Democratizing Software For a Liberating Future
Sparkster is based upon a very simple ethos:
Software should not inhibit creativity.
The future is going to be built using code, software and apps, so is it right that only the highly educated — often privileged — few have exclusive rights over those tools?
We don’t think so.
So we’ve built our whole business around empowering people who have good ideas.
A business built on personal experience.
Sparkster’s founder, Sajjad Daya is a man with a long and extensive history in ecommerce. In the early 2000s he was running a fledgeling printing startup that experienced explosive growth. As is often the case, that growth brought some major challenges with it and the backend of the business was soon so underdeveloped that Sajjad couldn’t even tell his customers whether their order had shipped.
The business concept was sound and the quality of the products exemplary, but the technical side of things was holding them back and the software solutions that were put in-front of Sajjad and his team were incredibly expensive and overly involved. Salesforce proved too pricey for a small business like his and Microsoft Dynamics — while powerful — was a little overwhelming and limiting in its complexity.
Scouting for a solution.
In a bid to find something both bespoke and affordable, Sajjad got in touch with developers based in India. However, given the fact they were working remotely, many time-zones apart, progress with these overseas teams was stuttering and left Sajjad exhausted and despondent.
Soon, in frustration, Sajjad turned to his whiteboard to draw out his needs via flow-charts and interface mockups. He laid it all out as simply as he could and in doing so he realised something; to give people like him the basic software building blocks they needed, he’d have to create them himself.
A new kind of business.
Sajjad knew intuitively that if the software he needed for his own business could be boiled down to plain English on a whiteboard, then it should be just as easy to build. Joining forces with a technical lead, Amit, and meeting with software developers and professional mentors, he started to solidify the concept and the first seeds of Sparkster were sown.
This new way of building software was based on a handful of key principles.
- Users shouldn’t have to talk ‘computer’, computers should talk to us in our own language.
- Using Sparkster should require zero coding experience.
- Sparkster should democratize app development to empower the people who want to build a better world.
Building Sparkster from the ground up.
With all this chat about whiteboards and plain English, it may seem as though building Sparkster was simple.
It wasn’t.
It required experience, experimentation, humility, courage, hundreds of proofs of concept and even more iterations. After all, they were looking to pare back the act of building with software and, as Leonardo da Vinci said “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Their to-do list was long and often felt insurmountable, especially when they lost talented team members to high-profile tech companies. But bit by bit they nailed customizable interface, cloud integration, data security, drag and drop workflow and a tonne of other features they knew their users would benefit from. Because that’s what they’ve been focussed on the whole time; helping people like the Sajjad from all those years ago. People with a good idea and a great business, who just need a leg-up on the technical side of things.
It’s a work in progress.
The Sparkster you see today isn’t finished, not by a long shot. Sajjad, Amit and the team are constantly learning from Sparkster users, working out how to make the whole thing smarter, more functional and easier to use.
And that’s the exciting thing about software development; it’s evolving at the same rate as the ideas and businesses it supports; empowering people like you. People who are going to change the world.
Join our revolution at Sparkster.me.
