Josh MacDonald - The Non-Technical Founder: How a 16-Year Old Built a Six Figure Software Company Without Writing Any Code

The Non-Technical Founder

How a 16-Year Old Built a $100,000 Software Company Without Writing Any Code

2018 Josh MacDonald

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ISBN 9781683507598 paperback

ISBN 9781683507604 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913995

Cover Design by:

Rachel Lopez

www.r2cdesign.com

Interior Design by:

Chris Treccani

www.3dogcreative.net

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Dedicated to my late grandfather, John Johnson.

This book, and the value it contains, would not be possible without the help of my amazing contributors. Their contributions are included throughout the book in their respective areas of specialization. Each contributor is friendly, intelligent, and approachable. If you have any questions on what they say, you can reach out to them on Twitter, or check out their published works.

Its 5:15 AM on a chilly fall morning. Don reaches out from under the covers and grabs his phone. He shields his eyes from the bright light, then begins flicking through the dozens of notifications that have curiously appeared overnight. Theyre all from a 15-year-old kid he had talked to briefly on a business forum a few weeks ago.

Don starts to take count of the texts. Throughout the entire night, a new text was sent every 15 minutes. Each contained a different outlandish and unfocused business idea. Don is a successful businessman with real experience, so he could have answered each and every text with certainty, but this was absurd! It seemed the kid had no respect for Don or his time.

Remembering his own beginnings, Don smiles. The kid has potential. But hes going to need to someday get focused some day if he hopes to see success.

The kid from the business forum is me, and Don is one of my mentors. I did eventually find my focus. I thought of an idea, held my mind to it, hired a developer to turn my idea into reality then sold over $100,000 of my new software in the year after launch.

This book is for everyone who wants to succeed as a software entrepreneur who may not have yet found a mentor like Don. As for me, I am not well-known. I grew up in a rural town with shoddy internet connection. I worked on my entrepreneurial projects after school. I didnt attend Harvard, but rather the best local option I could afford. With all that in mind, I still found success selling software I created. If you can relate to my beginnings at all, then this book was written for you.

You are about to read a practical guide on bootstrapping your own software idea. When it comes to learning, first-hand experience is always best. Ive been in the internet business industry since 2009. Thats a lot of first-hand experience! I have included all of it in the pages beyond, as well as guidelines as to how you can follow in my footsteps and find success yourself.

Truthfully, these pages could be converted into a 1000-page manual, but the specifics of this industry change too often. Instead, consider this book as a fast-paced learning instrument for you, the reader, to familiarize yourself with the numerous concepts you will need to know in order to get started. As with any project with grand ambitions, you may need to dig further into any concept that interests you in order to find out the recent specifics to understand the concept in full.

My name is Josh MacDonald. I grew up in what most call small-town Canada. At the time of writing, I am 21-years-old. I started messing around with internet marketing when I was 14, just a freshman in high school. My first project was an online discussion forum. With a few clicks to install a script and a little bit of troubleshooting, my online discussion forum was up and running. The topic was gaming. Like many kids of that age, I was interested in gaming, and the discussion board had various gaming pages where users could talk to each other. The project didnt last long. I learned my first lesson very quickly. I had seen someone say if you build it, they will come somewhere on the internet, and that had stuck with me. But no one came. Lesson #1: A website wont get traffic just because you make it. There are a million other websites exactly like yours. No one cares. You need to promote.

My first thought was advertising. But at that young age, I didnt have a debit or credit card to promote my website with. So I started creating content for YouTube, as that was something I could understand and actually do. I would talk about a gaming tutorial, or a free piece of software, and send YouTube users over to my website if they wanted to get it for themselves. Soon I had hundreds of daily unique visitors. But another problem had popped up. Visitors would read my forum, get what they needed, and leave. I wanted them to stay. So I added a rule to my forum that required users to register and make five posts before they were able to access certain sections. I was encountering problems and learning to solve them on a daily basis.

Before long I had 1,000 registered members. I was floored! I placed Google ads on my website hoping to make money on clicks. I managed to make a few dollars, which was exhilarating. Finally, I had the proof I could show my friends so they would understand that making money online wasnt a scam.

I did earn from that website, but not a whole lot. A few dollars here and there didnt satisfy me. Wanting to make more money, I started offering up my time as a freelance writer. At first, during my early years of high school, I was charging $1 for every 100 words. The gig was great. I got off the bus around 4 PM and went straight to work for my clients. The pay was guaranteed, and it really wasnt hard to clear $30 in a night before I had to stop to tackle my homework (always last minute). After a few weeks of this grind, I finally had enough to try out some new projects that required a little bit of investment.