Comment by rizzn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rizzn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Honestly, that was my problem the during two or so go-rounds ago. I had the first free podcast hosting company some six years ago, and it quickly grew to thousands of podcasters in a matter of months, seizing close to half the world's podcasters at the time.

I wanted to grow it past what I was capable of doing on my own, and I started talking to VCs. They were all trying to get me to write budgets for ten, twenty million. My cost was my time and my server bill. I really had no idea what to do with that much money.

I coulda used $100k-$500k to build out a sales team, hire a few developers, maybe a content manager, and be fully funded for at least two years or so...

.. oddly, I couldn't find anyone who was willing to fund me for a reasonable amount, and there was no way I could justify an insane valuation the tens of millions guys wanted.

This is exactly what we are going through. The VCs we talk to want to see revenue projections of $50MM+ in 5 years and want a project plan for investment in $MM. All we need is in $150k range and it is extremely difficult to find money in that tier. We have decided to continue boot strapping and stop wasting time for now.

Depending on your location, it sounds like the closest thing to what you want is to find a patron or an incubator/accelerator. They aren't that common everywhere, so it's probably just as effective as playing the lottery if you aren't in a tech hotspot.

SiliconANGLE incubates a few startups along those lines (SALabs), and for a time we were looking to align with a larger fund to do that on a more scaled up capacity, but it seems like the establishment VC firms aren't particularly interested in that concept.

Now that I reflect on our past conversations with said parties, I imagine that it's entirely possible that they're highly interested in the idea, but the wheels of their business move so damn slowly that at some point in the next two years one of them will come back and say "let's do it." I'm not holding my breath.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com