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Developer Wanted

This post comes a few hours after talking with a reference to secure a couple developers on the cheap.

Things I regret in my life in no particular order:

  1. focusing on marketing in undergraduate instead of computer sciences / being a developer
  2. managing my money poorly so I have absolutely no nestegg to use to fund a startup
  3. Leaving a pretty good role in consulting; immediately turning down a better role in consulting to buy a company that went nowhere. In hindsight I really just needed a break rather than to jump into my own thing.
  4. Not taking my good friend from San Jose up on the offer to move out there after leaving undergraduate school. Sure, we were marching toward the dot.com bubble but the connections and experience would have been invaluable.
  5. Did I mention lamenting the fact I’m technical but not really a developer?

So that means that I’m always the business / PM side rather than being able to do the development … it’s like owning a restaurant but not being able to cook. Or to a certain extent, afford decent ingredients.

No, I’m not missing the obvious – raise some money and then pay people – that’s in flight but it’s hard to not look back occasionally and wonder WTF was I thinking?

Onward and upward though – we had a good meeting and I think it’s a good fit. We have another call with a different referral next week. As a guess, they’ll be cheaper but the quality won’t be as good.

Funny enough, re-reading the post – it seems like I’m down but I’m not. I’m actually excited but frustrated that a few different moves in the past would mean I could fully engage this team and we could be on our way.

Oh well … time to get a little more cheddar and get really going.

Value Proposition – Too Broad

The last couple weeks I’ve waxed on poetically about our pitch and if it was successful.

It appears that my underlying assumption that what what we presented was succinct and compelling was incorrect. Our pitch showed the breadth of benefits but thanks to the timeframe didn’t get very deep.

This was a major mistake. Basically my friend (who is the COO and in the pitch) mentioned that the way we presented it was super confusing and the tool makes the process look harder, not easier.

Oh shit.

We got too fixated on the big picture impacts instead of pitching it from the point of view of the end user. The fine-grained details do look harder and if we hadn’t accounted for ease of transition – it would be harder. But, we did except we never mentioned any of those things.

This feedback has been invaluable and has kicked off some major rework of our pitch deck (pulled anything that isn’t about our initial target audience and diving into benefits / mitigations) and we’re building a prototype to be able to show ease of use since some of the core features that will make the system super easy to use aren’t built yet.

We’re gearing up for fundraising and socializing the product with our initial target market in March so we have plenty of time to pull together a new pitch … maybe this time we’ll actually show how we solve problems … time will tell.

So You’re Saying There’s a chance

As mentioned in last week’s post, we pitched to a development company in hopes of securing a deal in which we could pay a little now and then pay the rest later.

The good news is that they didn’t laugh and hangout; the bad news is that their COO kindly, but firmly said that they don’t do this type of deal, but she did want to see our work estimates for the remaining part of the work. I think it’s more idle curiosity but but they didn’t say no.

I’ll be honest, I was am super disappointed, but not surprised. I know, the fact I was disappointed shows an amazing amount of naivety. It was more a hope that she had the same over inflated opinion of me and this company that I did. 🙂

A few takeaways

  1. I need to get accustomed to more stress or get out of this game. I’ve been a wreck since about two hours before the presentation and I’m still recovering. This isn’t ok.
  2. The act of pulling together and delivering the pitch was helpful. The deck had some holes and we need a demo until the damn software is more developed.
  3. The spring 2020 plans haven’t changed
  4. Lord help us – we’re probably going to look at UpWork again.

Swing and a Pitch

I have been a problem drafting, project planning, pitch drafting machine over the last week (more actually). We have a big meeting planned for Tuesday in which I’m going to beg propose that a large software development company allows me to pay them about 5% of the total monthly bill and then they make the rest of the amount an account payable.

I have really enjoyed the business planning and pitch drafting process because the act of pulling together numbers, plans and trying to articulate the problem has helped me better understand the company. I might have to mail my MBA back if my school heard me say that we didn’t have a business plan, nor any of the research they suggested I do before investing time in building a product.

Nope.

What we had was a damn good idea and no direct or even close competitors in a market that’s in the billions. Sure, people are solving their problems today but idea is so much better … it’s the difference between a trusty horse and an AMG Mercedes.

So, we set about building the product with super low expenses other than my partner / CTOs time, which is valuable but I paid him in a sizable chunk of equity.

Now that our POC is basically done, the road to releasing to the market is pretty large for a weekend and summer warrior so we need to build out our dev team, but I’m not really interested in owing $240K for the work.

Thus, we need to fundraise. First, we’ll look to barter and then the friends and family round.

I’ve been working on the pitch for a number of hours per day and it’s nearly done. The neat thing is that it’s greatly improved over the week as bland problem statements have evolved into sharper ideas. I struggled with projections until finally I decided that didn’t care about those projections and decided to show the work plan, budget and approach for the next six to twelve months.

