A couple of months ago I read Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start". Did I learn a lot? Maybe not, but it comforted me in my choice of starting immeria and working on WASP the way I did..Yesterday, Guy posted "Plan B for fundraising", where he proposes an alternative to the traditional venture capital funding and startup approach. Basically, Plan B is exactly what I'm doing:
- Finance: I'm using my own savings and I do consulting and tutoring work to pay for bread & butter, but this slows down WASP development cycle. I received several offers, some of them very interesting, but at this point I prefer to stay focused and avoid new types of pressure.
- Be greedy: I cut down on expenses. I use my home office, and for attending conferences, I'm lucky enough to be a speaker, so at least it cuts down on some of the expenses. But I had to skip some conferences, like XChange, in order to focus on my work and cut down my expenses.
- Late product: yes, I'm later than I anticipated with WASP. I wanted to release my v1.0 much sooner, and users are becoming more impatient to get the unlocked version. The momentum is great, I need to be there! In the meantime, those who really, really are eager to use the full version of WASP can contact me and I will do the work as a consultant.
- Product praise & market growth: I posted "WASP Love!", and I get lots of great feedback through Kampyle and the support forum running on GetSatisfaction. My user base is now around 10,000, with nearly 50 new installs and 200,000 data points collected daily. Fellow bloggers and vendors alike are also talking about WASP.
- Growth options: When I left my previous employer, I had been working in parallel for about 6 months. My goal was to "be alone and have fun" for a year. So after XMas time, I will be hiring my team: business development, developers, analyst, support, admin, etc. (If ever you are interested, especially if living in the Quebec-city region, let me know!)