SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree
Tags: entrepreneur, music, inspiration, react
Published: 2019-11-20 18:32:01

---
title: SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree
published: true
date: 2019-11-19 18:27:29 UTC
tags: entrepreneur, music, inspiration, React
canonical_url: https://www.nocsdegree.com/submithub-founder-talks-making-with-no-cs-degree/
---

 ![SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree](https://www.nocsdegree.com/content/images/2019/11/SubmitHubInterview_JasonGrishkoff_portrait-1024x513-1.jpg)

Jason Grishkoff's music web app [SubmitHub](https://www.submithub.com/) makes over seven figures annually after he taught himself to code without a Computer Science degree. With [SubmitHub](https://www.submithub.com/) musicians can easily send music to labels, Youtubers and blogs, and get discovered. Read on for Jason's tips regarding learning to code, building your own business and achieving work-life balance.

## Hey, thanks a lot for doing the interview! Could you give an introduction for people who want to know more about you? 

My name’s Jason.  I spent my teens and 20s in California, most-recently working as part of Google’s HR department.  In 2013 I quit that job to travel around the world, and it didn’t take long for me to get stuck in Cape Town, South Africa, where I was born.

I spend my days raising a family and running two companies in the “music discovery” space, both of which have established themselves as go-to resources for the industry: [Indie Shuffle](https://www.indieshuffle.com/) and [SubmitHub](https://www.submithub.com/).  These days the bulk of my working time is spent coding in React, a library I taught myself in 2015.

## What were you doing before you started Indie Shuffle?

I graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 (Political Science and History).  My goal was to be a business strategy consultant, and after around 100 applications and many failed interviews, I managed to land a job in Washington, D.C. working at an Executive Compensation consulting firm.  Moving cross-country and working a “stiff" job meant that I needed some sort of creative outlet, and so I began a weekly mail-out of new music that I’d found through various BitTorrent sites (the target audience was made up of friends I’d left on the West Coast and new friends I was making in DC).

## How did you learn to code?

A few recipients of my email blasts wrote back asking if I could create a more permanent home for the songs I was discovering, ideally with an easy-to-listen interface so they didn’t have to go searching for the song themselves (this was before Spotify or even SoundCloud had taken off).  So, after a little bit of poking around, I decided that a Wordpress website was the way to go.

Wordpress was actually a great way to learn to code. They had pretty much any plugin you could imagine, and with a couple tweaks, I was able to get them to do what I wanted. It was with this tweaking process - reverse engineering, if you will - that I started to develop an understanding of HTML, CSS and PHP.

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[![SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree](https://www.nocsdegree.com/content/images/2019/10/Screenshot-2019-10-30-at-23.36.09.png)](http://nocsok.com)

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## You seem to have a similar philosophy as [Pieter Levels](https://twitter.com/levelsio). Code is a means to an end. Is that fair to say?

Yep, I’d say that’s fair.  Though the more experienced I become, the more pleasure I get out of writing clean, well-executed code.  My end goal is still to launch-and-iterate without spending too much time trying to think through every possible outcome.  At the end of the day, I tend to believe that a partially working/work-in-progress feature is better than no feature at all.

## Can you talk us through the process of making your first website?

As mentioned, the first proper version of [Indie Shuffle](https://www.indieshuffle.com/) was built using WordPress. Virtually nothing was written from scratch - it was all created from pre-existing plugins that I manipulated to my liking. When the going got tough, I managed to hire the individuals who had written those plugins to help me accomplish my goals. And then I’d go ahead and dissect their code to add the finishing touches.

## What were some of the challenges in making SubmitHub and how did you make an MVP? 

A good friend of mine who I’d met while at Google used to give me a hard time for my “coding” approach of hacking pre-existing code (often via FTP) rather than learning to write it on my own.  So in around 2014 he convinced me to switch my Thinkpad over to Ubuntu, fire up a terminal and learn Vim.

It took me a little while to get the hang of it, but by 2015 I was ready to do something on my own.  Building SubmitHub was my chance to try and code a project “from scratch” - a clean slate if you will.  It was my first time building from the ground up rather than tweaking what was already there.

Naturally, my starting point was to follow a tutorial - the [Todo app](https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/react/creating-an-app) by Meteor.  Once I had that up and running, I started to reverse-engineer their code to meet my needs.  For example, I replaced each to-do item with a song.

I buried my head in the project, working night and day to get the MVP up and ready for launch.  The learning curve was pretty darn incredible, and I sort of got addicted to it.  It took me a month to get it out there, and four years later I haven’t stopped tweaking/iterating/adding to it.

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[![SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree](https://www.nocsdegree.com/content/images/2019/11/Screenshot-2019-11-19-at-18.26.37.png)](https://www.submithub.com)

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## Can you tell us what a typical day for you looks like just now?

My life was flipped on its head around three weeks ago when my second daughter was born (we’ve also got a toddler).  Right now my typical day tends to revolve around them - which means there’s limited time for me to sit down and code.  I really miss it, actually, but I know from experience that life gets easier as kids get older.  If anything, the absence of coding time will inspire me to come back with even more gusto 😀

## Congrats on the new arrival! Can you tell us about what your future plans?

Future plans can be broken up into two categories, right?  From a business standpoint, we’re going to be expanding SubmitHub into the Instagram Influencer space.  From a personal standpoint, I’ve got a family to grow, and I’d like to spend less time in front of my computer and more time outside with them.

## Thanks a lot for your time, Jason!
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[![SubmitHub founder talks building a 7-figure company with no CS degree](https://www.nocsdegree.com/content/images/2019/11/Triplebyte_Logo_on_Black_1800x400-4.png)](https://triplebyte.com/a/Ww4mbM6/d)

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