From a blinking cursor to paying customers in 90 days.
The story of “Sparta” and how I learnt to code.
Around three months ago, I had a meeting with two friends of mine who had an idea. They had been thinking about a concept for a while and wanted to get my feedback on it.
The idea was Sparta, web-based software to help sales teams kick more ass. Specifically, they wanted to build the easiest way to create and manage sales competitions to keep a sales team motivated and on track.
Coming from a sales background myself, I immediately understood the problem. Pretty much every sales team I’ve ever worked in has run some sort of competition, mostly based around activities - calls, meetings booked or invoices sent etc. The problem however, is the technology (or lack thereof) supporting these competitions has been shit. Whiteboards, spreadsheets and ugly CRM’s are the antithesis of fun — so inevitably, the competitions lost momentum after just a few weeks and the team fell into the same old routines.
At this point, we’d spent a few weeks discussing the problem, discussing potential solutions, the market and the competitive landscape. We spoke to sales directors and tried to figure out as much as possible about how teams are organizing competitions today.
We decided we were going to pursue the idea. This is generally when a team starts scraping together a prototype, or an MVP. Now, here’s where it gets a little interesting. All three of us are business-guys-by-trade, and whilst we all have experience from the product-focused startup world- we’re still sales guys. So, who was going to develop this thing then?
At this point in the story, it’s worth noting that I’ve been “coding” for around a year — and by that I mean playing around with various small projects, trying my best to learn the basics of PHP and Javascript. Interestingly, and rather conveniently, one of the other guys had been spending the previous year brushing up on his front-end and design chops — to the point where he is rather able to mock up designs in Photoshop and then transfer those into usable code.
So, we had the skeleton of a “product team” (!), definitely not rockstars and far from experienced — but that wasn’t going to stop us. Hell no, we were going to build this prototype and get it in the hands of customers.
So, we got to work and started mapping out some ideas of how this software should actually work. Early pages looked pretty ugly:
After a couple of weeks, things started progressing….
This was around the same time we started to think about how the metrics should be displayed to a sales manager, and a sales person.
Early ideas looked like this:
After nearly exactly 90 days, we were ready to show the world our product. I’m pretty stoked to say that, we’ve already got a couple of beta clients paying and using the service, and the initial feedback has been great. From my perspective, this process has been super helpful — and actually helped to find the bugs that I probably would’ve missed.
For those who have an idea, but don’t know how to build it — just start. You won’t know less about development tomorrow than you did today.
We are of course now talking to developers for the inaugural CTO position, but personally — I’ve loved the last few months. I learnt a shit load about software development and absolutely aim to stay on the product side of things as our company and team grows.
Note: Any sales people reading this, feel free to check out http://spartasales.com and book a demo, and we’ll be in touch!
