When Kevin Miller set up LiveCode at the tender age of 17, he was not alone; he had persuaded three school friends to eschew university and join him at the fledgling enterprise, which now offers a programming platform that people can use to create their own apps.
“They did stay with the company for quite a while,” says Mr Miller. “Then they went off to do other things.”
LiveCode grew out of a hobby Mr Miller had at school. When the teenager-run company started, it worked on a disparate range of projects, including a programme to teach touch typing. Then, in 2003, Mr Miller saw a clear opportunity to do something different in the programming world, and LiveCode was born.
“Programming language was heading in the wrong direction,” he says. “It was getting harder to use and requiring more specialist knowledge. We saw an opportunity to get involved and make something more accessible.”
Live Code is a programming platform based on a language that is much closer to English than other programming languages. That makes it more accessible and makes software development faster. The platform is used by huge enterprises such as NASA and KLM but is perhaps particularly well suited to small businesses.
“Small businesses are our bread and butter,” says Mr Miller. “A lot of small businesses can’t afford an app building team but do have a couple of techy people who could work with LiveCode.”
As a result, the customer base is very widely spread. LiveCode has at least one customer in almost every country in the world, and 85% of its business is export, with half the market being the US and one third Europe.
LiveCode is also dual licence. In 2013, it raised almost £500,000 on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to create an open-source version of LiveCode. A third of secondary schools in Scotland are using this version to teach kids about coding, and Mr Miller recently returned from a visit to the US during which he was placing it in schools.
“It’s not really a profit centre but it’s good for our future if people have had experience of the product,” he says.
LiveCode now employs 20 people, most of whom are based in its Edinburgh office. The journey to that point was a steep learning curve for Mr Miller but one that he does not regret scaling.
“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and some things that couldn’t go wrong went wrong too,” says Mr Miller. “It took longer than anticipated, but business is always one part ideas and nine parts persistence.”
Many of the challenges were to do with an asset that the company acquired. It turned out to be hard to work with and it took the company years to get it working as it wanted.
“You always learn,” says Mr Miller. “I know a lot more about software now.”
Customer success stories and watching the team thrive make it all worthwhile. And while running a business is not short of challenges, they often bring their own reward.
“You’re constantly trying to improve and make better decisions,” says Mr Miller. “There is also a level of freedom about being your own boss.”
Having grown organically for several years, LiveCode first raised external finance in 2003 when the first version of the programming platform was introduced. Mike Markkula, who invested in Apple in 1976, provided external capital and remains the largest shareholder with a 10% stake.
LiveCode went to mobile in 2010 and the platform has been renewed over the past two to three years. A version of LiveCode that slots into FileMaker will be launched in August, and Mr Miller hopes to embark on another big round of expansion over the next 12 months.
His longer-term plans for the company are ambitious. Five years from now, he hopes it will have grown tenfold.
“It’s taken us a long time to get there, but we have a really mature technology,” he says. “We want to see where we can take that.”
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