Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink

I'm really very fond of notifo and the service that it offers is invaluable, but what I think is wrong with it is the packaging. I can understand what notifo does, but I don't think anyone else in my family would ever understand it.

If I were them, I'd pivot notifo to become a kik-like instant messenger, but with a little twist : it's the IM that webservices can send messages to. So you grow on the consumer front because people can just use it for normal IMing between friends, but then you make revenue on the back-end by selling the website to user offering (when it exceeds a certain size).

Great post as usual Paul (OP).

The points raised are really good pointers for other startup companies and their approach towards fundraising, which let's not kid ourselves is one of (if not the) most important things to do.

I am sure that it is a really good product and has a lot of potential. I can easily see notifo as being one of the little tricks in a developer's bag, a framework that handles all of your notifications while you concentrate on other, more important aspects of your application.

I would agree with maxklein on the approach towards Notifo. Yes it is revolutionary and brand new technology and it did take me quite a bit to understand and comprehend what it does. The understanding was also hindered by the fact that I cannot see what it does, since I do not have an iPhone and the Android application is under development.

The only obstacle is understanding what notifo is and what notifo does. Some people will not get it but the more do, the better it will be for you :)

Keep up the good work !!

OP here: If you get any nginx errors on my site can you let me know here? I think I'm about to jump ship with my WP setup and move to Jekyll.

Paul is rapidly turning into one of my favorite bloggers. Long-form, candid, and a lot of actionable advice.

Posts like these make me wish a friends&family round was a viable option for me. Right now my startup is in the sort of place where most of our focus should be going to the product, it's live, but not quite launched. We have a lot of great feedback that we really want to execute on before doing a proper launch.

And on the other hand being live, but not quite launched, is giving us a lot of scaling issues. You might as well say it's becoming a bit costly to run everything ... and we can only live without money for so long. That's why we're starting to devote half of our time to freelancing, just to put food on the table. This in turn affects the execution I mentioned.

Of course instead of freelancing we could completely stop executing and go for a round of fundraising ... but surely there's a chicken&egg problem hiding in there somewhere. Thing is, we have some soft-circled angels/VC's ... but we can only handle those so fast next to executing on the vision and putting food on the table.

Ok, rant over, not really certain whether it's on topic or not.

Must be great to be in a place where getting meetings with 40 interested angels is not some kind of impossible fantasy!

Thanks for the detailed article, Paul. Do you have any paying customers? It's not clear from the Notifo site if you have a paid version out yet. Don't want you to spill all your beans, but it would also help to know how many total users you have (ballpark?) to give some context to your fundraising story.

Paul, Always enjoy your comments and insights. Glad things are working out so well. If you are in Atlanta for the holidays i would love to grab drinks and catch up.

Steven.

Pretty good summary.

For what it's worth, it's only ever this bad on your first time around raising funding. Even follow up rounds for your startup are 10x easier (assuming you did what you said you'd do.)

Love his app to track his mood from day-to-day. Priceless.