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by dinkumthinkum
5074 days ago
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I mean that's great and everything. I love it. But. If the past and the present was so great, I wouldn't need money. I think Mark Hsu's paragraph on "Avoid overusing buzzwords" was pretty good; I think the avoid "Netflix for Pandas" thing is commonsense now but the notion that should actually use specific numbers when making your pitches can't be shouted enough. |
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Not to put words in anybody's mouth, but given that one can reasonably deliver a production-quality software product for hard costs lower than a college student has in their checking account these days and also pound the pavement selling it and/or have customer acquisition channels proved viable in microscale, you don't necessarily have to be rolling in it to a) have numbers which demonstrate traction while b) not having nearly enough to make the next big steps like bringing on multiple people at market salaries.
I'm only a mentor at 500Startups and don't have decisionmaking authority, but I'd predict that if you had a story like "We built a $WIDGET for doctors offices, cold called 100 people, got 10 meetings, and sold two systems for $1k a month each. To take this to $1 million a year we need a) a customer acquisition specialist, b) two engineers to firm up the feature set, and c) money to play with more scalable channels. That costs holy-OMG more than $2k a month." the answer would be "That is intriguing and we want to hear more."