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What Is This Book About?

This book is about helping people who want to learn how to hack their idea by themselves in order to build the first version of their product.
I wrote this eBook to share my experience and failures with wanna-be entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs (business guys) on how they can also become a hacker and build their own products by themselves.
Note: I might write some words you might not be familiar with, but they all mean the same thing. Words like; Programmer is the same as hacker. Programmers are also called hackers in the startup world. They are people who build stuffs with any programming language. Hustler is the same as idea guy or business guy because those who hustle are people who are passionate about the business part of the startup. Pardon me for this. These words are common in the startup world.

A little story about myself

I’m Samuel Ayodele by name; I’m a 21 year old and a student. I’m passionate about the startup life and I love meeting people who have the entrepreneurial mindset, people who can bring something out of nothing and turn it into something amazing.
How I got started….
I explored a series of checkups with myself on what path I wanted to take in this life - The corporate path or the entrepreneurship path? I made up my mind to follow the entrepreneurship path, a pathway where I could make a dent in the lives of many people.
I’ve always wanted to create my own company, impact people’s lives and create jobs for people. I never for once cherished the corporate lifestyle. I’m ready to give it all it takes to make my dreams become a reality.
My main aim is to build a brick and mortar businesses and also online businesses. (Startups) I want to make an impact in the online and offline world. Before I move into the brick and mortar business niche however, I want to make a dent in online business first.

Getting started…

In order for me to get started, I searched for books on startups, read up on successful startups and entrepreneurship blogs to get an idea on how to build a startup. For example, some of the Blogs I often read are:
•	Paul Graham Essays
•	Onstartups
•	Jason L Baptiste
•	Jun Loayza
•	Yukai- Chou
•	StartupProffessionals
•	Instigator
•	Smart Bear
•	Chris Dixon
•	Steve blank
•	Lessons learned

After understanding what I needed in order to get started, I began thinking about ideas that would add value to people’s life - In the startup world you just can’t start a startup for the sake of being called a startup entrepreneur,

A startup needs to be created because it will make an impact in someone’s life.

I’ve always had a bunch of ideas to start with but the problem is that I begin all of those ideas at once, I have to start first on the one with the highest priority.
So I began pulling together some of these ideas and finally settled for the top three ideas. I decided to email people, (People I know who can be of help to me) of whom I shared my startup idea with them. After mailing them, the some of the replies I got where:
•	This has been started before how will yours be different?
•	The idea has been implemented, try and search for another idea.
•	How will this be different from your competitors? If you believe you can make it in the niche, go ahead with it.
Big thanks to these folks, most especially to the ones who gave me the latter reply. I really learnt from each of their replies. The lesson learned is:
It’s 90% sure that your startup idea has been started by someone else. But for you to win big and succeed you must understand the pain you’re trying to solve, Why you’re different from the rest (competitors). Startups don’t kill startups, founders do - If you truly believe in your startup idea, go make it happen.
After thinking of what to do next, I decided to stick with the idea I’m truly passionate about. Now, it‘s time for execution, there’s a problem however and the problem is, I don’t know how to code, I’m just an idea guy. So I decided to look at getting a developer to help me.
To get a developer who truly believes in my vision, I started reading articles on “how to get a technical cofounder”. After consuming articles on how to get a technical person for my startup, I decided to give what I’ve learned a try.
I signed up to technical forums, asked friends if they knew people who can code, signed up to startup matchmaking sites like Founder2be, searched for different keywords like “Get me a technical cofounder” “startup hacker” on Google. After months of searching for a developer, no success! I became baffled, thinking if I will ever make it past this stage.
One day, I was surfing through 37Signals, and I came across an article titled “There’s no room for the idea guy” I quickly clicked on the link to get the main reason why DHH (the author of the article) said so.
My main take away from the post is:
The truth is that most everyone has plenty of ideas that could work out to be great business. The kicker is most often the right execution that they’d be responsible for anyway, at the right time, which is almost impossible to predict. The value of The Perfect Idea is very small indeed.
That doesn’t mean it’s useless to have big ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a great start. Now pick up a functional skill and help build it your damn self.

After digesting the article, I decided to take the urge to learn how to code and build the first version of the product myself!
Before that however, I mailed a bunch of developers asking them if they would love to work with me on my startup idea, The reply I often got was,
•	“Nice idea, but I’m very busy with projects. Will try and see what I can do.”
•	“I don’t think this idea will work out. Besides you don’t have enough funds to get started.”
•	“Sorry Sam. I’m also working on my projects. Can’t help at this moment.”
A developer or two agreed to work with me but after sending the product spec to them they decided to back off and tell me they can’t continue due to different complications.
Nothing can be more heart breaking than these kind of replies, If a girl I love tells me she’s not dating me anymore and that she’s bored with the relationship, I won’t feel much sadness compared to if a hacker told me that he’s not interested anymore.
Sometimes I feel like giving up but then something keeps telling me to move on. Before I finally jumped on the urge to go learn coding I felt that learning how to code was a waste of time.
One of the things that gave me the confidence to learn coding is how hackers hack in hackathons or startup weekend. I feel inspired whenever I watch these videos. One of the startup movies that inspired me most is the “Social Network” - I love Mark’s zeal for hacking on epic shit! My favorite words are “Let the Hacking Begin”.
My main goal was to learn two programming languages and build my projects with the programming language I cherish the most. I decided to learn PHP first. I picked up starting eBooks on PHP and I watched videos on how to code in PHP. Within a month I was done with PHP at least. After that, I decided to move on to Python. Learning python was one of the coolest things that ever happened to me.
By the time I was done learning Python, I decided to build my project in Python. But before I could build a web app, I will need to learn a web framework for building web applications. So I researched on the Python web framework that will best suit my projects. After my research, I settled down for Django because it’s a Python web framework for building fast and scalable web applications in no time.
After learning two programming languages and a web framework (Django) I built two projects, (to a stage where users can test it) from this point I can tell you how it feels to be a hacker.
In this book, I will share with you lessons learned when hacking on my startup idea and make you understand why you should learn how to code. Hopefully, it might help you go about hacking on your startup idea yourself.