[eengstrom]

My original idea for this venture started over a dinner. My mind had been churning on related business challenges for a couple of years. I was not only focused on highly visible opportunities, I was looking for the right time and right problem to solve. For me, this meant, how can I help my customers make a great deal more money?

I pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer, scribbled down 12-13 ideas, drew some logical relationships, circled groups, labeled the ideas and then spent about 2 months refining and testing the ideas through discussion and research.

At this point we're narrowed down to about 8% of the scope of the original concept, but that 8% is viable, has customer traction (already) and looks likely to earn 1.5-2mm per customer per year.

We expect to spend another week on the pitching to initial customers and try and get closure with our first enterprise customer in the next two weeks. How long it will take to reach the right funding, we don't know. It's enterprise software and we want to grow.

What's different here is that we haven't coded anything. We won't until we have directed feedback from our pilot customers. Oh yeah, and funding. :)