221–229 of 229 posts
It looks like you took an approach we wanted to take but thought it'd be harder to monetize (as you found out).
Want to e-mail me and lets chat? (info in profile)
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Because the founder would be spending all of their time reselling the investors every week. I don’t want an entrepreneur spending their weekends looking for jobs on LinkedIn because they had a bad week. You need patient capital to build and iterate to PMF.
That's interesting, so you see convincing someone paying say $10,000 a week as long as he sees progress as good, slowly exchanging it for stock at a set valuation, as harder than shelling out $2M out of the pocket in one bulk amount? I have experience of the former (well, it was more like $5K in my case) and it wasn't hard at all, i struggle to imagine myself raising $1M at once. $5K a week sounds like too little, bu…
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Then do something about that! Don’t quit, go talk to the users and figure why they didn’t adopt. The answers are laying right in front of you but you seem deterred by doing the work. B2b is hard, try harder before quitting.
>The answers are laying right in front of you but you seem deterred by doing the work ...i've been the sole full-time founder for 9 months. i have worked every single day of those 9 months (doing everything - sales, customer success, investor relations, product). i am not deterred by work - i am deterred by the prospect of burning money chasing a delusion. the users didn't adopt for the same reason every users of eve…
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As someone who worked as a CTO at what I like to call a "zombie" startup I agree with the poster above me, and it hurts just to recollect the history. You can keep this shit up indefinitely. We're in a weird environment where, with enough endurance, a startup, even one with a miserable high touch sales cycle and poor business model, can live month to month like some sort of crime family looking for the next big score…
> Contractors suck and their code sucks unless supervised I have worked both as an contractor and as FTE for product/service companies (and startups), and I'm a bit tired with fighting with this prejudice. The core business of software houses is ... making software, and making it such way that a client is happy with the outcome, pays for what he really need and returns with more projects. Startups / product companies…
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As someone who worked as a CTO at what I like to call a "zombie" startup I agree with the poster above me, and it hurts just to recollect the history. You can keep this shit up indefinitely. We're in a weird environment where, with enough endurance, a startup, even one with a miserable high touch sales cycle and poor business model, can live month to month like some sort of crime family looking for the next big score…
> Contractors suck and their code sucks unless supervised I have worked both as an contractor and as FTE for product/service companies (and startups), and I'm a bit tired with fighting with this prejudice. The core business of software houses is ... making software, and making it such way that a client is happy with the outcome, pays for what he really need and returns with more projects. Startups / product companies…
The financial people need contractors, but they have no clue how to find a decent, honest one, and even if they luck out and find one, they don't know how to work with one. Either way, contractors get a bad rep.
I've seen some horrible ones who honestly deserve a bad reputation and more, but I've also seen some really good ones get a bad reputation due to impossible deadlines, poor or no specification or thrashing due to changing the specification of what should be delivered several times a week.
I raised $10M and it wasn’t going to work. We had spent 20%. Board wanted to change course, I said let’s give the money back. I said you’ll have to fire me if you want to keep raising money and change course and they did. 4 years later after they raised another $60M they sold the company for $15M. Sometimes you don’t win. Sometimes it’s better to back out and start anew. Give it all you can but there’s no honor in dy…
Is selling the company for 15M a win? Or a loss because of the 60m raised?
I definitely agree with the suggestions here to take some time off. Sometimes, especially when you've been living and breathing this stuff for 9 months, you need some time away to rejuvenate. I did that a few years ago with a trip to Nicaragua when I felt like I couldn't ship the product I was working on. After a week of not thinking about it we went on to shipping the product and moving our production line to China. The startup still failed in the end (for other wonderful reasons) but that introspection time is 110% worth it.
One thing that resonated with me recently was to keep your network up. If you fail you fail but you'll have a group of people willing to help you out if and when it happens. If you continue and then thrive you'll still have a great support network when the stress hits hard.
A friend said it well on a recent episode of the $100 MBA Podcast. https://100mba.net/mba973/
Also, remember sometimes the failures are great insights into what is working and what isn't working. If you have had this many potential clients at this point nothing says that there aren't more out there that you can surprise, delight and serve.
Best of luck.