This is a really informative and inspiring article.
It has been 6 months (not 6 years) since I quit my full-time job as a Rust developer to start my own business.
As time goes by, I can feel the pressure of mortgage and car loans, and I can also feel the care and pressure of my family.
My original plan was to make a new IDE for Glicol (https://glicol.org), and to develop relevant hardware with firmware written in rust for school education.
I sent some cold emails to VCs, but most of them got no reply.
I also sent an email to the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, offering to perform for children for free, but they didn’t reply for two months. I shamelessly sent it again, and someone finally replied with a rejection.
Only one VC talked to me and thought that I should convince and validate a partner first, and he suggested that I go to an incubator.
Very good advice.
Later I learned that even Norwegian education startups skipped Norway and focused directly on the US market.
People from the incubator also told me that it is impossible for Norwegian schools to accept new things independently.
This is very enlightening to me because most of Glicol's visitors are indeed from the US. And it took me so long to discover this fact.
But if I don’t start, I’ll never get past those six months.
A deceased friend and I tried something like glicol in the mid-80's. We hacked a different crystal oscillator on a Zilog SCC board design donated by our employer to make a MIDI interface. My friend coded 'lxm', Language for the eXpression of Music. My job was to 'mxl', Musically eXpressed Language - to capture from the Juno 106 we were developing with. We weren't able to market it at that time. For your project, maybe find a US-based partner, there are plenty of Magnet and Charter Schools that can independently develop curriculum for non-core subjects. A possible way in is to find ones with a PTO (not PTA), the parents can drive this sort of thing. PTOs are independent corporations that serve one or a few schools whereast PTA is a top-down org and they are not the place to try to drive innovation IMO.
The way I think about investors, they are an extremely high interest loan. I have a money partner in my startup, I negotiated his equity down to 70% from the 80% he wanted. So if this product hits (already have a regular customer) and makes a million, he'll get $700K for investing less than $100K. I'll get $300K for investing probably about $300K worth of my own time and hand half of that to the IRS. Balance that with keeping 100% of $0 = $0.
I agree with you about VC and you are obviously more experienced as well. At that time, I just thought, try VC. Later I could understand the track they wanted me to take, and I also had other options such as bootstrapping.
But if it has to be some exponential growth and I am forced to change the attitude of exploration, that is not my original intention. I'd rather do some other business and keep open source software going.
Wow. I am in similar situation. I quit job after having a baby and when workplace discriminated against me. I decided not to fight and rather start something of my own.
Now, I see no traction after building an MVP. We are in EduTech and eCommerce space. It is so hard to get any response from decision makers.
People would rather pay big corporations millions than talk to a regular person who is offering $200 software.
Shift to a different MVP.
Try to get some revenue immediately.
My special relationship to Glicol is a different story as it was not designed for commercial use and it's purely experimental during my phd.
It's just because of people's encouragement that I try to build the education interface for it.
And after checking a few existed edu interface, I realise the core tech on their products is close to zero. All the hard work is on the sales team and marketing.
So the first few deals are the most important at the moment, and I need to fight with the idea that I want to improve the code before I talk to schools.
It has been 6 months (not 6 years) since I quit my full-time job as a Rust developer to start my own business.
As time goes by, I can feel the pressure of mortgage and car loans, and I can also feel the care and pressure of my family.
My original plan was to make a new IDE for Glicol (https://glicol.org), and to develop relevant hardware with firmware written in rust for school education.
I sent some cold emails to VCs, but most of them got no reply.
I also sent an email to the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, offering to perform for children for free, but they didn’t reply for two months. I shamelessly sent it again, and someone finally replied with a rejection.
Only one VC talked to me and thought that I should convince and validate a partner first, and he suggested that I go to an incubator.
Very good advice.
Later I learned that even Norwegian education startups skipped Norway and focused directly on the US market.
People from the incubator also told me that it is impossible for Norwegian schools to accept new things independently.
This is very enlightening to me because most of Glicol's visitors are indeed from the US. And it took me so long to discover this fact.
But if I don’t start, I’ll never get past those six months.