Ideal Binary's Aidan and Kevin Doolan are twins who could have dropped in from a Harry Potter book: non-identical red-haired twins in their 20s who could stand in for the Weasley brothers at a pinch. But they're trying to work magic of a different kind, by writing iPad apps which have animation and behave like interactive popup books. Set up in 2008, the company consists solely of them working from home, though they're considering getting an office now. They've received no funding – they're entirely self-financing. They came along with Barry O'Neill, a former games entrepreneur who has his own venture capital firm, Other Ventures.

• What's your pitch? Aidan: "We're developing for the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch, doing focusing on 3D ebooks, drawing on our background in the games industry. We realised in 2008 that the iPhone has a lot of horsepower, and that we could use it to do sophisticated 3D simulations. In a sentence, trying to revolutionise the digital ebook market by increasing interactivity."

• How do you make your money? Aidan: "They're apps – we sell them on the Apple App Store. The first one, Rumpelstiltskin, had 30 pages of text and four interactive "popup" spreads, and was aimed at four- to six-year-olds, and was priced at $1.99 – that made back its development costs in two months. The next one is Rapunzel, which will start at $1.99 and go up to $2.99 and then $3.99.

"We looked at developing for Android about six or seven months ago. We're monitoring it, but there are still rough edges."

Barry O'Neill: "The biggest issue is Google's mismanagement of the Android market. Google has smart people working for it, but they don't understand that Apple had 110m credit card details [from iTunes sale] before it even started the App Store. People aren't going to create a Google Checkout account just to buy something from the Android Marketplace. And that's going to remain an obstacle, except in places like Japan where KDDI has integrated payment into telephone billing.

"But from any editorial view the Android Marketplace is a blatant copyright abuse. There's just loads of ripoff apps there. Billing is still an issue, and the fragmentation of the OS, the lack of focus, means it's very very hard to make money on the Android platform."

Kevin: "Windows Phone is interesting but we would have to use C#, which means a complete rewrite of our software. We might look at it in 2011."

• How are you surviving the downturn? Kevin: "Fine – our application has entered the global market – we were the recommended app by Apple in 24 countries. So we don't rely on Ireland for revenue. Because we're small we don't have many outgoings – and office space is certainly cheap now. We're working from home but we're hoping to move into our own office soon."

• What's your background? Aidan: I was at Dublin City University. Kevin: I was at Trinity College Dublin. We graduated in 1998 and stated in graphics and animation, and then moved into games development. Then we did some work in mobile, and games, and we developed a platform called USCL that you could target a platform at.

• What makes your business or product unique? Kevin: "We're the only ones trying to simulate fun things by extending books – it's a bridge between how they used to be and how they can be. The platform we've built for the simulation could be used for grownup books – we're looking at what could be done with graphic novels now."

• Who in the tech business inspires you? Kevin: "It would have to be people in the game industry – probably, and this will sound weird, iD Software, who made Doom and Quake. We learned to create from them. There's a piece by Michael Abrash who had a column in Dr Dobb's Journal that we learnt from word for word."

• What's your biggest challenge? Kevin: "Technically, it's scaling our business. But we're very focused on it."

• What's the most important web tool that you use each day? Kevin: "Google! If we have issues that need to be sorted out. And Twitter, and a million tech blogs. We also use SVN for versioning. The iOS SDK is just amazing."

• Name your closest competitors Aidan: "There's lots of ebook companies but none that does anything like this. Actually, we have seen one from a company called Loudcrow, from Canada. We don't know if we all thought of the same idea at once, or if we somehow subtly influenced them. It would be nice if we influenced them."

• Where do you want the company to be in five years? Kevin: "If we can make a good success of this and the platform is used as a brand – that's what we'd like, become a global public brand.

• Sell to Google, or be bigger than Google? Aidan: "Oooh ... being bigger is tough. That would be a lot of ebooks. But if you don't aim at the bullseye then you can't ever hit it. It just means we have to focus on what we want to do."