From No-Code Nowhere to Building a Software Company — A Startup Story
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I recently talked to our CTO and we came to the decision that writing this article would be a great idea to help people who need that bit of hope in the face of adversity. It’s also interesting to me that you don’t hear as much about the story behind building product as frequently as post-launch (of course it makes sense, that’s where the meat of the story is, but I think it’s really helpful to hear the struggles behind building a product).
This is a story quite strange, but hopefully you can use this as motivation/inspiration and maybe you’re in a situation where you feel all hope is gone (believe me, I’ve been there) and there is no where left to turn. I hope this story shows you that you can do anything you set your mind to and that the dream you had in your head, yeah it’s actually possible to attain.
So grab a cup of Tea, Coffee or Water (in case you haven’t drank any today) and enjoy!
In September 2017, I was outside in my front yard. I was sitting in my fathers car at about 11AM. My neighbour (and my best friend) and I started talking about things friends normally talk about. I then asked him about an idea I had to gauge his opinion. The idea was essentially hiring photographers near by your location for a shoot (my actual idea was for any job but he was a photographer and truthfully I really wanted him to like it). He said it seemed decent and we moved swiftly on.
Here’s the thing, I didn’t know how to code.
I took computer science in secondary school and I enjoyed the programming aspect (but truthfully I sucked at it, I got a D in my project so, I definitely wasn’t an expert).
As I was in college, I wanted to focus mainly on school work and less on this.
However in February 2018, I found a free course on Udemy that taught HTML and CSS and I thought this might be great to learn, coding looked so cool and seemed artistic even (I also find calculus to be beautiful too) and I ran through that course pretty quickly and was moderately satisfied, I made a basic website (that looked like it belonged in 2005), but it was mine.
I then started watching Swift videos to learn how to build mobile applications (for those who don’t know, it’s the language used to build apple device applications). Again, I sucked at this again. I fell into the trap of copying what the instructor typed and thought I was learning…long story short, I wasn’t. I realised this once I tried to make my own basic application and had no idea what to do.
Over the next few months I dwindled away from coding to focus on school work.
In the summer months, me and 3 of my friends bootstrapped our way with side hustles or getting part-time work to go to the USA and travel across that country.
One of those stops was Las Vegas, Nevada.
None us drank alcohol or were into the “traditional” Las Vegas vibes, but we thought it would be an interesting place to check out and we also wanted to go to the Grand Canyon.
On August 5th, I was in a Starbucks, I tried thinking of ideas that would make a difference in the world. Then I scrolled through Twitter and saw a tweet saying the author had issues enforcing the payments he promised to VA’s in the Philippines (he was a drop shipper and so was I at this time, easy to say, he was much more successful than I was at e-commerce).
I started thinking “What if I developed a payments system to avoid renegotiations for hires?” Then popped up the idea I talked to my neighbour about and I started thinking, “what if I made an app that allowed people and businesses to hire VA’s for a small fee?”. I pulled out my NASA notepad and started writing out the idea. It also helped that I had a gut feeling the economy was going to tank within the next 3 years (which it did in 2020). Alongside this, one of the biggest motivations was definitely my hatred for job applications, writing up cover letters and doing application forms to get rejected just sucked. I wanted it to be quick. The questions I wrote and answered were “Who could I provide value to?” and “How could I get this made?”. You’ll have your own answers to these questions, but mine were “Businesses, Unemployed people, people looking for another job and people who want to hire a VA to make their lives easier” and “I guess just by starting to build the thing lol, find a great team, learn HTML, CSS, Swift and Java, draw out the UI”. The name I picked was ‘AVA’ (automated virtual assistant).
For the next couple of weeks, I kept writing out ideas on this (including using a benzene ring for ratings), but there was still one problem…I still had no idea how to code (I genuinely remembered only a couple of things from the course I took, h1-h6 tag, p tag and article tag, safe to say my notes disappeared). So I followed my own advice, build a team. I knew a handful of people who could code and an even smaller subset who I trusted. I eventually asked 2 people to help me, we’ll call them Sam and Jane. Jane had just finished an internship at a games company as a software engineer and she was more than happy to join. Sam was younger but I looked at him like a younger brother and took his word he knew how to code. Jane told me to make a briefing outlining all necessary information and I got a template to work from. This is towards the end of August and we were excited to start, we were going to do an iOS application at that time.
Then September rolled around and we agreed to keep working on this partly at the side. I also asked one of my best friends at the time (no, not the guy from the beginning) to join as a biz dev guy, we’ll call him Dylan. I manually wrote out a cap table in my notepad to keep track of it. Jane eventually got so busy with her University work, she couldn’t commit, and given she was the only person who knew how to write code in a production setting, it was impossible to do it without her at the time.
So in November, I enrolled in another online course for Swift (also free) and tried to learn Swift again. I had a very weak basis in computer science and long story short, I got nowhere with this course and still couldn’t do what I needed to. We all agreed that on July 1st 2019, we would meet up at my house and work over the summer to build this. It was all in place.
During this time, I read books and tried to learn how to adapt the principles learned into my life and I had asked another coder I knew from college to help me out, he showed me his site from class and I thought it was great enough to join (we’ll call him Vishal). Who was I to say no right?
Here’s where things turned for the worse.
About 3 days before we agreed to meet up, I called Jane to ask if she wanted anything when she came over and to gently remind her to come. She decided to bail out in the last second saying she wanted to work on her own project. 2 days prior, Sam admitted he didn’t remember how to code. So it was left to me, Dylan and Vishal to do this.
