Every entrepreneur who has ever lived as already said, “If only I had [X] dollars, I would be able to do [Y].” The point is that you don’t, and your job is to learn how to deal with that reality.
Your initial publicity in no way reflects how your product will perform in the long term. Assuming that having a “big launch” will save you from having a bad product is a death sentence.
Nothing Is Trivial
If your revenue model requires any of the following in order for it to function, then it’s not a revenue model –
- 100,000 users in 3 months.
- People to buy virtual goods (unless your demographic is the Club Penguin crowd)
- Big deals with huge suppliers/vendors/companies going through in under 6 months, “We need to sign an advertising deal with Microsoft to kick start our ad revenue stream.”
- Consumers to shift an intrinsic behavior pattern.
Only 1 in 30 of the the lawyers, consultants, PR agents and marketing gurus who will pitch you early on are worth their fees — probably less. If you have to hire one, get references and check with three (or more) of their former clients to see what they thought.
Unless you are well connected or very lucky, you will never close a round of serious Angel funding, let alone court a VC, if you have under 10,000 users. If money is absolutely critical, look for private investors.
You don’t need anywhere near as much money as you think you do, and you need it for entirely different things than you imagine.
While it may happen in time, the first 18 months of your startup is not about finding a way to get rich. Your job is to find a way to squeeze a real revenue stream out of your model.
Almost all of your critics are correct. That doesn’t mean that your idea is bad, it just means that there are some very obvious flaws that need to be changed.
The romantic picture of startups going from nothing to being sold for hundreds of millions in 12 months is a crock. For every startup that is a breakout success, there are a thousand that have to grind.
Nothing about getting your first 50,000 users is trivial. Imagine trying to move a small city in the same direction, when no one has a phone, and everyone is being barked at by 12 people at once.
…But remember, you didn’t sign onto a startup because you thought it was going to be easy.
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