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Comment by williamstein | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the market I am targeting as huge, and I agree with you that it is probably easier for Wordpress to succeed than SageMathCloud. I'm perhaps too realistic about the potential market for SageMathCloud, which was a reason why A16Z wasn't interested. If I took VC funding I might not have the option to focus on a smaller market.

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Btw nobody clueful goes to meet VC, at lest on the first goaround saying they are looking for funding. Instead they say "were not looking for funding but would be interested to hear your thoughts and open to any introductions you might think appropriate from your network."

So you inadvertently signaled "I'm looking for funding" in VC-speak ;)

>If I took VC funding I might not have the option to focus on a smaller market.

Agree 100% I just wanted to make sure your expectations were realistic based on the what you wrote. I hope the best for you!

Just curious, what kind of resources you have and efforts you make in the area of marketing, business development, and sales of SageMath and SMC? Have you taken any external funding for SageMath and SMC beyond grants?

The market may not be large enough and opportunity may not be as fast growing that VCs expect, still it may be possible to build a decent size business with SageMath.

Regarding SMC, right now we are growing our sales slowly but very consistently. Some universities tried SMC last year, liked it, and are significantly expanding their subscriptions this year. However, our top focus right now is on fixing every bug, implementing key features that users demand, and dealing with issues that become clear from support requests, while working hard behind the scenes to build better technical foundations for growth. We have enough users (e.g., often 500 simultaneous active users, and we hit about 1150 simultaneous running projects this week) to give us a good sense that what we are building provides value and is working (or not). Our business model is freemium, and the conversion rate for students using SMC in courses is high.

> Have you taken any external funding for SageMath and SMC beyond grants?

For SageMath, all funding is via grants, and I have almost no such grants these days (I used to get grants in the early days). There's a grant in Europe called OpenDreamKit that provides substantial funding right now. There's also one new NSF grant that will provide some funding for free open source textbooks built with lots of example using Sage.

For SageMathCloud, I did a round of Angel investment about a year ago in order to "bootstrap" things, and hopefully give us the time we need to build the business to be profitable. The Angel investors are a small group of people I know from the mathematics world. Right now the company is not profitable, even with a small number of low-paid developers, so it's critical to have this money to make up for the slack until we have more customers.

We can and should do a lot more marketing when the time is right. I hope that time is very soon.

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