Comment by eduardordm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eduardordm | Hacker News Reader

chanced,

I'm also married, also own a house and I've been through this. I hope you can get something useful from my comment. Our realities are certain not the same, but anyway...:

I don't know why you need money at this stage, but please, do not depend on angel investing right now. Do something that you can charge users for right now (today!). Charge them. Are those potential customers willing to pay you TODAY for the product to be delivered in X weeks? Do that. Do not play lottery with your life.

Angel investors will invest in pretty much two types of startups: 1) startups with crazy ideas that can make everyone millions or fail miserably (think color.com) 2) startups that have a reasonable idea with good traction where return should be smaller, but certain

That said, my opinion is for you to get users to pay you right now or try to do some consulting and build something people will pay for immediately.

This was a very honest comment, best of luck to you.

eduardordm,

First off, thank you for the response.

>> I don't know why you need money at this stage, but please, do not depend on angel investing right now. Do something that you can charge users for right now (today!). Charge them. Are those potential customers willing to pay you TODAY for the product to be delivered in X weeks? Do that. Do not play lottery with your life.

Great advice and I wish I could follow it. My service has a co-dependent userbase. My customers are businesses that only get value if the end-users are present. I've asked a number of them and while they are willing to give it a shot, they won't pay for it until the other userbase is sufficiently established.

>>Angel investors will invest in pretty much two types of startups: 1) startups with crazy ideas that can make everyone millions or fail miserably (think color.com) 2) startups that have a reasonable idea with good traction where return should be smaller

Very well put. I believe it falls into the first category but ultimately the opinions of the angels is what matters there.

>> try to do some consulting I have been; unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of work right now in my area & for whatever reason, telecommute gigs aren't popping up right now.

I think I'm going to continue to push ahead and hopefully build out both users bases in my area. It'll mean giving the service away for awhile but hopefully that'll be enough to garnish some weight when I cold-call angels.

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