Before I began Entrepreneur Academe I thought we’d need a seed round to make it happen. Instead, after a promise I made to one of the mentors, I hacked the site together in 10 days to hit the date I’d said it be live by.
What you see on Glimt.it now is far from the vision that I did wireframes for originally and though launching the vision from the beginning would have been amazing, and no doubt taken us further than we are to date, the route and journey we’ve gone on has been invaluable.
When you have a living and breathing site that is live – and asks both time and money from you – you learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t, but also with regards to what you need. There’s no denying that the learning process to some degree overall may take longer due to that you can’t move as fast when cash is limited. But, if cashflow and runway wasn’t an issue, we wouldn’t have had to figure out many of the operational and business aspects that we’ve now had to work through. Like how to make money from the start and continuously being on top of making the best use of the resources that we have.
We’ve gone though a number of iterative circles where vision, the practicalities of realising that vision and the business side of making it happen has gone hand in hand. My 15 years of working at (digital) agencies, client side and with startups have helped a lot, but until you tackle all of it, everything is hypotheses, albeit very informed hypotheses.
Rather than spend a five or six figure sum on the technical platform from the beginning, we’ve iterated from the first version based on what we’ve learnt that we need. It has worked great and also helped us identify a prioritised list of what we need and that’s not a list of requirements based on what we think we need. It’s a list based on what we actually need. To grow, automise more and improve the experience for our users and clients.
If we decided to raise a first seed round this year, I can confidently say that we’ll be able to do a lot more with that money than had we raised it from the start. We’ve accomplished a lot with very little to date and that puts us in a great place for the future.
For anyone who’s thinking about launching a product, don’t just do an minimum viable product, but do a minimum valuable product and get it out there and test it. Many things can be hacked together in a short space of time and it’ll allow you to test what you’ve set out to do.
Image via Flickr user Thomas Heylen
