Curious Office

ImageKind is only going to get better but we’re delighted with what we’ve been able to achieve with relatively little money. In many ways, developing ‘more with less’ remains a very interesting challenge although we’re now entering a phase where the actual incubation of the concept has been demonstrated but marketing of the community has not yet commenced. We’ve been proactively contacted by a number of angel and venture investors in that last few weeks though our plan to this point has been to fund the effort internally. Since we opted to internally fund the project in the first phase, I had to put pretty serious pressure on our developers to release a lot of features very early even though we all knew that more time and money would allow us to put out something even better if we had waited longer. But, the process is a balance. The product is never done. And that’s why we’re reconsidering taking outside capital. It’s much easier to see how you can do more for members after the first version is complete than you can conceptualize before any work is done at all. So, raising more money may be one way to acknowledge that the product is never really done if there is a real market for the product in the first place. Taking our first few meetings with venture capitalists suggests that raising money for our little venture could be a very real possibility. However, I’ve decided that the best thing for us to do with this particular project is to assume that we won’t raise a dime and continue with the same perspectives that we started with. That includes the following:

1) Keep delivering (shipping) features as fast as you can. Daily if necessary.
2) Focus on getting cash flow. Getting cash early is more important than focusing on a long term profitability argument. Get cash in hand in the first few months from sales.
3) VC’s tend to hate service based businesses. Yet, in the early days of every business, the business is basically about servicing your first and few customers to the nth degree. My message internally has been to ‘over service’ our first few hundred customers. Over time, the company should hopefully graduate to a more automated machine.
4) Project conservatively yet understaff and underspend anyway.
5) Continually draw comparisons to businesses people already know. Many people know who Cafe Press is. So, I love it when I do a Google search on “Cafe Press of Wall Art?” and get several returns. The market is drawing an easy-to-understand parallel between our business and something else that they already understand but that isn’t quite the same. This allows you to draft on the marketing budgets of other companies.

We’re really flattered by the contacts from potential investors. One thing we all agree on is that developing communities usually takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you’d normally think. Occassionally YouTube’s can happen. But, Zazzle didn’t raise $16 million from Kleiner Perkins for nothing!! Not NEEDING the money certainly seems to help the process but recognizing that things can be more expensive than you think is probably healthy thinking.

If you’re into this kind of thing, or if you are looking to raise money this is a rather interesting link.

Thanks to Andrew Fife at Cryptine Networks for pulling it together.