[blakewatters]

Hey guys, head of engineering at Layer here. If you actually try to go down the road of building a platform for other developers then you are very quickly going to discover that you need to build a bunch of other stuff totally separate from the core messaging service. You are going to need solutions for getting data in/out, dashboards, billing systems, sample code -- on and on. Plus you have to provide an SLA to close any meaningful business. And you'll need a pro sales team to get those opportunities interested and through the funnel. We are 35 people and I could easily keep another 5 engineers fully loaded to attack the roadmap as aggressively as we'd like. And we've been at this for 2 years. There's a lot of surface area and you need to be very good on both technical and sales dimensions to make a platform play work.

My best advice for you is to either find a unique value prop in the consumer space where you can perhaps gain a foothold and access virality or focus on finding a nice home for your engineering team and technology. I've seen a lot of advice here about how you should start consulting to create runway. This is terrible advice and you should face reality. Nobody is going to build an app and a business on top of a messaging platform that is a part time project of a handful of developers without any runway. It's just not a rational business decision and nobody who is capable of paying you real money would make that call. You are in a market with existing well funded players that are rapidly evolving their product and addressing that market through sales and marketing. You either have to build something that you can give away for free and generate traction that you can raise money against or you need to focus on selling the core assets that you do have: the people and the tech. You may want to reconsider releasing that code if you want a shot at an aquihire outcome. Best of luck.

[dosh]

agree with blake here. we're also working on a similar product, but we had customer base from the start with actual use cases, which lead to bookings/revenue early on. you have to look at from the customers' perspective to see which problem you are actually solving and how you are creating value/saving cost for their business.

in the age of over-supply, it's definitely never enough to just create technology and expect it to sell automagically. go talk to your existing/potential customers and get their feedback. start with a local optimum product catered to their needs, and generalize towards global optimum from there. even Einstein started with a special relativity and not general relativity. ;)

to offer a realistic advice, unless you have a customer-development cycle in place with a target customer base (who has at least signed a MOU/LOI/Purchase Agreement/etc.), I'd stay frugal until you have something like this, then raise money. and yes, I'd definitely stay away from consulting kind of work if you are serious about your business/product. this is a short-term way of staying afloat, but once you build your company's cycle/rhythm/culture around b2b human-labor business, it's hard to turn that around towards a product-driven business.