The Valley
Not talking about Silicon Valley. I’m talking about the valley between the peaks.
Things are getting tough in startup land. We finished The Iron Yard in late September, launched a prototype (we used to call it a beta, but let’s be honest), learned a lot and felt like we finally found the sweet spot.
The next milestone was to actually get the product to catch up to the business development. See, we have beta clients (some high profile) waiting to use our product. I suppose this is a good problem to have but I imagine the shine wears off after waiting around too long.
Here we are in March and about a week or so from pushing the update that will finally get the clients on our platform. This is THE critical moment in the life of Locally. This is when we find out if we are a contender or a pretender. Either way, it’s been about as hard this last month or so than is has been the entire journey to date.
Money running low (business money that is, personal accounts have long since been drained), tension in the household increasing daily, sense of industry is about shot, role confusion (I work for free while my wife brings home the bacon), personal torment for both my wife and I - the mental battle over to support or not to support this endeavor, to give up or not give up on this dream, become the startup killer or remain the startup supporter? It’s all madness, quite honestly. Pretty sure I am in limited company when it comes to dealing with all this stuff.
One thing I know to be fact. Startups need capital to move fast. IF you have some, you are golden, if you need to raise some, you are gonna get suckered into the “trap” real quick.
The “trap” is the toil between spending time working on raising money (which takes a lot of time especially if you have to establish investor connections on your own), and deciding to commit to just cranking out code and shipping product. You quickly realize that you can’t do squat without some money. Then while you are struggling to get meetings with investors you get pissed and decide you are going to build out more features and ship some updates. Then you realize this is moving fast enough because you don’t have the required resources….you get the idea.
The “trap” is also getting sucked into all the blogs, articles and startup “How-to’s” which are all garbage. These don’t apply to the average startup (and if you are the founder of an average startup, you know what I am talking about). I could write a book on all the traps you know why? We have fallen into what feels like every one of them.
I will wrap up with this. People ask me all the time if it was worth it to quit my job, leave my family behind for the summer, ask my wife to support me and significantly put a hurtin on the family (I was gonna say “family budget” here but really, this has been beating down on the family unit). Not sure I have the answer yet but I certainly have learned some lessons about what is important in life. I’m not the best at seeing this all the time but I do know. All we need to do is ship the next update and then we are golden…