I am a seasoned tech professional who has had a reasonably successful fin-tech consulting firm with contractors and strategic development partnerships. I want to bootstrap as long as possible to maintain control, and have self funded to date through a low volume high margin businessmodel. I realize that to grow this product successfully it will take a decent support and dev staff. My strong suit is product development and user experience. Raising capital and sales and marketing are not my strengths and I have been reluctant to partner or take capital due to bad experiences in prior startups. Maintaining control has become a major mantra and I want to continue to grow as a business and as an entrepreneur.
Market to your niche, talking about the same problems your beta clients signed on to get fixed.
These are called "pain points" and are valuable language. Anyone in the situation will instantly pay attention to you.
Note that I am saying you should talk about the problem(s), not the features of your software. People want to get out of bad situations, not buy features.
Yes, retain equity. Once given away, it's difficult to recover. And it can easily be worth much more than the capital raised...which is meant for operating expenses anyway, not your personal use.
If the beta clients have paid you for their involvement, then it would seem you've proven the economic viability of the solution. Either way, your next job is to filter for people having the same problem the software solved for your beta clients, and get new clients to pay for the solution.
Answered 7 years ago
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