Obinwanne Hill

Actually the reason that I started Restive was, in 2012 I was trying, responsive web design was a growing methodology. Mobile devices were really growing, really fast. And websites, you know, weren't coping. Websites were having a hard time, or users were having a hard time using websites, which were not customized for mobile devices. So around 2011, 2012, I was trying to learn responsive web design and how everything worked and I read a couple of articles and I was trying to get around all the methodologies, like media queries and all that, and I just ended up becoming really frustrated at the workflow, because there was way too much testing, for one, testing that was required to build a responsive website was ridiculous. I mean, there is this Tweet from Luke Wroblewski , if I've got his name right, that showed all these devices that you have to test your website on, and there were probably 20 or 30, so that frustrated me and I was trying to find an easier way to build a website, a responsive website. And that's really where the idea for RestiveJS came about.

I just want to say before I forget, this website is going to have to adapt to different devices. So I gave you a way to keep track of the devices that this website is going to be on. So if this website is being accessed by a phone, I want to be able to know that instantly. If it's a tablet, I want to be able to know that instantly. If it's in portrait orientation, I want to be able to know that instantly. Some of these notifications, or the status of the websites, while they were on these devices, was not commonplace. I mean, it was, you had to use media queries or nothing, and I just, I was just a bit frustrated with that. So I just thought I'd build a program, just to help me personally, build a better website, and I did that. And I decided, Hey, if I'm having these problems, some other developers might also be frustrated as well. So I just put the code up on GitHub and reached out to a couple of blogs, SpeckyBoy was one of them, to get started writing a couple of articles, and it just went off from there.

So I got a couple of responses from different people who wanted to build websites and said, I read about this and was thinking if you could help out with the websites. So that came and that brought another idea. I was like, Hey, if people are having a problem with their responsive website, or with the website that they want to make responsive, I could provide services to help them out. So I just said, Okay, why not just start a company to do that, so that's pretty much how the idea for Restive came about.

It's still bootstrapped, there's no outside capital, it's pretty much just me and a remote team, every now and then, doing things, but we're looking at launching a couple of interesting products this year and very early next year. So hopefully, once we do that, we'll see if we could get some other outside capital involved, if possible, and try to grow the company from there.