Spotty Bear

First week of Starting Spotty Bear

The first of ongoing postings on progress of starting, bootstrapping & running a company

So here I am, having just started a company this week, trying to finish off my first app for the AppStore, and having spent £30 on domain names. I am wondering what on earth a geek like me is doing here with the aims of building company and brand from scratch. I think this blog might be interesting, both for me looking back in the future and for other people who are interested in what I am learning as I go along.

So how did I get here?

Well, I have done most jobs in the IT sector. I have been a front-line developer in a number of different technologies, and a full time Project Manager and Product Manager. I have done requirements analysis (defining and documenting requirements), supported production systems, done manual testing, written automated tests, closed down products and I forget what else. Professionally I started my IT career for a bespoke software development company who mainly worked on scientific problems. I worked on a number of products for my clients, some of these were aimed at consumers who had no training in the developed software, others were internal products only to be used be a few people.

After a few years I moved on to a start-up company in healthcare as a Project Manager and Product Manager to develop a new Software as a Service product. At the same time, I started listening to podcasts by entrepeneurs, as well as learning from some very experienced colleagues at the company.

I was using a MacBook Air, and starting dabbling with Apps. I tried to write a couple, and never gotvery far. As a keen bridge player, I started to write an app that would allow me to record everything about a nights' bridge play (bidding sequences, scores, arrangement of cards, comments etc). This was a great learning curve. I started to play with Core Data and to understand Objective C and iOS Paradigms (which I had been exposed to when project managing iOS & Android apps in my previous job).

The inspiration for Spotty Bear

I have always enjoyed teaching, whether it has been maths, bridge or any other number of things I have been involved in over the years. My son was getting to an age (well, 6 months) where he was really enjoying playing on our iPad. The first app we bought him involved him tapping on the screen and a shape appearing where he had pressed. Although he loved it, as soon as a shape appeared he tried to keep on tapping the same place on the screen, so it ended up with a stack of shapes all in the same place. This gave me the idea of writing a better version of this app where he had to tap on a shape which would then explode in a cascade of shapes with great sound affects. As soon as I started writing this (in the evenings and weekends), I made rapid progress: I was more or less finished within four weeks. That left me with my normal issues: my graphic design skills are negligible, and I am no good at layouts. I went for help to my wonderful wife and friends, who helped me to tweak everything until the icons and splash screens looked good enough that the app was ready for launch.

So then I needed a supporting website. I had also been talking to my mum about apps/games that she wanted to be able to teach children certain aspects of maths. Although there are lots of games and apps that teach basic arithmetic and other things, there is a lack of games/apps that teach more complicated ideas. This quickly led to the idea of starting a company to write high quality educational games and apps, with the eventual aim of writing applications and games for use on computers as well.

I spent a weekend with my best friend looking up domain names that were free, and we were amazed to discover that spottybear.com was free. I decided that I should commit to this, and buy the domain names and start this company. So here I am, three days later, trying to get everything sorted so that I can submit BabyShape to the AppStore.

More to come later on the technical issues & tasks I have been trying to overcome to get the app and website launched.

Posted on 01 September, 2013  | Tags: Technical  | 0 Comments