Josh Haas's Web Log

In my last post about fear and creativity, I alluded to a startup idea I have. I didn’t spell it out directly. I was afraid. What if someone takes it and does it better than me? What if someone gets there first? I have an intense, overwhelming visceral hunger to hold on and shout “mine!” at the universe. Gotta hold on. Gotta control everything, get all the details right, win.

I’ve been told over and over again that being scared of your idea being stolen is a sign of immaturity in startup-land. That good ideas won’t get stolen, rather they need to be forced down people’s throats. That ideas are value-less and only the execution counts. I believe it, I swear. But my gut doesn’t.

That’s okay though. The same urge that makes me want to hide my idea from the world is the same urge that makes me want to do all the design and programming myself, that makes me afraid of hearing other ideas in the same space in case one of them is better. I’m okay with that urge. It’s just me, being a person and having an ego, trying to scrape a little bit of dirt together and call it my own.

But I’m going to let it go. At the end of the day, the important thing is the voice that wants to create, the part of me that wants to see the world change, that’s frustrated that nothing like what I want already exists, that wants to use it myself and live it in a world where the people I care about can use it. That’s the voice that’s willing to step back and let other people design it and build it and bring it to life as long as something gets created, that would almost be happier in a world where there’s multiple competing products, not just mine, because that’s better for all of us. Even if someone reads this blog post, takes my idea, and brings it to life, and destroys my company because of it, that’s still a win for me. Because it happened, it got created, the world changed a step towards the direction I want it to be.

So, here’s my idea. When someone builds a new web-based application, there’s the design of the application — how it functions, what it looks like, what happens when you click the big button — and then the technology that brings that vision to life. My mission is to give anyone capable of articulating the design, the power to build the technology. WordPress lets people who have an idea for a blog, know what they want to write and know what they want the page to look like, execute that vision without knowing anything about databases, php, or web servers. I want to build wordpress for applications. I want to build a tool that lets people communicate the logic of an application without knowing programming, and hook it up to a design, and hosts it and makes it scalable.

I want this because there are a million people out there who are trying to find and hire people with particular knowledge set, software developers, to build them these applications. I want those people to be empowered to make it happen no matter what the market for programmers looks like (and it looks grim — if you want to hire a programmer, be prepared to pay!) There are companies waiting to be born, games waiting to be built, real-world problems waiting to be solved, and the technology isn’t there. Let’s bridge that gap, and give people the power to make it happen.

I’m going to be recruiting co-founders soon. If you’re interested, drop me a line.