Starting Up: A Non-Programmers Guide to Building a IT / Tech Company

By Scott La Counte

Take your idea to reality!

Think for a moment. Think about that one time--or maybe one of several times--where you said, "You know what would make my job easier? This..."

Innovation doesn't have to come from innovating minds. It can come from ordinary people who are just trying to make their everyday

• Language: English
• Publisher: SL Editions
• Release date: Jul 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781629179247

Book preview

I Got This Idea!

Think for a moment. Think about that one time—or maybe one of several times—where you said, You know what would make my job easier? This…

Innovation doesn’t have to come from innovating minds. It can come from ordinary people who are just trying to make their everyday lives a little easier.

Ten years ago, I had this idea for modernizing Shakespeare. It wasn’t a terribly original idea—I wouldn’t even call it innovating. There had been plenty of publishers who had attempted the same thing.

Innovation doesn’t have to be original. In most cases, it isn’t. Innovation often is just taking an old idea and making it better. Steve Jobs was the master of this. The iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch—these were all things that had been done before—but Apple made them better.

In my case innovation was twofold:

Modernizing every Shakespeare play

Putting it in a format that spoke to a modern audience: an app.

The app became SwipeSpeare and the idea was simple: Let students read Shakespeare as they normally would; when they’re struggling to understand a passage, they swipe their finger across it to see a modern English translation.

It was simple—and it worked. With zero marketing, SwipeSpeare was downloaded over 350,000 times.

The number sounds good when in context, but it sounds even better when you understand that A) I wasn’t a developer, B) I wasn’t a designer, and C) Everything was bootstrapped.

The Drive

How did I get there? Let me give you some context first.

There’s something that you should understand about innovation and the people who create it: you have to be driven.

Want to see some of the greatest ideas? The best products and movies and games? Really the best of everything? Go to the local cemetery.

Morbid, yes. But 100% true. Most innovation dies with the people who failed to create it.

If you want to take your idea to reality, then you have to come to the realization that it’s not going to happen without a drive that pushes you to see it through. Innovation happens when there’s this perfect marriage of a good idea and a creator who can’t sleep until it happens.

That drive can come from many places.

For me and for lots of people, that drive happened when I wasn’t comfortable.

The economy tanked. I was newly married. And the job that once produced steady paychecks no longer provided that healthy income.

I had been thinking up an idea for quite some time but had never been driven to go forward and execute it because I was comfortable. Once I was no longer comfortable, then it was a do or die situation—it’s a lot easier to build a business when you have nothing to lose. And those businesses can be some of the most successful because if they fail, then you have literally nothing.

Start Here

So there I was. Married. Broke. And hungry for success.

I had a lot to learn and was about to get my crash course in startups.

My idea wasn’t an app. That idea would come later. My initial idea was a publishing company. The original Kindle e-Reader had been released in November of 2007. I had just finished my first book Quiet, Please and knew firsthand that publishers were taking a let’s wait and see approach to eBooks. Kindle was unproven and was disrupting everything, and publishers were trying to decide how to respond.

What did that mean? It was an easy market to break into. Thousands of people wanted books and larger publishers hadn’t bothered putting them in eBook format.

I started researching what readers wanted but couldn’t find on Kindle, then I went into business with my brother and an old library colleague to produce it.

With my brother, I started a