About

Every story has a beginning…

I have been unemployed since the beginning of April 2010 and have a running tally of how many weeks I’ve been gone in my mind (you don’t tend to forget things like how many weeks it has been since you brought in a paycheck!).  I left my corporate job to start my own business with an idea that I came up with not too long ago.  I realized that if it was going to be successful I would have to devote my time fully to make the dream turn into a reality.

About a month prior to me leaving my job, I was in a bar with some friends and somehow we stumbled onto a great idea for a really fun bar game (I am convinced that all great ideas are born with a little bit of alcohol involved).  The alcohol kept flowing, ideas kept coming out, and eventually BarCards was born.

Instead of letting the idea die on the vine, I decided to see what it would take to make it a reality.  Now, I am not technical by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, a blue dry erase marker is more technical than I am!  I am officially trained as an Industrial Engineer – think of a Toyota manufacturing line, Amazon’s warehouse of inventory, Southwest scheduling routes for their planes, or Cheaper By the Dozen (not the Ashton Kutcher movie but the book that was written by a son of one of the creators of Industrial Engineering).

At any rate, I was fortunate to be put in a position at my last job to help manage aspects of a project that involved the development and deployment of an enterprise wide software tool.  I won’t bore you with the details, but it was there that I met and made friends with some good developers and learned how to speak their language to accomplish a goal.

With this new found confidence, I decided to try my hand at getting BarCards developed.  Not being able to afford domestic developers, I contracted the work offshore with the aid of the website Elance.  I also worked together with a friend (now a partner for the BarCards project) who was out with us drinking that fateful night to help develop the images.  It took a little bit of time, but I have to say it was pretty remarkable to actually have something that was taken from the abstract ether where thought, dreams, and aspirations come from and made available for you to download to your iPhone.

This website is create for several reasons: (1) to offer you a candid look at how we created an app, (2) to give a glimpse of what we are up to next with BarCards and other apps that I will be working on, (3) to provide data on sales/downloads in the same vein as Noel over at Games from Within, and (4) to field any questions/comments about future enhancements you would like to see or issues that you encounter.

Thanks for stopping by!

garrett