrations to fashion trends. "I remember how technically knowledgeable you used to have to be just to put up a simple webpage. But over time, people built developer toolkits to enable devs to do cooler and flashier things.
"That’s why we designed a platform that makes it easy for people to build and manage their apps."
Images courtesy of AVAI Mobile.
Have a news tip for us or know of a company that deserves coverage? Tell us or tweet @BuiltInAustin.
