Ethan Duggan was playing video games one afternoon after school. “My mom comes home and she has a bunch of dresses, like twenty,” he recalled. “She goes into her room, tries the dresses on, comes back to me, and says ‘How do I look?’ I say she looks great. Then I realized, I have a phone.” Ethan came up with an idea for just the situation he was in, he devleoped “LazyHusband,” available now for $0.99 for iOS and Android devices.
Ethan and I met in the press room of the Austin Convention Center. He was accompanied by his dad, Rick Duggan — a systems director at Zappos — and his mom, Marni Klein. With only a little bit of prompting from his parents, Ethan walked me through the app, which comes with a series of phrases like “No, you don’t look fat.” Users can record their own voices saying the phrases and can add new ones, then play them back in any awkward or boring dress-trying-on situation.
Ethan says followup apps are on the way. LazyKid and LazyWife are coming soon. LazyKid will include such standby adolescent gems as “Yes, I’ve done my homework,” “I love you,” and, Ethan’s favorite, “one second.”
But lest you think that Ethan is a one-trick pony, he’s also working on other types of apps. He’ll soon release “Bargument,” which pulls up fake Wikipedia pages to “settle” bar arguments. “My example is that there are 30,000 seagulls in Africa,” he said.
Ethan spent four month with CodeAcademy learning to code, then began developing his app. He also got plenty of help from the Las Vegas tech community. “Geoff Saunders [the cofounder of user authentication app LaunchKey] got me a two-hour crash course in CSS,” Ethan said. “From that, I learned the basics.” George Moncrief, the tech director at Raster Media, helped him learn PhoneGap. “Pretty much a lot of people, like ten people, have helped me from VegasTech,” Ethan said.
While Ethan has enjoyed his time at SXSW, he describes the experience as “a blessing and a curse at the same time. The good thing is, I get promoted, I get to talk to a lot of cool people, I get to get a lot of connection and stuff. The curse is that I have to do a lo-o-t of walking.”
LazyHusband is available for $0.99 for the iPhone and iPad in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
