I’d like to say it was all part of a secret plan to not draw attention to ourselves until we were ready. But it wasn’t.
The sad truth is, we were always low on money and bootstrapping. We spent a lot of time building, and very little time pitching.
We pitched about 10 VCs total in this whole time. I remember being at an event where Reid Hoffman spoke, he said he pitched 99 VCs before he got investment.
But we spent zero on marketing and PR, and 11 million people in 100 countries downloaded our Groups app. But the app is not that interesting, people don’t understand that most of our users are community leaders.
What people don’t get is that in this space, you need ALL THE FEATURES that Big Tech platforms offer before people will switch. It simply took us 10-12 years to get to this point. I picked a hard problem, but a very rewarding one in the end.
Look, MySQL and NGinX took 10 years before VCs funded them. But to be fair, they grew a lot whereas Qbix didn’t. Maybe I and my team simply suck at making things viral. But I believe this year will change that.
Networking is hard. I’m a guy who came from an immigrant family in Brooklyn. I never moved to the West Coast. We applied to HN with Qbix every other year since 2011. Never even got invited to the interview.
Now, I personally know Noam Chomsky, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Tim Berners-Les (see the photo at https://wefunder.com/Qbix), the Rohingya Project guys, Queen Diambi of a tribe in the Congo, the hed of United Nations Capital Development Fund, the head of CoinDesk, and many more randomly assorted people I met over the years. But it took years.
And I still don’t know very good VCs. And many VCs still look at our open source project as ”too big”. They prefer to invest in small feature companies, which we can now spin off from our accelerator.
If you want to introduce me, I’m very happy to take a meeting and demo on Zoom.
And if you want to support it, just go to https://wefunder.com/Qbix and kick in $100 or something. We are gearing up launch the 5th of November this year — and you’ll definitely not forget that :)