I. On Ruvix and Cambridge

You are running Ruvix yourself. How are you still in college?

The reason that I’m still in college is because I haven’t failed yet. There has been a few close calls but I’m still around, fourth year.

When I started to pursue this software route I lot of my supervisors were (laughs) rightly concerned but I got a few thinly veiled threads of expulsion, you know, it was kind of weird, but funnily enough, but now the college is interested in what I’m doing. They want me to speak at events they are running.

Founding Ruvix Apps

I do engineering. In the first year we had a software module and it’s not particularly difficult, but I couldn’t do it, so(laughs) I nearly failed and a friend sort of helped me finish that because I couldn’t finish it myself, and so it’s kind of funny that I now do software because(laughs) I couldn’t do it to save my life.

At the end of the first year, I had an idea. I really wanted to make an app for some reason. So I just woke up one morning and decided to start learning.

I released one app, which was a money-tracking app. I think it’s still alive. In terms of what it does it’s not particularly new or innovative. It was just really pretty. So I am really good at design, but I don’t know about my code. As soon as I released that and I saw a couple of thousand people download it in the next day, that was the first time that I had the idea that I could make something that’s valuable to a large group of people, who are not just like my mom or my friends, but people from everywhere. Even people in obscure places in the world such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia were downloading my app. So the idea that from where I was, my room, I could reach so many people, was what sent me along this software journey.

The Most Captivating Quality of Ruvix Apps: Beautiful Design

Most of the design I do myself. I tried hiring several designers, but [it didn’t work]. It’s much more of a taste thing, than it is a very scientific method. I had one guy who won awards and was on magazines but his design didn’t connect with my ethos, so it is all about developing the right kind of taste.

Rather than figuring out [where something should be] in a scientific and quantitative way, it’s more of a “look at it, does it look right, does it feel right”

There are some apps that I have out there that are just abysmal. They are practically tests of a particular sector. So, I might want to see how apps in a certain category do, so I’d make an app in that category really quick. I’d just throw things together and put it up there and see how that category behaves. And those ones I don’t take much time doing. It’s only when I become personally vested in a certain project that I spend a lot of time doing stuff that might not even end up in the final version of the app. I’d design something for weeks and be like, “nah, this doesn’t work”, and start over again.

Having a button here isn’t enough, it’s if the button being here feels right. It sounds really wishywashy but looking at something and being happy with the result is what I usually end at but of course that process can keep going unless I stop myself.

The point is to make something that I’d pay for, something that I’d like looking at.

II. On Startups and Collaborators

Startups and Passion — always hand in hand?

You need to find something compelling enough. because to some degree you have to fulfill some sort of need but at the same time if you are gonna make it work you have to be compelled enough to sort of shun a lot of things in order to execute it.

It depends on the person. For some people who can work on the assumption that this is a solution to a particular problem that will fill in a gap in the market and that’s sufficient for them to work on it tireless until they fulfill that; and for other people it’s just the quality of work that they do that motivates them to keep going.

Finding Collaborators: Finding the Difference between School Work and Startup Work

You are doing work that doesn’t necessarily fit with anybody else’s agenda. For instance, someone who works hard in school might not necessarily do well in entrepreneurship because in school you are working towards a certain agenda: to please the teachers etc. but [in entrepreneurship] you are just working with no clear sight of where that might end up. The willingness to work relentlessly on whatever you are trying to do is the type of thing I think you have to look for, far more than talent, because given enough motivation, anyone, including myself, I somehow managed to do software despite being bad at it simply because I wanted to do it bad enough. Finding someone with tenacity towards problems. That’s the best characteristic of a Cofounder.