1 Simple Way to Keep Your Company
Do you need that money for you or your customer? An investor might just distract you from your own success.
Nearly a year ago I started in Antler, a start-up incubator. It was lot of fun, I learned a lot, and I met an incredible group of people.
I started working on a new company, mindcast.io. You can read about here. My partner and I came up with an elaborate plan for building an empire that predicted the future and sold those numbers for trucks of cash.
It was going to be sexy. We had an cool app planned, a research theory based on cutting edge research, a (kinda) novel method for collecting data suing online networks and communities, and a million ideas for what we could give our customer.
All we had to do was build it.
— But —
We needed boatloads of cash to make those truckloads of cash. We needed investors. All of a sudden our company wouldn’t be so much our company. There would be a board, targets, people calling you late at night to “Check-in”. Was that what we really wanted?
Did we want to make a business or just another job for ourselves?
Looking back though, I don’t think we needed the money like I think we do — We might have been able to save the company for ourselves. We could have had a company, and not just a new job.
In fact, if we didn’t see the company as just a big finance project, but our own business, we might have even kept it alive.
It takes money to build things
We needed money. To pay for the tech, to pay our salaries. To pay for a location. It would even take money to pay our investors for the privilege of investing in us.
The tech was expensive, we as founders were expensive, and for some reason we didn’t think that we could build what we wanted to all on our own.
And we couldn’t have, because what we wanted to make would have no revenue backing it up — we had to build something beautiful and noteworthy before we were willing to show it to a customer.
I think about that now, and I realize our priorities were backwards. If we wanted to make a company all for ourselves and not for our investors, we need to sell. We needed to sell a product and not just our company.
What were we really selling?
A year later, I look back and I realize that we missed the point of our start-up. What is it that we were selling to our clients? Cool tech, a cool methodology? No, I think we wanted to make those to see if we could.
What our customers wanted was information that would make them money. Why couldn’t we have hustled the research on our own, packed it into emails instead of a fancy dashboard and sold it like there was no tomorrow?
Would our clients care most about the tech we made or the profit margins they earned?
If we had focused on the product, the meat, then we wouldn’t have spent all that time worry how to pay for the bling. We might not have gotten investment, but we could have made a company.
And we could have kept our company, all to ourselves. We would not have needed to take investors on board, and we could have got our product out the door immediately.
It makes me wonder, then. Why did we all spend so much time trying to create such a cool company and not a profitable product? Why weren’t we focused on what would make our customer’s happy?
Its something I have been thinking about a lot. What was the product and who was our customer?
Were we selling to users or to investors?
Money can’t buy you love, but love cant buy you servers
This isn’t to say that you have to bootstrap your company or else its not real. If you are super lucky, you have explosive growth and can’t afford the server time all on your own-You simply need the cash to keep going. That’s amazing, congrats!
If, though, you don’t need the cash to keep going, but to get going, it might be time to think about what your product really is, and what it is you are trying to achieve.
You might be much more successful with a whole lot less, and save your company all for yourself — at the same time.
After all, you probably didn’t start the company just to find another boss.
