I am an experienced (yet not necessarily that successful ;)) entrepreneur, and I have an idea for a new startup. I've collected about 100 signups from potential end users and potential vendors (to show the potential product/market fit). Since I've been down that road before I know it might be easier to raise now, with a much lower valuation of course, than later, when the product's ready and then I'll be expected to show traction before raising. I need a bit of cash to help me pay developers and get things going. How far off am I? does that sound doable at this stage?
An additional option I've just used: Similar to a tech founder. I sought out and used a student from the local college's Programmer Analyst course. Work placements were part of their course and they actually needed these work terms to graduate. Of course, paid is preferable, but not required. This provided us not only a working prototype, but got us very close to our Beta release. From there, at the end of the work term we offered the student equity to continue on with us.
It worked very well, and I suppose isn't very different from taking on a technical founder. But in this case the student had additional benefits to performing the work (he gets to graduate) and was willing to do the work for less equity.
In our case all of this was possible because the technical requirements were simple enough to be within a new graduates skill set, of course.
Answered 10 years ago
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