Ionic: The Childhood Friends From Wisconsin Who Bootstrapped Prototyping Tools and Open-Sourced a Mobile Framework

The story

Long before they built one of the best-known open source mobile frameworks, Max Lynch and Ben Sperry were two kids in a Milwaukee suburb making video games. "Ben and I actually grew up together in Shorewood, WI (near Milwaukee) and were very close friends. When we were in high school, we started getting interested in game development," Lynch told the University of Wisconsin–Madison's computing school. "That was the first time we combined forces on creative projects, and with his art talents and my programming skills we were able to make some basic games."

The partnership continued through college. Both attended UW–Madison, Lynch studying computer science and Sperry graphic design, and they "moved into web development and worked on a number of projects over our high school and college years."

**First-generation entrepreneurs**

The startup culture of the late 2000s gave them a template. "While in college at UW and around 2007/8, we were both inspired by the new startup movement that was taking place around communities like Y Combinator and Hacker News, that was encouraging people like us without traditional business or entrepreneurial backgrounds (we are both 'first generation entrepreneurs') to start companies," Lynch said. "It turns out a developer/designer duo was a perfect fit for this movement, as we could build any web-based product we wanted without needing any outside help or hiring a team to get it off the ground." He was particularly grateful for his partner's skills: "it was a gift to have an incredibly talented designer help make everything I built look amazing, instead of my questionable 'Programmer Art.'"

**A side project called Codiqa**

After graduation, both worked at PerBlue, a mobile game startup in Madison, and built software on the side. TechCrunch later noted that before founding their company, both had worked at startups developing mobile MMORPG games. In a 2012 retrospective, Lynch explained how their first product came about. "When we built Codiqa, we didn't really have any plans to turn it into a business. We built it because we were doing jQuery Mobile development through the standard mockup -> prototype -> end-product process, and we thought mockups were redundant when the end-product technology was known." Their solution was "a simple interface builder for jQuery Mobile that could quickly build these kinds of apps."

They began playing with the idea in late 2011 while "juggling our 9-5s and our side project." On January 1, before they had a working product, they launched a landing page with an interactive demo and a viral share option, which attracted about 1,500 beta sign-ups, mostly through Twitter. The private beta followed a month later. "The biggest feedback we received was that this was awesome… but way too buggy," Lynch wrote. Fresh from reading about the Lean Startup method, they shipped many small updates quickly.

**A partnership with jQuery Mobile**

The breakthrough came from giving something back to the community they built on. A few weeks before the public beta, they showed the jQuery Mobile team their tool and proposed an embedded version on the project's website. "They agreed," Lynch wrote, and at the end of February 2012 an embedded Codiqa launched directly on jquerymobile.com. A few weeks later they blogged about reaching 10,000 users in a month, a milestone that, Lynch noted, "coincided nicely with a rejection from YC a few months earlier." The post was number one on Hacker News for a whole day. "In one year we went from just an idea to a three-person profitable software startup," he wrote.

**Drifty, profit and a bigger opportunity**

The company, called Drifty, was founded in 2012 with Sperry as CEO and Lynch as CTO, TechCrunch reported. Its products Codiqa and Jetstrap offered drag-and-drop prototyping to more than 250,000 developers, and the company "has grown revenue by 10x, while bootstrapping its way to profitability in 2013."

Building those tools revealed a larger gap. "As they worked on building their first two tools, the team realized there was also a big opportunity in cross-platform mobile development, in terms of introducing tools that would allow developers to take better advantage of web technologies," TechCrunch wrote. Ionic, launched in late 2013, was an open source HTML5 framework for building native-feeling apps with HTML, CSS and AngularJS. Sperry emphasized the licensing: "It's completely, 100% open-sourced. It's MIT-licensed, which means anyone can use it, commercial or personal."

In March 2014, Drifty, a participant in the TechStars Cloud 2013 program, closed $1 million in seed funding from Arthur Ventures to grow its team and continue developing Ionic.

**Building a company that lasts**

Ionic grew into a company with an enterprise business, and Lynch became CEO. In February 2020 he announced a $6 million round led by Arthur Ventures with General Catalyst participating, bringing total funding to $18 million. He was clear that the round was not driven by need. "As a startup that is on the cusp of profitability, we didn't need to raise any more money," he wrote. "We reject the binary outcome of becoming a unicorn or crashing and burning, and we think employees and customers increasingly reject that, too." He reported that Ionic had added 150 enterprise customers in a little over 24 months.

On November 7, 2022, low-code platform OutSystems announced it had acquired Ionic, with terms undisclosed, SiliconANGLE reported. Ionic would operate as an independent subsidiary. OutSystems founder and CEO Paulo Rosado said Ionic was "a continuation and expansion" of OutSystems' vision. Lynch promised users "a significant increase in product engineering and R&D over the coming years," including for the open source projects.

Ionic's founders followed a path that many developer-tool companies now copy: build something useful for yourselves, give it to the community that inspired it, and let profit from small tools fund a larger open source bet. Their partnership with the jQuery Mobile team is a textbook example of distribution through generosity. Equally notable is their attitude to capital: bootstrapped to profitability, modest seed funding, and an explicit rejection of the unicorn-or-bust mindset. The eventual sale to OutSystems was not a dramatic exit, but it reflected a durable business built on a framework millions of developers could use for free.