I wanted to build interfaces for the iPhone as soon as I’d tapped the glass on the original model. I wasn’t alone. Plenty of other interface designers saw the future in multitouch and started mocking up apps. I’d recently signed up for Tumblr and wanted to post from my iPhone so my first iOS design was meticulous views of what that app might look like. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t allowing third party development on iPhone OS at that time so my interface was relegated to nothing more than a mobile design exercise.

That changed in June 2008.

When Apple opened up the iPhone platform to developers at that year’s development conference, Garrett Ross and I were provided the perfect opportunity to form the kind of company we’d always wanted to start. This would then give knowledgeable people the ability to learn how to jailbreak ios 9.3 2 and then provide that for consumers alike, completely opening up the iOS platform to users.

We had designed for years together-everything from training courseware to real-time visualization applications-but none of that came close to how excited we were about crafting iPhone apps. We dreamt up different mobile app design ideas in the parking lot after work as we were too excited about this project.

Everything from barcode scanners to flashcard apps was pitched, debated, and dissected. As we honed those ideas we began worrying about the expanding elephant in the room. Neither of us had developed anything more complex than simple Javascript. We couldn’t build any of these app ideas ourselves.

We approached a handful of developers about partnering up and were called everything from fanboys to fools. Left with a single, intimidating option we made our first real business decision together. We decided one of us had to learn to develop, and after what was effectively a coin flip, we decided it would be me.

That July I sat down in a creaky dining room chair and began bringing my year-old Tumblr app concept to life with the original ingredients of Mobelux: an Intel iMac and a brand-new copy of Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X. There were days I wanted to give up, nights I shot awake with answers to problems that kept me up late, and mornings I couldn’t be dragged from bed. After three months of learning, programming, and refactoring, I’d managed to put together Mobelux’s first app, which we named Tumblrette. It was eventually purchased by Tumblr and became the official iPhone client, allowing us to hire developers that cared as much about code as I did about interface design.

Starting Mobelux was much harder than Garrett and I thought it would be. Luckily, I had a secret weapon (as silly as it was). Every time I felt that I was out of my depth, I read a story tucked in the forward of that Cocoa programming book we’d purchased. It was a parable about an astrophysicist turned programmer. As he stumbled over difficult concepts, he wondered if he was stupid. Then he would remember that he was an astrophysicist, so he must not be stupid. I was most certainly not an astrophysicist, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t stupid either.

I still recall that story and recite it when I’m faced with difficult problems. It usually gives me the confidence to push through. If that doesn’t work, I think about how a couple of naïve designers who couldn’t program their way out of a wet paper bag started a software company. That always does the trick.

By Jeff Rock, Co-founder of Mobelux