We agreed for them to come over at 9am. Vishal came at 10:30am and Dylan came at midday and they both left at 2:30pm. It was the first real day we were going to work on this. Given the business school background Dylan had, he told me things he knew to be true from his class, but were things I didn’t want to hear. Needless to say, I was unhappy with that. The other issue was that someone else had the domain we wanted, we spent the day thinking of a new name and deciding that a website would be better, as Vishal knew how to do web development. I remember as they left, Vishal said, ‘if you still want to carry on with this, send me a message and I’ll be here tomorrow’. I remember having a painful anxiety attack, scared out of my mind because I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then I realised that I made my bed and had to sit in it and giving up wouldn’t be the best option, given I didn’t apply to university just to pursue this idea. Later that evening me and my father tried to think of a new name, he said ‘why not ilikeava?’ and then it hit me, why not just likeava? In all candor, I was still rooting to get ava and thought this would be a great placeholder whilst the site would have the ava logo and the branding.
For the consecutive days, Vishal showed up daily, Dylan couldn’t due to a family circumstance, but I wasn’t worried that much about Dylan showing up as I needed a product first. Over the course of the next couple of days, we launched our first version, a plain site to collect emails. The issue is is that this didn’t have a backend. I also learned that Vishal only knew HTML and CSS and no other languages (he was learning PHP on the go as we thought we could collect emails with this easily). He asked me a valid question, ‘Why don’t we just use the website building tools to build it out?’, my response was that I wanted to build everything in-house, to have the startup hustle and some other waffle to salivate my pride. Whilst he was figuring that out, I tried to learn how to code (via codecademy) to do my part. I worked day and night to learn, but still got nowhere. On the Friday, we used the website tools and launched our V2 which would collect emails and outline what we were building. That same day, Vishal quit because he felt he couldn’t do the things I needed for the app. He was an honest worker who worked tirelessly to do his part.
Then it was just me. Within 10 days I had 4 people who would be a part of the team and now was all alone. I was scared to say the least. I texted Dylan to tell him we quit and his response was ‘yeah, it was a really technically difficult challenge’. Gee thanks for the news mate. The truth is is that I didn’t want to quit (I also had my personal reasons that I haven’t mentioned for building this app to help solve a problem that mattered to me, but I’ll write about that in the future). I had a vision of something and no idea how to get there. I reached out to one more person I knew, he was at a software company but was working customer support, but he studied software engineering as a degree. He agreed to help me after I told him what happened. He started helping me build the software. We’ll call him Nathan. Nathan would go on to provide me with key insights that helped me deeply.
I kept trying to learn to code over the summer and got nowhere. I also got a remote job (ironic, I know) working as a sales person and then marketing analyst. The reason I liked this was because I could work flexible hours, work on my goal and still not be ‘completely useless’ as I had felt I was. I got the job because the CEO knew of me from 2 years prior from Twitter and he was actually successful at e-commerce and had hired me.
In the end of July, I went on a holiday I booked 3 months prior to Scotland with a designer named Omram. Me and him had developed a very close friendship despite us living in different countries. The week before the holiday, I asked him if he could help me build out designs to send to Nathan. He agreed and during the holiday he helped make photoshopped images of each page. I was still following Dylan’s advice on design, I wanted to do it in darker colours to make it seem elegant, but he said doing colours would be better.
When I got back from our hiking holiday in Scotland, I began questioning if I loved what I was doing and the simple answer was, no. I hated the design and if I hated it, why the hell would anyone else like it?
I decided immediately to ditch that design and go about my initial design vision, the design wasn’t fully formed but got there in the end.
I hired Omram to build a prototype of the designs I made on Adobe Xd and paid him 220 Euros.
At the end of September, I ended up leaving my job and had no idea what I was going to do. The following day I made a call and applied for University. I got good grades in college so I wasn’t worried about being accepted, I didn’t apply because I believed university was a waste of money at the time. Needless to say, my influences were Americans. I got accepted into university on the same call and a couple weeks later started, 3 weeks later than everyone else, studying Economics (in college I studied Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics and for a brief period, Further Mathematics).
At the end of October, Nathan recommended a course to me on Udemy, it was £12.19 and it was a full stack web development bootcamp by Colt Steele. I wasn’t sure if I should buy it but then decided I needed to pull the trigger.
From that point onwards, I began to learn how to code properly. By the end of the first half, I was actualising my hand drawings turned adobe xd files into real coded pages. It was incredible. I carried on and finished the course in February and then I tried to build likeava. I got hung on the backend and that placed me back into the scarcity and fear again. It wasn’t until I took a breath and said ‘Let’s take this one step at a time’ which calmed me down.
I then took a course by Ian Schoonover which changed everything. Colt had taught me the fundamentals to get me moving, Ian taught me how to link everything together. I am deeply grateful for both of them.
I had developed the confidence that I could actually build my vision. I kept working at it every day, balancing university work with likeava.
In July, I joined a discord server with a bunch of other developers and we were going to work on an app to help developers meet each other. I helped them a lot, me and my now CTO were the ones who pushed code the most. My intention was clear though, I wanted to get help with my own app. As time passed, this side project kind of died down. I eventually asked Vlad to join our team and he said yes. At this point, I had built about 90% of the app, on my own. Not bad for a kid who couldn’t write a hello world not long prior.
Me, Vlad and Omram worked together closely to build the rest of the app. Vladimir had some incredible suggestions to make the software better and as did Om. I am deeply grateful to both of them for being a part of this journey so far.
We eventually incorporated in December and have released the application today.
If you want to check it out and maybe even join the platform as a member, I would love to see you on there!
And if you want to reach out to me, email me kanoj@likeava.com
Remember, never give up, keep chasing that thing in your head. When everyone else loses faith in you, keep your head up and if you fall, fall on your back because if you can look up, you can get up!