I like it. It’s authentic and solid. Is it good? I’ll tell you next Wednesday. 🙂

Early stage orgs and forecasting revenue

Late November and December is a great time to have a “real” job but also need to spend some quality research, analysis and planning time for a startup. Work efforts fall off a cliff after Thanksgiving thanks to either one’s own PTO or the PTO of others.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been trying to build out our business plan. It’s coming along fairly well and I at least have a WAG on how much it’s going to cost to finish our product so we can go to market. In fact, I have a decent idea of the key market segments that should be interested in our product.

I have a lot of cognitive dissonance with completely made up numbers. They have to have some logic behind them other than wishful thinking. I’ve spent the last week? or so trying to find logic where almost none exists.

My initial numbers show a tidy $2mil in revenue by year five and a little profit. This model uses some logic based solely on estimates from Facebook and Google advertising. I have no way of estimating success of direct selling because, well, I’ve never pitched this product to anyone.

It’ll be damn good but who knows? Not me – at this point – that’s for sure.

I tried building out a model with aggressive SWAGS and that model was complete bullshit that I probably couldn’t wouldn’t defend in a pitch.

Hey there – these numbers look great – how’d you get them? Well, I knew you all needed to see exponential growth so I built my model using it.

Do you believe these numbers? I believe these numbers are possible, but I also think really mediocre numbers are possible and I also think the company tanking is also possible. The last part isn’t likely, though.

I’ve laid awake a few nights trying to figure out why I’m a) so worried b) struggling to pull any type of forecasts together … this is when it hit me that the reason I’m having trouble with any type of logical model is that the company is just too early in its development.

I need to get to users and show them the tool and get feedback. Their feedback will then tell me if this is a homerun, double, single or a strikeout.

*note – it’s about an hour later thanks to me going to do a little search for the next paragraph and then diving back into my planning*

A plan is coming together. We’re going to aim to crowdfund the first step of our development & in the process of fundraising I’m going to start pitching the future product to potential customers to get their feedback. I figure the feedback on the fundraising & pitches will help me better understand the market and my forecasts.

Business Plan?

If there’s one thing that I was taught during undergraduate school and getting my MBA it was to make certain that I had a solid business plan before ever starting a business. Which, is precisely what I haven’t done.

It’s not that we didn’t do back of the envelope research on the need for our core product, business model or opportunity. And, to be honest I did do a pretty competitor / comparable assessment before we got started but to say we had more than a business outline and solid assumptions would be an exaggeration.

We’re now nearing the stage in development that it’s time to start pulling together some solid research and putting together our plan. The winter holiday season has given me more day-to-day time to think through our markets and to do some good desk-based research on market size. Hell, even market opportunity.

The nice thing is that so far my research is supporting our long held assumptions. Right now I’m all about the secondary research into both B2C and B2B markets. My plan is to have this finished up by next week and start doing some SWAG projections.

I think it’s time to start doing some closed door meetings with a few investors that I trust – not because I want their money, but because I want their thoughts on the right way to get early stage funding.

[For the record, I’m also interested in their money ;)]

2019 Annual Board meeting

Today was our annual board meeting. The upside was that we have spent approximately $500 for the year not counting sweat equity but the downside is that we still haven’t made a dime of revenue.

We reviewed the system status, finances and finally plans for 2020. The system is looking good – it’s like seeing a skyscraper with only a the beams and the foundation built. There’s a ton of additional work to do but it does look good.

Finances, well, not much out and nothing in. Nuf’ said.

The roadmap is a little more interesting because I finally think we’re ready to start showing off the early builds to gage interest and start early stage fundraising. We need about $250K in dev and another $100K for marketing and business development before we can fully launch. Or, I think we do. I plan on having tighter numbers by the end of the month or early January.

We finished in about an hour – not bad for our only meeting of the year. The mood was optimistic but not giddy. We’ve done giddy and anxious before and it doesn’t help.

Summer Progress

We’ve made some nice progress this summer. Our MVP is nearly .6 with a full MVP 1.0 still likely by the end of the summer.

We’ve started the discussions on adding at least one resource for the fall. Hopefully we can find someone who wants to partner with us. We have to crack this nut at some point or we’ll never grow.

Long Journey in the desert

We’re in what seems like an endless desert with our development. One moment, it appears we’re nearing some milestone and the next we realize it’s just an oasis.

At this point, I’m a little unclear if we’ll ever actually finish the project, but I’m also not convinced it’s a terrible idea that needs killed so we just march forward.

We’re nearing our third year of development but thanks to replatforming of the API, front-end and now middle we have nearly nothing to show for the work except a long checklist of items that we know do not work.

I still have faith in the lead dev (main business partner) and frankly the out of pocket costs are pretty low so other than a little time there’s no real cost. But, it’s certainly becoming a little disheartening.

We’ll continue to soldier on since there’s no real plan B.