Introduction to Building Your Startup

Earlier this year, I grew interested in simplifying the meeting scheduling process. In my view, the proprietary calendar systems such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook have failed to make scheduling as easy as it could be. My big complaint is the number of back and forth emails typically required to schedule the average meeting. I had an idea for a planning application that would make the process much less annoying.

I love the creative process and I enjoy sharing my knowledge with others. I thought it would be valuable to set forth the internal process I use as I go through the process of formulating a new product idea, clarifying its business concept, and moving through the stages of implementation.

Building Your Startup With PHP is a series geared towards walking you through the stages of transforming a cool business concept into an actual startup. If you're an idea person curious about the entrepreneurial process, this is for you.

All of the code for our MeetingPlanner application will be released via open source.

New episodes will be published regularly throughout 2015 - usually between two and six weeks apart. A number of episodes are already in the works.

The Table of Contents

Here's the current list of articles:

1. Building Your Startup With PHP: Getting Started
2. Building Your Startup With PHP: Feature Requirements and Database Design
3. Building Your Startup With PHP: Geolocation and Google Places
4. Building Your Startup With PHP: Localization With I18n
5. Building Your Startup: Access Control, Active Record Relations and Slugs
6. Building Your Startup With PHP: User Settings, Profile Images and Contact Details
7. Building Your Startup With PHP: Scheduling a Meeting
8. Building Your Startup With PHP: Scheduling Availability and Choices
9. Building Your Startup With PHP: Email Commands
10. Using the Mailgun Store(): A Temporary Mailbox for Your App's Incoming Email
11. Building Your Startup: Delivering the Meeting Invitation
12. Building Your Startup With PHP: Email Commands
13. Building Your Startup With PHP: Simplifying Onramp With OAuth
14. Building Your Startup: Exporting iCal Files into Calendar Events
15. Building Your Startup With PHP: Choosing and Configuring Production Hosting
16. Building Your Startup With PHP: Collecting and Managing User Reports and Feedback
17. Building Your Startup: The Open-Source Foundation Behind Meeting Planner
18. Building Your Startup: Refining Email Templates
19. Building Your Startup: Responsive Email for Gmail,
20. Building Your Startup: Notifying People of Meeting Updates
21. Building Your Startup: Delivering Notifications
22. Building Your Startup: Preparing for Reminders
23. Building Your Startup: Dynamic Ajax Forms for Scheduling
24. Building Your Startup: Sending Reminders
25. Building Your Startup: The Dashboard Foundation
26. Building Your Startup: Improving the Mobile Web
27. Building Your Startup: Issue Tracking and Feature Planning
28. Building Your Startup: Security Basics
29. Building Your Startup: Ajax for Meeting Times and Places
30. Building Your Startup: Invite People via URL 
31. Building Your Startup: Increasing Security
32. Building Your Startup: Preparing for Text Messaging
33. Building Your Startup: Automatic Time-Zone Detection
34. Building Your Startup: Advanced Scheduling Commands
35. Building Your Startup: Requesting Scheduling Changes
36. Building Your Startup: Meetings With Multiple Participants
37. Building Your Startup: Completing Group Scheduling
38. Building Your Startup: Importing with the Google Contacts API
39. Building Your Startup: Error Logging
40. Building Your Startup: Running Multiple Domains
41. Building Your Startup With PHP: Building a RESTful API
42. Building Your Startup With PHP: Bootstrap Your Home Page
43. Building Your Startup: Leveraging Bootstrap, Ajax, and jQuery
44. Building Your Startup: Using Routes for Schedule With Me
45. Building Your Startup: Leveraging Crowdfunding,
46. Building Your Startup: Securing an API
47. Building Your Startup: Approaching Major Feature Enhancements
48. Using Faker to Generate Filler Data for Automated Testing
49. How to Build a User Tour With Shepherd in JavaScript
50. Programming With Yii: Generating Documentation

And we'll likely add more topics to this list soon. So, check back regularly and follow me on Twitter @reifman.

Please feel free to ask questions and suggest topics or features below; I generally participate in the discussions. You can also reach me on email me directly.

Other Resources

Following stories of the entrepreneurial path is always interesting, and there are a couple of recent entries that may complement this series. 

This year, Stanford is open sourcing its How to Start a Startup class with many industry experts, such as Sam Altman, Paul Graham and Marc Andreesen. Also, Planet Money co-founder Alex Blumberg recently launched a podcast on his own foray into technology startups, which you can follow at HearStartup. He's a bit of a novice as an entrepreneur, but in part because of his access, the content is intriguing and entertaining and he's making amazing progress.

If you'd like to learn more about Yii2, the exciting PHP framework which the series is built in, follow our Programming With Yii2 series and visit the author's reference site The Yii Developer Exchange.