Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, June 14, 2006:
NextNY Follow Up
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Went over to the NextNY meetup yesterday. Not bad. A good turn out. I was hoping that the talk would focus on products, creating great products, marketing a new company, figuring out markets to enter, you know basically things someone starting out would need to know. Instead it focused entirely on VC funding and locations for your office. In fact only 5 minutes at the very end were left for actual Q&A from the crowd, though that was supposed to be the majority of the time.
I think the people running it have the right idea in mind, perhaps at the next event they'll be a bit more focus and a few less invited speakers. Also one VC speaker is probably enough. At this event the majority were VC related and they tend to bicker amongst themselves.
Personally I think if you're starting a business getting VC funding is the last thing you should worry about. If you can get customers and make sales you'll be able to grow organically without worrying about all the overhead of a VC (excluding business which obviously need funding like hardware companies). I suppose it depends on your goals. Mine were to be my own boss and run a successful software company. If your goals are to be "famous" VC may be a better route. I'd rather be happy for along time then have a year of huge growth and back to the job market 6 months after that when the money runs out.
Just today there's a great example of why getting caught up with lots of employees, VC's, millions in bank loans and so on is not the way to go:
Bob Wyman - PubSub Death
I am looking forward to the next event though and continuing my participation in the community. It's nice to have some tech momentum on the east coast.
Discussion
Ian, thanks for letting me pick your brain for a few minutes after the roundtable wrapped up. Great to hear the self-funded story in more detail. Definitely helps as we continue down the path of our product development. Till next time!
Created by Danny on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
No problem. I checked out your guys app and it definitely looks interesting. I would have killed for it at one of my previous jobs where I had a bunch of part timers reporting to me and keeping track of their time was a huge pain.
I recommend you guys try and find ways to get the word out among old school businesses about your product. I'd be especially focused on colleges, hospitals, and other community type institutions that use lots of part time people and have limited budget and IT resources.
Created by Ian on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
I missed the last event but I'm planning on attending the Google one in a few weeks. Will you be there?
Created by Gil on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
I'm not sure yet. It's probably not worth the trip down just to hang out at Google and hear what they're up to.
Created by Ian on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
Ian,
Thanks so much for your participation. Hope to see you at Google and I hope that you contribute some of this really great feedback to the group. Thoughts like this will help us make nextNY a lot more relevent to its userbase.
Created by Charlie on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
Thanks Charlie. I'm not raging on it, just looking forward to bringing it around to more business oriented topics. Perhaps that was just an odd first one to attend.
Created by Ian on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm
I recently read "Startup", a history of the pre-.com GO Corporation, and it was really eye-opening. Obviously, they had a need for VC money (as they were building a "pen computer" and had to build the hardware themselves). But it's hard to believe they plowed along with 200 employees for something like 3 years with no sales. It's also an illustration of how vicious the cutting-edge computing world was - when you play with the big money, be prepared to confront some really dirty tricks. GO had contracts twisted and outright broken by Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, all of whom were supposed to be allies at one point.
Life seems much more peaceful as a micro-ISV than a $75M corporation!
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Created by Jesse Smith on 06.14.2006 6:07 pm