When I spoke to Partner 1 on Sunday, he assured me that everything was cool between us and I was fine with that. I didn’t want things thing to be un-cool between us. I know this sounds like dialog you might find in a movie starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., but it’s true. I have been friends with Partner 1 for 10 years and while I wasn’t happy with what transpired with our business venture, I’d also realized that starting a business is hard: really, really hard. If I had to put my finger on why I’m the last one standing out of the “original 3″ principals, it would be:
- Given our business model, we didn’t replace our salaries with bank or venture capital dollars, so we had to work for free. Working for free is very hard.
- Given our business model, even if we were selling software today, the chunk of returns would’ve happened 2-3 years from now. Waiting for returns and working for free is very hard.
- Given our business model, we didn’t want to borrow or reuse anyone else’s code. Doing so, while not only morally suspect could also have been a deal-breaker if it came to acquisition of our company. No company will buy code that has dependencies on anybody else’s, or at very least you run the risk of losing the deal if the acquiring company has fear about licensing the borrowed code from a third party. Seeing this, I had to write tons of code from scratch and this took a long, long time. Working long hours, waiting for returns, and for free is very hard.
- I had a solid knowledge of the problem and after studying lots of specs (tech notes) and code, I developed a solid understanding of the solution. Partner 2 definitely had no clue and Partner 1 didn’t fully come up to speed. Working long hours, while needing to come up to speed, waiting for returns, and for free is very hard.
- I’d had spare cycles to do it since my wife was studying for the bar in two states, but that can’t be said for everyone who has commitments at home. Working long hours, while needing to come up to speed, with commitments at home, waiting for returns, and for free is very hard.
- Doubting the available market. Once I got the feeling that Partner 1 was losing faith in our potential market (i.e. the concern about lack of hits on Google Alerts), I think that on top of everything else he lost faith in what we were trying to accomplish. Working long hours, while needing to come up to speed, with commitments at home, with lack of faith in the potential market, waiting for returns, and for free is very hard.
The one glaring thing that was lost in this whole mess was… testing. When you develop software that you intend to sell, you’ve got to test it before it goes to market. It’s almost always the case that even the best of programmers overlook something that will shake out during testing. In this case, I relied on Partner 1 to do the testing and we never got to that. When I’d met with my friend at dinner last Thursday he graciously offered to test on a home network he’d build and to offer feedback as he had it.
As of this morning, testing has taken place and results have been mixed albeit far from terrible. I had to do some code fixes and my friend had to re-test. The end result is that we have a “working program” but I’m aware of what needs to be done to solidify things into a release… before we re-test again.
I think I’m going to finish the product (both v1 and v2) first, then do the business (IP, packaging, website, etc) stuff. This will probably push everything back by a quarter but this is probably how much time it will take me to regroup.
