The First Year of my “Startup”
I wanted to republish one of my articles from January 30th, 2016 as it was the beginning of my transition into tech. At the end of the article I’m going to add links to the two Udemy courses that I took that allowed me to grasp the basics in order to build Pixity.
Well, it’s more of a side project. To be honest, for over a year it wasn’t even that — it was just an idea (I came up with the initial idea November 2014). I had no technical knowledge to bring the product to life so I decided to focus on the business side of things.
I made the biggest rookie mistake in the book… I did “busy work” instead of validating the idea. In seven months I came up with a name and logo, made social media accounts, bought a domain, and most importantly, got (really cool) business cards.
Time to actually take care of business?
Now that I was “legit” it was finally time to start validating and networking to find a technical co-founder. Luckily, I found the perfect opportunity. What better way for a 21 year old to do just that than to fly off to Vegas as a volunteer for a startup conference, by himself, with nothing to show. The purpose of the trip was for networking and validation and I had no intention of getting funding from investors. As expected, they ripped my “startup” apart…but I did manage to secure a few dollars from them at the poker tables. Talking with investors, and other attendees, got me thinking about Pixity in terms of a business, rather than just an app. I spent the next few weeks coming up with a business plan and iterating the idea as I talked to as many potential users as I could.
The months to follow were spent (unsuccessfully) searching for a technical cofounder. No developer wanted to take on the risk with someone they didn’t know in a startup that had no traction when they could easily get a good salary elsewhere. It was now November 2015 and I still had no minimal viable product. I decided I was going to outsource development and got quotes ranging from $3,000 to $50,000. In December I realized I wouldn’t be able to save up enough in a reasonable period of time (I already wasted one year and wasn’t planning on wasting more).
Alright, now what?
There was only one thing to do… learn to code myself. I spent two weeks going through Udemy courses to learn the fundamentals of front-end development and then jumped into it, continuing to learn as I go. Luckily, I got the hang of it fairly quickly and have been designing and developing the app for the last 6 weeks using Ionic Framework (AngularJS, HTML5, CSS) and Parse as a backend.
I was about 1–2 weeks away from finishing when Facebook announced (two days ago) that they are shutting down Parse. At first I panicked, but then learned that they are open sourcing their code and developers have until January 2017 to migrate off before it is completely shut down. I plan on still finishing the app on Parse and then start learning backend development so that I can migrate off of Parse without rewriting too much of my current code. I’m thinking of going with MongoDB and Heroku and would appreciate any thoughts or other recommendations (I still don’t know anything about backend).
Next steps for me
I see four outcomes: Pixity can fail, be a hobby, become a lifestyle business or become a massive success. So far, it’s been a great learning experience. I learned the importance of validation and prioritizing tasks, as well as picked up the fundamentals of front-end development and user experience. I plan on continuing to work on Pixity while remaining open to other opportunities. Regardless of what happens, I believe the experience (and my change in mindset) is invaluable. Ultimately, everything I takeaway can be applied to help me be successful in whatever I choose to pursue.
Resources
As promised, here are the two Udemy courses that I learned from (I supplemented these with finding YouTube tutorials):
HTML 5: https://www.udemy.com/learn-html5-programming-from-scratch/learn/v4/overview
Angular: https://www.udemy.com/learn-angularjs/learn/v4/overview
Although the Angular course now is outdated (it teaches Angular 1 — we’re now on Angular 5?) I still wanted to share it as I later took an intro to NodeJS by the same instructor. More on this on a follow up piece to this article where I share what ended up happening!
