In this issue, I want to tell you 3 personal stories from 3 developers, just like you, who 3 months ago had an idea and a couple of days ago launched their mobile startups.

I personally mentored them during the last 3 months, and on the 1st of September, we hosted a Demo Day, during which we presented the results.

This was an important day for notJust.dev, and the beginning of a new phase: Helping developers with great ideas build and launch successful mobile applications.

Read on to find out more about how we can work together and help you launch your app ideas.

Context

Before starting my YouTube journey, I co-founded 2 startups and grew them to thousands of users. I also worked at Amazon as a software engineer, however, I did not find the corporate world very exciting. Building a startup from the ground up and seeing it grow, that’s what gets me fired 🔥.

My love for startups influenced a lot the content I make on YouTube, the events and hackathons we organize, and the community I want to build around notJust Development.

The best part is seeing new projects built and published by developers from our community.

However, launching successful mobile applications is no easy task. Starting from technical difficulties all the way to the marketing challenges and how to bring people to your app. Where do you even begin?

Throughout the years, I received quite a lot of requests from our community members with great ideas to join their team and help them build their ideas. A lot of these projects looked promising to me, with a solid team behind and great potential in the market.

However, my answer has always been “Sorry, I can’t. I have to stay focused on notJust.dev”.

The more opportunities like this I had to turn down, the more I started thinking that we should figure out a way to help developers not only learn mobile development but actually build and launch successful mobile apps. That’s the end goal anyway.

That’s how the seed for our upcoming Accelerator program was planted.

But before jumping head first, I wanted to run a pilot program to learn more about the struggles developers encounter and the ways I can help them personally or with the resources they need the most.

The Pilot Program

Back in April, I sent a short email to 500 students from our Academy.

20 projects applied, and after some interviews, we selected 5 projects for our Pilot program.

From May to September, we worked hard with the founders, meeting multiple times a week and helping them build and launch their apps.

On September 1st, during our Demo Day, 3 projects publicly launched and presented their projects. You can watch their presentation in this video, but now I want to cover their stories. I hope that it will motivate some of you to start working on your ideas as well.

Gigi - Anthill

Gigi’s story is truly inspiring.

He founded Anthill as a next-gen evolution of LinkedIn with a decentralized marketplace, designed for Creators. However, due to external factors like the pandemic and the global economic slowdown, their technical co-founder left the team.

At that moment, the only option was to take it into his hands and build a prototype himself. The problem was that Gigi had never coded before. But that didn’t stop him.

He joined our course back in April and started applying everything he learned in his new app. When I sent the invitation to the pilot program, he was the first to apply.

I was unsure if it would be possible to build and launch an app with no prior coding experience, but I could see that Gigi would do everything to make it possible.

3 months later, Gigi published the first version of Anthill on the stores 🎉

Gigi proved to me that you can build and launch mobile apps even if no prior coding experience. It definitely was not easy. He was working 10-12 hours a day for the last 3 months and in the end, it paid off.

Ted - Recab

Ted wanted to help people learn languages in a more engaging and effective way. He is using OpenAI models to generate articles based on user’s interests and proficiency levels.

During the accelerator, he built and launched the mobile application using React Native, Firebase, and OpenAI.

Edis - Foodering

Edis saw the need for an app that would allow people to share their diets, and let others follow the same diet as the creator. There is a lot of confusion when it comes to following a strict diet. Foodering gives people the possibility to follow and replicate every meal curated by a professional nutritionist or someone who has done this before.

Edis is a Senior Developer, but he did not have experience building an app all by himself, which comes with its own challenges. During the last 3 months, Edis worked on this app after his main job, and he managed to build, launch, and test the MVP with multiple users.

What’s next?

The results from the Pilot Program were even better than I expected. I understood better where developers need the most help in the whole process of launching mobile apps. We also validated that our approach works and can be replicated.

With that being said, I am happy to announce…. 🥳

notJust.Accelerator Batch1

The first official batch will kickstart in January 2024.

The application process will open in November and we have the capacity for only 10 Projects.

If you are a highly-motivated developer, with great ideas, that needs help with building and launching successful mobile apps, we are looking for you 👀

Join the waitlist, and I will make sure to let you know one week before we open the application process.

🔴 Join me live

This Friday we will build a Spotify Clone integrating directly with the Spotify API. It's going to be a tutorial packed with value, so set a reminder and don't miss it out 👇

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🔁 In case you missed it

Demo Day Check out the presentation from the projects above Watch now

Image Optimisation AWS Solution to post-process images and increase the load speed of your app Watch now

Did you learn something new today?

If you found this email valuable, forward it to one friend or coworker that can benefit from it as well. That would be much appreciated 🙏

Vadim Savin Helping you become a better developer together with the notJust.dev team