cirroc

The hard part of working that much is trying to balance work and Family. Mostly I've given up sleeping- I know it's not ideal, but I'm down to 3-4 hours a night.

In full honestly, the 65 hour figure only comes in when I include travel time. (about 2 hours/day)

My typical day is:

Get up at 5am, and head to work. Work from 6-4, then head home. Drive home. Family stuff from 5-7 until my partner gets out of work. 7-1, Startup stuff.

1-5, sleep.

On the weekends, I try to get a bit more family stuff in, but then I usually end up going to work for another 3-4 hours on Sat/Sun, and put in the rest of the day on the startup.

I wish I had time for a 2nd job, but, really, the startup is the 2nd.. and the 3rd. ;)

I'd love any ideas to raise additional money for the startup- If we could work on it full-time, we'd really be doing something special.

Plan A) Don't fail. If we are able to bring in a moderate level of revenue, we could probably cover the costs of repayment, even if we had to halt further development.

Plan B) Suck it up, and pay for it for the next 5 years. Obviously, this plan sucks, but it's better to have tried, isn't it?

I'd love any other ideas for financing- We want to make this happen; I'm just looking at it, and seeing a loan as the most achievable option. I'd love to be wrong ;)

I know we could (They've offered), but I think it's a pretty terrible user experience.

Essentially, they'd be pre-ordering based on trust in us, with nothing to show for it. I'd be happy to give them an extended subscription, but I feel like it would feel cheap, and make us look bad, not to mention that it would be a pretty frustrating experience for them.

I agree with the idea, I just don't think it can be made to work in a classy way.

Very good point on getting the partner involved in the loan- I'd like to do this, but I'm not sure how to. We have a Delaware corp set up, but since the company doesn't have any credit, I don't know how it could take out the loan.

Perhaps the company could take out the loan, and we could both co-sign?

We're probably about 3 months from being at a point I'd feel comfortable charging- If we got a 10K loan, we could probably cover this easy.

The problem comes in that if our estimates are off, we've made the world a lot more painful for ourselves. We've had quite a few customers asking to pre-register, but I don't like the quality of experience that would give.

I appreciate the advice, thanks.

Thanks- That's certainly an avenue I'll look into.. It looks like they do the SBA loans that I had mentioned, but also do their own private loans, which might be an option.

We have two people in our team- If I could get a Chase loan to allow our lead coder to go full-time, and keep my job to make the payments, we could be OK until launch.

It's not optimal, but it might let us get the time we need to launch successfully and quickly.

I'm very open to any other ideas, and appreciate the discussion.

Fair point, but we need to do something. I'd love any ideas- We're Mass based, and we've got the code about 80 percent done, depending on how you count. We've got users who are ready to pay when we launch, and we've got a decent potential for growth, but we know we're unlikely to be the next Google with this project.

In some ways, we're working to get the bugs out of our Engines, and working on our bona fides, so we can buy google with the proceeds from out NEXT project ;)

Alright- You seem to be in the consensus on the news.yc board, and I'm coming around to your viewpoint. That being said, what are the alternatives? I'm already working 65 hours a week on my primary job, which I need to pay rent and the server costs, art costs, etc for the startup.. Then I'm putting in another 30-35 a week on the startup (12 on Sat + 12 on Sun + 4ish Tues-Wed-Thurs)..

I can't really take another job- I just don't have time to do that, and actually code anything. Approaching AAs is hard, since the product isn't as "Sexy" as a lot of things. It's likely to a good few hundred K per year after we get it going, but it's not the next Microsoft.

Do you have any ideas on where else to look? Is there something outside the AA route, or even a sub-niche within in we should look at?

Hrmm.. Very fair points, both on outside investors, and on CAPCOS. With outside investors, I know we'd get a better valuation if we could launch, and start bringing in revanue before we go out knocking on doors. Investing in a dream and a codebase is one thing, but seeing the numbers on paper has to help.

You can if you put your personal assets and reputation at stake instead. To a degree, this is what you're doing in a startup anyway. You're putting your money, time and energy on the line, and hoping for a reasonable return on that.

Granted, you may be right in that it's not worth it for many projects. The project we're working on isn't as sexy as some though, and is unlikely to take over the world. What it does have is a moderate number (300ish) of users ready to sign on as paying customers at launch, and a good chance to tripling that within 6 months. Those aren't retire to Tahiti numbers, but they're enough to pay for dev.

Those sort of numbers make it hard to approach most AAs, who want to see a 10:1 investment:return

That's fair, but at the same time, I'm hesitant to agree, on a few ground-

1) You're certainly right that banks have nothing to go on. My credit isn't amazing, but its certainly decent enough that I could probably manage a small loan from the banks on personal credit alone. It would provide a few months float money, at the least.

2) You've argued heavily before that there needs to be an element of becoming personally committed[1], providing motivation. Having a Personal Loan over your head is certainly one way to do that.

3) Are there other options? Raising Angel money would be more difficult for us that for some projects, because we're not as Sexy as we could be.. We sent in a yCombinator proposal that was very ambitious, but were rejected, so we scaled back to what we thought we could achieve on our own.

We're doing a pretty decent job on it, but its not going to be the next Google, or even the next Scribd. Most Angel Investors seem likely to want to back a sexier horse, so to speak.

We do have a dedicated group of users waiting to sign up for paid subscriptions, and we know we could hit profitability reasonably quickly, but how do we get from here to there?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html