Experiences funding growth of a self-funded startup
It's not new news: Find a market need, build product to meet the need, and grow.
However, this works if you have the capital to make it work as simply as that. If you don't, you have to find ways to:
- Pay the day to day bills - yours, and your company's - while you grow;
- Pay for the development, marketing, and support of your product.
How to do this? Often, startup companies will do consulting work to bring in the cash to build the business. And therein lies interesting things.
Technorati Tags: Software
We take on consulting projects from time to time when we have some new initiative that needs investment that simply isn't in the current budget. And I guess the purpose of this post isn't so much to talk about doing consulting - it is to talk about what we see when we do the consulting.
Software development - whether desktop, server, or website software - takes discipline. Many consulting customers don't have the discipline in their DNA - either because they're not software developers, or (if they are) they get lazy. So when they write down what they want, it's amazing how much detail they don't really realize must be sorted out along the way. There are big up-front design decisions that are often simply unaddressed. And there is literally a constant stream of small decisions that customers must make, but aren't ready for the investment of time required to make them.
We're proud of one thing here at Plum Canary: We've got people who have been building software since 1984. Lots of different kinds of software. And we understand the need to be compulsive about making the small decisions in a way that looks ahead to what may be, not just what is. We may not be perfect. We're sure our products will always need some new feature or capability we didn't think of. But from our first release to our last, we strive to make the tons of small decisions disappear into the background for our users, and make software easy to use, and make it meet the need it was designed to meet.
I know this sounds like a bit of bragging, but when you see (as we do when we do consulting) how so many companies (who should really know better) don't know how to do this well, it makes us proud to know we can.