What creative idea has been giving you a spark or holding your thoughts lately?
Do you have ideas for web-based apps that you would like to build? Do you feel stuck because you don’t know how to code?
Me too!
Or, perhaps you are allowing your lack of coding ability to hold you back? At the very least it is a convenient excuse to not put your product to the world, which can be scary and overwhelming.
(img source: Launch Academy)
For quite a while now, I’ve been thinking about reconstructing and rebuilding online review platforms to help solve pain points for small to medium-sized business owners and to hopefully inject some joy into their day.
Certainly, there has never been a more exciting or better time to take your creative vision, build it out, and ship it to the world. If you are like me, however, you can come up with excuses until it’s easier to just give up! A few months ago I decided to focus more energy on figuring out:
What is the solution to moving my project forward?
I thought long and hard about hiring a developer to build out my vision and I was really close to taking the necessary steps to hire someone. But I realized that every time I had an issue or problem I’d have to hire someone to get me out of trouble.
For me (and hopefully you too!), that was just too much of my own project out of my hands. And it felt like I would be stuck in a never-ending “stress” loop trying to identify and find programmers. That’s what finally got me over the hump and inspired me to take the necessary steps to learn how to code.
In fact, if you are an entrepreneur with limited access to startup capital, at some point (I think) you have to make the determination that you are going to learn to code. (How you go about it is your personal choice – there are many options out there, including the highly recommend and reasonably priced Treehouse or the free Codecademy.)
Around this same time of realizing I would have to learn to program, I started asking folks on Twitter if they could point me to quality coding bootcamps. My primary thought was that instead of paying someone else to create my application, I would invest in myself and learn, at the very least, how to hack the minimum viable product (MVP) and get educated in the process.
To that end, I start at Launch Academy in Boston on August 12th for a three-month coding intensive. Being a complete novice, I harbor no illusions that I will build the next Google or Twitter.
What I do firmly believe is that at the end of the program I will be able to better technically communicate what I want to create and to have the MVP development process underway.
How about you? What do you want to create? What is one thing you can do today to change the trajectory you are on?