I am 21. I live in the East Bay. And I co-founded a software development company with my brother. There are stories of young people in the Bay (Northern California) making millions and losing billions, building a business over night and driving an existing one into the ground. Stories of idled Stanford undergrads who spend 30K to make a million. Or of Berkeley genius building unimaginable hardware behemoths bent on changing the world. And then there is the unspoken experience... The one of failure. Most Startups fail. 75-95 percent of them in-fact.  This story is less about perseverance and more about failing. Repeatedly.

1. My First Web Application
I am 21. I live in the East Bay. And I co-founded a software
development company with my brother.
There are stories of young people in the Bay (Northern California)
making millions and losing billions, building a business over night and
driving an existing one into the ground. Stories of idled Stanford
undergrads who spend 30K to make a million. Or of Berkeley genius
building unimaginable hardware behemoths bent on changing the
world. And then there is the unspoken experience... The one of
failure.
Most Startups fail. 75-95 percent of them in-fact.
This story is less about perseverance and more about failing.
Repeatedly.
Grabsent
web application company
My First Web Application

2. My First Web Application
It is called GrabSpent -- an Affiliate Marketing Network (program) which empowers the marketer
by allowing them to set their price with the person selling the product; a bartering system is in
place so the marketer can name the percentage. The idea is to create more money in a space
where a lot of money already exists.
If I said there were no complications, I would be lying. Below you will find a list of steps (hiring,
building, drafting) and my favorite incidents amongst their failures. Hiring: 9:00 AM, September in
the Bay, I receive a phone call from the applicant whose interview was pushed back a week the
day before.
We had just moved to the bay and boxes lined the walls. No, they were not load-bearing boxes.
They were (are, considering we still haven't unpacked them) full of books.
I spent the next 15 minutes on the phone, sitting on my front porch and waiting for the applicant.
The porch is about 3 ft from the ground and my legs hung down the side -- my toes were getting
cold because I have terrible circulation. I was convinced that I may have been developing gout.
Grabsent
web application company
My First Web Application

3. The applicant came
The applicant came to the door tall and smiling -- not tall enough to be a basketball player, but
tall enough to be emasculating. The preparedness in their smile is what sunk my insides: I had
no idea what I was doing; I barely had an idea of what I was hiring them to do; this was going
to be terrible.
I grabbed him a whicker chair from the backyard and the interview began on the couch. The
house shitzu sniffed towards the applicant as they tried to hide their palpable fear -- I say
"palpable" because their fear created a barrier around them... And the dog would replace the
chair, outside.
The interview consisted of the drawing of an overly-complex and illegible wireframe (the visual
lay-out for applications) and the recurrence of the phrase "Sorry, I don't quite understand".
Many things were lost in translation -- the time of the interview, "the dog is safe", genuine
smiles, "no really, don't worry about the dog" -- but namely, I lost 2 hours of my life.
Grabsent
web application company
My First Web Application

4. The applicant was an OPT Student
The applicant was an OPT Student (Optional Practical Training) who was trying to extend their work
visa -- this is why my pleas of interview delay went unheard, they were actively trying to stay in the
country.
I hope they are well. They were skilled. Just showed up a week early to their interview.
Drafting: The UX/UI (User experience/user interface) was not wireframed until a week before launch.
We didn't really know it would be necessary... a very unfortunate oversight. With that experience we
are well on our way to becoming the next big Tech Consulting Company: "You should first develop the
UX/UI, then the product." People pay big money for that kind of hind-sight.
Building: Any complication in this section is more of a nuisance than anything. They are also common.
Web Application Development can be frustrating. We built our first application with Ruby on Rails,
PostgeSQL, LESS, HTML, Jquery, AJAX and more Javascript stuff... For now we are hosted on Heroku
and BitBucket. It was fun, but I may make the leap toward Python/Django in the future.
-Dylan
Grabsent
web application company
My First Web Application