Long time lurker but am seeking some advice.
We're self-funded team that has a prototype in the genetics field working in a one-off computing state. It has some scaling issues that we're getting resolved however we're not quite ready to go commercial. We do have potential customers in the pipe. Our goal is to build this into a company.
Our problem comes down to hardware and costs. After benchmarking AWS, we've found out that it is not economically nor architecturally feasible for what we're trying to accomplish. Ironically enough, we're dealing with too big of data sets at scale and their computing architecture doesn't scale like we need it too. This was somewhat a surprise since my day job consists of dealing with large datasets on the AWS stack (although, not nearly as big as this).
We have identified a vendor that does allow us to get the performance we need and we did prove it through benchmark runs. However, they're fairly pricey, we'd have to co-locate, etc. Up until now, we've been gifted compute time or personally paid for it to test our prototype but now that we're looking to get early adopters, we need a way to do this somewhat right.
Question: Is this enough to get a reasonable seed round? Should I even try raising or try and get a paying customer? Is it better to try and go big on raising or small to purchase the minimum? Do I have other options that I'm not seeing?
I can shed more light if needed, especially on the AWS stuff. Appreciate any advice!