What's your industry? Can you give any other details about the company? I've always been interested in these "lifestyle" companies but I'm not sure where to begin.
I started Em with the idea of a futuristic wysiwyg document editor, with the help of my brother's friend who wrote us a check for $50K to get started, "and cut me in appropriately" (which we later paid back since we never had a traditional start-up)). But after 6 months of writing a business plan (yeah, I know..) and talking to friends in the software business, it was clear we weren't going to get VC funding. (I think 1990 was the nadir of software VC investments.)
So in my deep-dive into the document production market (QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, etc) I came across the small idea of building data publishing plug-ins for XPress (Xdata, copying an idea I saw for Aldus PageMaker), and started there (then Xtags, Xcatalog).
We later (2000-ish) branched out into plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, initially the same XPress plug-ins just ported (underwritten by Adobe), and then later expanded into workflow plugins (WordsFlow, DocsFlow) which are our mainstay right now.
Funny how we're doing more or less the same stuff as 30 years ago (well, plus additional products) in a supposedly fast-moving market. I suppose print publishing hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years.
I started Em with the idea of a futuristic wysiwyg document editor, with the help of my brother's friend who wrote us a check for $50K to get started, "and cut me in appropriately" (which we later paid back since we never had a traditional start-up)). But after 6 months of writing a business plan (yeah, I know..) and talking to friends in the software business, it was clear we weren't going to get VC funding. (I think 1990 was the nadir of software VC investments.)
So in my deep-dive into the document production market (QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, etc) I came across the small idea of building data publishing plug-ins for XPress (Xdata, copying an idea I saw for Aldus PageMaker), and started there (then Xtags, Xcatalog).
We later (2000-ish) branched out into plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, initially the same XPress plug-ins just ported (underwritten by Adobe), and then later expanded into workflow plugins (WordsFlow, DocsFlow) which are our mainstay right now.
Funny how we're doing more or less the same stuff as 30 years ago (well, plus additional products) in a supposedly fast-moving market. I suppose print publishing hasn't changed a lot in the past 20 years.