How a kid who took electronics apart ended up building software
People sometimes ask how I ended up co-founding Event Espresso. The honest answer is that it started long before any of that, with a kid who wanted to know how things worked.
I took things apart
As a child I was a tinkerer. I opened up electronics to see what was inside and how they worked. That habit of poking at a problem until it makes sense has stayed with me in everything since, including business.
The Air Force taught me structure
I served in the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard. That gave me structure and discipline, and practice at adapting when things do not go to plan. Building a business is mostly things not going to plan, so that turned out to be useful.
Pizza jobs taught me about customers
I worked at Domino’s and Pizza Hut. It does not sound like training for a tech career, but it taught me to work hard, to care about the customer, to work as a team, and to keep looking for a better way to run the system.
The blog the IT department would not build
At a job I had before Event Espresso, the marketing department wanted a simple blog. The IT department could not, or would not, provide one. So I built it myself, with WordPress, on my own HostGator server. My bosses liked it, the CEO included.
That made something clear to me. The IT department preferred closed software and resisted anything new or free. WordPress was open source: free to use, with a community of people building it together. That contrast stuck with me, and it convinced me WordPress was a real choice for serious work.
Event Espresso started with a real need
My wife ran a scrapbooking business and needed a better way to manage her events and the people who came to them. The tools available were either too expensive or too complicated for a small business like hers. So I used what I knew about solving problems and building websites, and built her something myself. That was the spark for Event Espresso, which I went on to co-found.
What still drives me
Looking back, the same few things keep showing up:
- Solving problems. Event Espresso began as a fix for one person’s real problem.
- Community. I believe technology should help people do things for themselves, and I have stayed active in the WordPress community and in open source.
- Telling stories. I also have a creative streak, which is where Adventure Buildr came from: a platform that mixes my technical side with my love of interactive stories.
If you want the longer version, it is in my autobiography. And if you have a problem you think a website could solve, I would like to hear about it: 801-688-8590 or seth@smartwebutah.com.