It’s an exciting time for Ben Sperry and Max Lynch.

They launched their little company just last year, and already Drifty has debuted three products, been accepted into the incubator project TechStars, and gotten accolades from jQuery Mobile and Rackspace (News – Alert).

Drifty offers cloud-based tools to make mobile and Web developers’ lives easier.

The Madison, Wisc., company’s first product was Codiqa, which CEO Sperry and CTO Lynch created for fun before formally launching Drifty. Leveraging the HTML5-based user interface system jQuery Mobile, this solution enables developers to realize faster time to market for their applications. Codiqa does so by enabling developers to take software prototyped by marketing and design people and customize it on the back end, rather than starting development from square one, explains Chris Kiser, Drifty’s support and product manager. That, he adds, allows an organization’s product and developer teams to be more in sync.


Image via Shutterstock

Sperry and Lynch understand the importance of that connection, as Sperry is a graphic designer, and Lynch is a programmer, explains Kiser.

As for Kiser, he is doing double duty at Drifty while getting an education at University of Wisconsin-Madison. TMCnet met with Kiser at TechWeek Chicago.

Drifty hired on Kiser four months ago to help with marketing and sales, but before that the company was relying mostly on word-of-mouth for product promotion. And it had the good fortune of making it on to the home page of jQuery Mobile, which Kiser says generated a lot of leads for Drifty. (One report says it garnered more than 10,000 users in the month following Codiqua being spotlighted by jQuery Mobile.)

Then, in late May, leading cloud service provider Rackspace, in its blog, called Drifty’s Codique and jetstrap “must-have apps.”

Jetstrap is the name of Drifty’s second product, which it made available in beta this March and started charging for in late April. This product is a drag-and-drop solution based on Twitter (News – Alert) Bootstrap. Like Codiqa, jetstrap aims to expedite the prototype-to-final solution timeline for software development, but the focus here is on “empowering users to create responsive desktop websites with the popular HTML5 framework,” according to the Drifty website. Kiser explains that jetstrap can help with development of sales and contracting products, collaboration solutions, and much more.

Both Codiqua and jetstrap export clean HTML5 code, so developers get CSS (News – Alert), JavaScript and HTML5 code that they can then customize.

Drifty is just now launching a third product called formend. Designed around the backend processes related to sending forms for stuff like surveys, formend is an add-on to Drifty’s existing products.

“We see Drifty becoming a Drifty suite, kind of in the vein of an Adobe (News – Alert),” Kiser says.