Second angel meeting
The meeting with angel #2 (from same outfit as angel #1, and no relation to VC dood) was interesting. Still no resolution as to our ultimate fate but we picked up some clues and heard some unexpected things about fundraising from the mouth of a potential investor (who has the ear of many more people like him).
Take-aways:
* To paraphrase, "WTF, your spreadsheet has you spending two million dollars in 18 months? You don't need to buy the Internets before you publish to them, you know. Fix this."
* Our expectations for funding delivery does not reflect the world as this angel group understands it to be. Rather than write a check for half a mil and calling it done, they'd rather see a plan where they can drip in a bit at each milestone.
He has bade me to rework some stuff and get back to him. Our ideas and our overall business plan are great and well-defined, but now people are looking at our numbers and our timeline, and seeing that AFATCT they are either wrong or missing. OK, fine. We can fix that.
I am full of energy and it is very strange energy. Up until now the promise of funding has been a psychological fence between where we are now and setting up the revenue-earning stuff. I will take this fence down now; we need to press ahead. Things will get Interesting, after Origins.
I think we can make this work. I have... a lot to do.
Unavoidably this leads again into thoughts of "shit I wish we had another employee". A challenge ahead is selling all this to the Andys, especially the part-timer who I will undoubtedly try to convince to quit his lucrative day job before we have six digits in the bank. There may be no giant bag of money, maybe instead a twilit trail of smaller ones winding through the wood, but either way we really need him. He's the air element of our Invisibles cell.
What's plain-and-simple bad news is that I am nearly out of personal savings. If we don't get some solid funding by next month, but we switch to a more gradual funding scheme, then I'm still going to have to pick up a programming contract or something. If I am careful and wise about it - I have done this before - then will not result in overall slowdowns in Volity. It's too bad I may need to do it this way, though.
Take-aways:
* To paraphrase, "WTF, your spreadsheet has you spending two million dollars in 18 months? You don't need to buy the Internets before you publish to them, you know. Fix this."
* Our expectations for funding delivery does not reflect the world as this angel group understands it to be. Rather than write a check for half a mil and calling it done, they'd rather see a plan where they can drip in a bit at each milestone.
He has bade me to rework some stuff and get back to him. Our ideas and our overall business plan are great and well-defined, but now people are looking at our numbers and our timeline, and seeing that AFATCT they are either wrong or missing. OK, fine. We can fix that.
I am full of energy and it is very strange energy. Up until now the promise of funding has been a psychological fence between where we are now and setting up the revenue-earning stuff. I will take this fence down now; we need to press ahead. Things will get Interesting, after Origins.
I think we can make this work. I have... a lot to do.
Unavoidably this leads again into thoughts of "shit I wish we had another employee". A challenge ahead is selling all this to the Andys, especially the part-timer who I will undoubtedly try to convince to quit his lucrative day job before we have six digits in the bank. There may be no giant bag of money, maybe instead a twilit trail of smaller ones winding through the wood, but either way we really need him. He's the air element of our Invisibles cell.
What's plain-and-simple bad news is that I am nearly out of personal savings. If we don't get some solid funding by next month, but we switch to a more gradual funding scheme, then I'm still going to have to pick up a programming contract or something. If I am careful and wise about it - I have done this before - then will not result in overall slowdowns in Volity. It's too bad I may need to do it this way, though.