Grant Glas is the founder of App Press. After college, he was an art director building magazines. In 2010, when the iPad was first presented his mind lit up! He knew he wanted to build an iPad app. However he had two problems.
One: He couldn’t code.
Two: He didn’t know what to build.
He enlisted the help of his eventual co-founder Kevin Smith who had created several iPhone apps at the time but he was still struggling with what kind of app to create. That’s when his wife came home with an idea.
A simple idea that would change his life. His grandma’s Italian Cookbook would be turned into an app. His grandma is from Italy and worked at the Indianapolis City Market since 1939. She has a hand written, leather bound book with some of the most amazing recipes dating back over 100 years.
Grant’s wife started to type the recipes and he took pictures and created the app’s artwork in Photoshop. As they began sending all of this material to Kevin to code, they ran into problems. Everyday he wanted to make changes to the recipes, photos and artwork. Thus, frustration started to creep in. His deadline was getting pushed back and tiny changes were getting lost in emails.
That’s when Kevin had the idea. He was going to build a tool that would allow Grant to build and update the app code-free. App Press. In six days, Grant created the Italian Cookbook in App Press.
Grant. A person that had never written a line of code in his life. When the app launched it made it to the home page of the App Store. Featured right next to Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. And in one week it got 25,000 downloads.
Listen more here or below to hear more about his incredible platform.
