| Travis Hughes Interactive
| |
After many, many months of hard effort and false starts, my advergaming product is finally
moving ahead, line by line of code.
However, at the rate it is moving it is still 6 months away until I'll even have an
alpha version and perhaps 12 months total until it is stable enough and complete enough to sell.
But I don't want to lose any more time on this as it's being developed.
To capture this time 'under the curve' I have two options:
1) Spend more money to get it built faster (that is, hire some additional engineers).
But the catch is I don't have the money to do so, which is why development is stretched
out over these months.
OR
2) Let it product development continue at the same rate but spend my time building a stable of
customer accounts/my rolodex and getting revenue by selling a similar substitute product
into the marketplace. In this case, I would partner with another foreign company (European)
and I would own the customer relationship and ideally later replace their product with my own
as I would own the customer relationship and I would be the single point of contact for these
customers. But there are risks to it.
Options To Consider:
===================================
1) Approach a particular European company that has core technology, sell for them/represent
them in US and get them to make a few 'tweaks' to the product to make it salable into the marketplace.
Benefits:
- Early user feedback, ability to sell into accounts I need for my product when it's done.
- Own the customer relationship
- Make money to fund my company and build it faster
Caveats/Dangers:
- I may create a new competitor who was unaware of the use of their technology in this market
- Customers may not want to switch to mine may ask the European company to 'tweak' core technology for their use.
2) Find a couple other engineers willing to work for equity.
Benefits:
- Can get work done much faster, cash expenditures stay almost same (save for variable expenses).
Caveats/Dangers:
- Took me 6 months to just find the first engineer!
3) Raise either angel or VC money to fund my plan.
Benefits:
- Can speed this up dramatically.
Caveats/Dangers:
- Give up lots of equity
- May never get the funding so wasting lots and lots of time, energy and focus PLUS your plan
is then, "out in the wild" and the VCs may give it to a friend who copies it or somehow else
I get screwed.
4) Get Full time job (and stop the consulting)All,
Benefits:
- No need to give up more equity. Earning lots of cash to pay programmers and can hire a couple more.
caveats/Dangers:
- Very stressful
- Becoming unfocused/scattered from full time job and startup
Comments, ideas on this?
Thanks.
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