My Year at an Atlanta Startup
A Year at HubLogix
There’s plenty of hype surrounding tech startups, but to an outsider, it might seem like just hype — an assumption I’m glad I didn’t make. I stumbled into the local Atlanta startup scene before my junior year of college. As someone who had recently discovered a love for coding, the path of least resistance could have been to either focus exclusively on classes or career plans after graduation.
Instead, the hype drew me away from solely focusing on classes. To understand what “working with startups” entailed, I reached out to the people I knew were involved in the Atlanta startup community. In some places, I found a lot of enthusiasm and little substance. In others, I found amazing people working very hard to solve big problems, but were often too busy to talk. My curiosity kept me persistent until I eventually struck gold.
This week marks the one-year anniversary of my work at HubLogix. If you’re not familiar with HubLogix, it’s an eCommerce automation platform created to make it easier for people to manage their online stores and take care of all of the painful parts of the process, like managing inventory across multiple storefronts or routing orders to suppliers.
My friend Kurt — who I knew from high school — started HubLogix while we were still there. Kurt had some pretty strong entrepreneurial instincts early on. I remember hearing about his online iPod accessory store as early as middle school, while the rest of us were busy dabbling in High School Musical or acne treatment.
When I reached out to him midway through my college career, I was looking for a chance to experience startup culture and learn about new development tools. Before then, I thought Java and C# were the only languages that mattered and that MVC was just some type of rare skin disorder.
Within just a few months, I learned things I couldn’t possibly have learned in textbooks or MOOCs. I experienced Rails head first, picking up tools like Git along the way. I had a reason to build and iterate with a purpose.
Yet the most profound things I learned were not technologies, features, or methodologies. I acquired knowledge about the world of eCommerce from the perspective of a small startup. At a lot of large companies, entry-level developers rarely have the chance to help build a product while simultaneously learning to understand how it fits into the context of the industry. Not the case at HubLogix.
I received transparent feedback daily, unlike I had ever experienced in classes in the past. After just a couple of months, I summoned the courage to give Kurt my ideas on a layer of the product and realized it wasn’t something to be intimidated about. From there, we developed an informal process of bouncing ideas off of each other, however crazy or unfeasible, continuously working to evolve the product. Thankfully, Kurt had laser focus to keep me from building useless things. In a lean startup, that focus was absolutely necessary. My creativity and his focus on boosting the value proposition of the product for our customers led to various ideas, which ultimately led to features.
Outside of just building the product, I experienced other core functions of the startup like support and business development, and gained a more well-rounded understanding of how each component influenced and was influenced by the product. I even learned how to manage the development of the product when I was tasked with onboarding other developers or overseeing feature implementation by other members of our small team.
I could ramble on the exciting, multi-faceted challenges I have tackled and get to tackle every day at HubLogix, but those might not be relevant to everyone. What I can say is that working for HubLogix enabled me to be a better developer and a more creative person, and exposed me the way one might think about scaling a business.
Many people my age have been given the cliché advice to follow their passions. I disagree — I’m not sure that passion is something that needs to be present before diving into something new, like the chance to work at an intriguing startup. For me, curiosity pushed me to take the first step away from my inhibitions into foreign territory. From that first leap forward, I found something I was passionate about. Ultimately, I don’t think you have to fully understand what you’re doing at first or lay down the path before embarking on it. Sometimes, you’ll get lucky. You may develop an appreciation for the process and the unknown — and I can guarantee you’ll learn some awesome things along the way.
Updated in March to reflect new name (eCommHub is now called HubLogix).
