Over the next 5 months or so, Nafaa (my Algerian developer) and I become closer, discuss coding, technology, religion, as well as American and Algerian politics. I had no idea the French were still such an influence there, but I digress.

My project that originally was going to be created by me for free, had now been outsourced to Nafaa. Which is great, but is obviously going to cost more than my original estimate of nothing. After 5 months I’m up to about $8,000.

Good news is that before I started coding Bytestand I had researched local development shops as well as other developers based in the US. The estimated fees ranged from a low of $40,000 to a high of over $100,000. I was blown away, I could teach myself to code and pay myself a decent salary for those numbers, I obviously decided to look elsewhere and ended up going International.

I want to GO, and I want to GO NOW!

I was able to fund the first couple payments to Nafaa from my sales on Amazon, but I didn’t want to stop that ball from rolling and divert funds to purchase new inventory over to software development. So after about 2 to 3 grand of self funding, I broke out the credit card and that’s where my funds have come from until today.

To clarify the next snafu in the process, its best to understand me. I am a 43 year old Father of 3, tore up with the ADD. People think I’m absent minded, and maybe I am, but the absent mindedness originates from always thinking about something else. Typically that something else is a business venture that I’m exploring or trying to improve upon. I can’t help it, well other than Ritalin, but it’s just the way I’m built.

Antsy doesn’t do justice to the feeling I get when I want something to happen. I want to GO, and I want to GO NOW! I like the reward of putting something together in private, and then exposing it to the world and seeing if what I thought would work, really will work. It’s the ultimate report card, expressed in dollars and cents. I love it.

The reason I’m saying this is that when an app is released in the Shopify App store, you first get a developer account, then you can submit your app for review and it goes into “Beta” status. Which means people can see it, download it, and use it, you just can’t charge for it. Beta is another word for testing, but in a state where the app works well and has just a few minor bugs. I of course could not wait to go into Beta. As a result, our bugs were neither few nor minor, and we ended up staying in Beta for a couple months and about $4,000.

I’m not even sure what the lesson learned here is, maybe it’s take more Ritalin, or it could be learn to code better, or just make sure you have plenty of money on your credit card. You’ll need it.

Amazon to Shopify – ByteStand