[afandian]

Genuinely non-snarky question.

It looks like a standard calculator and conversion app, and it looks like most of the implementation I could imagine being in a calculator app is already done.

Why would you even think of raising funds? You thought it was a good idea to write the blog post, so it obviously crossed your mind.

[CookWithMe]

Because he went through an accelerator. He'll be told for months that the demo day and the pitch will be super-duper important, because investors.

I attended a different accelerator than him (but also corporate and in Berlin), and the idea that bootstrapping may be viable, or even that waiting for another 6 to 12 months when one has real feedback from the market, was never brought up. This is especially sad, because the situation in Berlin is basically inverted to the one in SV: Living costs are cheap, raising (seed) money is hard.

Our Demo Day... afaik no startup got an investment because they met an investor there :-) Afaik, some proceeded to later (>12 months) raise money, one did have success with crowd-funding. But we all wasted a serious amount of time training our pitch...

[MateuszMucha]

I agree with most things and that's been the general sentiment in our accelerator, too. However, I don't consider it a waste of time. Pitching is great in a way that it forces you to have a clear vision of what you want to do. And boy, I needed it. Every time I pitched, I got questions I knew I didn't have good answers to. These were the biggest holes in my business plan and pitching alone made me think harder about them.

As for the demo day, we were told early on that it's a big thing, but it's unlikely that we'll be discovered then. I got in touch with a pretty great investor who's kinda interested, but I think they're way out of our league now (series A/B level), so we'll wait. Also, on that day we initiated a B2B deal which just might turn out to be what we need at this stage (we're building a prototype now).

I love the Berlin-SV comparison and your conclusion!

[solutionyogi]

Exactly my thought.

I went to their website, tried to find non-trivial calculations and I couldn't find any. I really don't know why there is even a question of whether to raise funding or not.

[MateuszMucha]

afandian,

This app is just an MVP, the future hopefully is much bigger. On of the reasons is "because it's what startups do" and "everybody thinks that's the next step". I do have needs (development, content creation and in-house marketing team), but none of them are a must-have, I can do it a bit slower with whatever means I have at my disposal.

[ohquu]

What does "the future hopefully is much bigger" mean for a calculator application? Competition with Wolfram Alpha? Unless you're doing something on that scale, I can't imagine what you mean.

[MateuszMucha]

@ohquu: people calculate craploads of things on a daily basis. More often than not they're using calculators that look pretty much the same as those in the 70's. I want to make it easier, faster and more pleasant. I want people to be able to calculate things that right now they can't and aren't willing to learn how to.

"Much bigger" doesn't need to mean we're gonna send people to Mars. Solving even small problems for tens or hundreds of millions of people qualifies as "much bigger" for me.

[schnelle]

I'm glad you have a successful application, but are people really unable to multiply their bill by 1.15 to get the new total with a tip?

I'm curious, what is the most requested new feature you're getting from your users.

[MateuszMucha]

Yeah, simple percentage, tip & discount calculators are the most used.

Feature request come from markup/profit margin and "trader's" calculator users. And they have more serious needs (and they never want the same thing...).

[theonewolf]

This is actually the most stressful part of dinner. Along with splitting a bill fairly.

Of course I can do it, but when I'm talking with people I'd rather do it much faster with less likelihood of a mistake.

[sjs382]

Move the decimal point to the left. Boom, %10.

Move the decimal point to the left, then double. Boom, %20.

[MCRed]

Asking this question is exactly why they shouldn't take VC money.

Instead of running around trying to find an answer for "how will you be worth a billion dollars?!?!?!!!!" they should be figuring out where their market is.

[k__]

Made my day, thank you.

Also from the site "Humans make mistakes. This app doesn’t."

Bold claims.

But I could imagine something like WA with a nice mobile interface being a must have app.

[afandian]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/26b.html