Week One Update
Sarah, Brian, Sean, Faith
I have a list of 45 people loaded into Substack but thankfully I only âsubscribedâ you four for now. I spent most of this week doing calls, meetings and consulting work, so I didnât get to finish the big post, titled "What are âTools for Thoughtâ and why do I care about them?â. But I promised myself Iâd send the first mail this week so weâll start light with a quick progress updateâŠ
The most useful conversation I had was with Colm Tuite. He recently raised $4.2m pre-product for a technical product which has similarities with what I want to build. His path to that started probably 18 months ago and looked, roughly speaking, something like:
Built an audience on twitter & Medium, talking about design tooling and becoming an expert on it.
Wrote a blog post looking for a co-founder. 50 applied, among whom he found his co-founder. Shortly after launched a kickstarter to see if there was community interest & validated that there was.
Decided to raise money to build a team. Sent 70 cold emails to VCs â only one responded. Also applied to several incubators. Most rejected. Did one pitch in London which piqued interest of one other VC.
Of the only 2 VCs who showed interest, ended up pitching them both within 2 days and managed to impress. Inadvertently created competition among them which resulted in a bidding war and brought the round up to 4.2.
Since raising money, now spending most of his time between admin & hiring, not building.
I think that when itâs time to invest in building the product, this is not a bad blueprint to follow. I will need to build a big team which will likely be expensive, and I would like to find a co-founder to increase chances of success. Hopefully the VC reach-out part will be a little easier due to existing network & reputation.
But my main takeaway from the conversation was that right now, I donât envy the situation Colm is in, and donât want to go that route yet. One because Iâm enjoying making things and having freedom of movement, and two because the value proposition Iâm creating is not polished enough to go to market in the way he did. So my approach for now is to 1. Get my head down and build a prototype, and 2. To begin talking about it online and build engagement and perhaps a small audience. I am also thinking there might be a way to speed up getting the prototype built, but Iâll report more on that next week.
Until then, peace, and thanks for reading đ