Well, you may have read my “origin story” for Paper Street Enterprises, but I figured it would be fun to tell you about how JaveLLin Solutions started. The initial idea for the applications started about 2008. That was when I first got the stroke of genius (or masochism) to build applications to help companies better run Service Management. In my head, it all seemed so simple. I would just build my own SAP system, then build an application and sell it. Ugh… if only reality were that kind. I spent the better part of the next 3 months downloading, installing, running into errors and repeating. All of this, just trying to build my first 4.7 SAP system. I gained a whole new appreciation in this process for basis people. I also acquired a distinct hatred for anything basis related 🙂 Of course, that hatred would grow as I attempted to build more systems… but I’ll save that for later. Once I finally got a working system, then I needed to put my first idea into practice. My idea was to build an out of the box application that a company would use to provide a call center for their customers. The idea was to build a web application that the end user could register their products, submit help desk tickets and more. Easy right??? Not hardly.
Since I knew nothing about web programming, I had to figure out how to build a BSP (at the time, SAP’s go to method for web stuff). So, I got the book, did all the exercises and slowly learned how to write a BSP application. That took several months, and them my first disaster struck. My hard drive crashed, and I had no backup of the virtual server that all of my worked resided on. I had not only lost my coding work… but now I had to go back through the entire SAP installation process. And then I needed to do all the system configuration (including building master data from scratch so I had something to work with). I admit, my concepts got better, but it set me back multiple months. By the time I had a product I felt good about, I had spent the better part of a year burning all my free time. (Now, to top things off, I was recently married, so that meant free time was in short supply, so things kept moving even slower). But I was not deterred. I had a plan. The next step was to become an SAP partner. I did some homework, but not enough looking back. I managed to spend a LOT of hard earned consulting dollars to become a partner and then get my application certified. If you curious about my opinions on certification, check out my post about it from a couple years back.
As time went on, I built more and more applications. Unfortunately, my focus was too scattered. So I’d built WM apps, VC apps, Service apps… and none of them were really cohesive. I got my first sale, which was my dashboard for service management. It was loosely based on some SAP developed dashboards for shipping. I thought it was all down hill from there… That was when I came up with a plan…
But I’ll save that for tomorrow,
Thanks for reading,