I’m trying to bring light to the darkness around the edges, but haven’t gotten there yet. Some days, it really brings me down how slowly we’re progressing.
I had a call with a VC I really respect yesterday. He’s seen the app a few times, and each time his response has been the same:
what’s the use case for this, why would I ever use it?
And after explaining why I and others do use it, he still didn’t buy it.
Or rather, he didn’t get why enough people would use it for him to care about it enough to write the check (as a user or as an investor; nail the first one and the second is more likely to follow).
I didn’t think he would, especially given there are currently only a few people using it, which proves his point. We just haven’t moved it forward enough to get traction yet.
He didn’t care about the execution difficulties, which have bee numerous given the part-time Rails work and my fulltime front-end work (perhaps I should have funded the devs fulltime instead of myself). He cared about the model and use cases. He knows that given a team and funding I can knock it out of the park. It’s just that it’s not something he’d use.
As we were wrapping up, he said, as he has on the other calls (and if you’ve pitched him before you know who it is simply by this line he says often),
“my wife likes to say that I’m sometimes wrong but never in doubt.”
Well, I still think he’s wrong. But I appreciate the insights, and he’s always on my list when I have something new.
For now, though, I’m pressing on with Jawaya, which will enter Beta 3 and a name change as soon as I can get enough Rails dev cycles on it. It will not be significantly different, but it will be easier to use, more obvious, and I’ll start actively promoting it to niche communities.
I might be the opposite of him: always right and always in doubt. That’s the ambition, bravado and paranoia of a founder talking, all mixed up together on a crisp Fall morning full of coffee, spit, and high hopes.