A New Client Starts His Journey

I had an aspiring entrepreneur reach out to me this week.  He’s had an idea for quite some time (years).  He’d been watching a certain niche and saw that space continue to grow and he wants “in”.  He’s sick of being on the sidelines and wants to be in the game.

Now this guy who I’ll call Joe (not his real name) is going thru what I consider a normal series of events for an aspiring entrepreneur.  He’s got a job, he sees an opportunity related to his area of expertise and he watches.  And waits.  And then he starts to take action.  Small steps, but as they say, a journey of a thousands miles…

He had been talking to “developers” – people who, you know, create websites.  Now Joe is a sales / business development guy and while not tech-illiterate, he quickly found himself going thru “developers” because, well, an interactive website requires a bit more than HTML and a pretty layout.  Joe requires more than what a front-end website developer has the skills to do.  Creating a Wix or WordPress site isn’t what Joe needs – he needs a  full stack, highly interactive, complex system that solves his Customer’s problems.

Now, this is no knock on Joe or those developers.  Technology is incredibly complex and confusing; there’s tons of different tools, programming languages, frameworks, etc, etc, etc.  So I feel for Joe as he tells me his story of finding someone to help him with his app (and thankfully he found me).  Now I can’t go into details of his idea, but I can say that it will need a database, it’ll need a front end, users will need to not only interact with the app but also with each other.  And it needs to scale – potentially hundreds of thousands of users.  Pretty cool stuff he’s thinking about.

As we got talking further, I walked him through codeless development and bubble in particular.  His comment – why doesn’t everyone know about bubble (exactly spot on Joe!). And while we didn’t talk about wireframes or mockups specifically, he did send me some hand sketches of different concepts he’s thinking of.  He actually texted me pictures of his hand sketches.  Again – cool.

I love this stuff.  Helping people like Joe take the next steps on their entrepreneurial journey is what keeps me going (it’s Sat night as I write this – and that’s after spending most of the day working on a variety of apps, including Joe’s).  But this is the essence of starting out with your idea.  So if you’re a sales or biz dev person like Joe and not too sure about the technology stuff but you have an idea you’d like to take to market, let’s talk.  Get off the sidelines and jump in the game!