trynabootstrap

You bring up a good point -- our customers will definitely take a significant time to make a sale. Ideally we will raise enough money to wait out the long sales cycle and use that time to make our product more attractive.

We definitely need a strong sales lead, but we hope to pay for that role through outside investment.

If our estimate (20 months of runway in the bank) is correct, then we should have enough time to raise capital after 12 months of MVP-building.

We have considered spending some time in Thailand, but we are concerned that the fixed costs of moving (plane tickets, visa, etc.) would outstrip the month-to-month savings unless we chose to stay there for over a year.

While our project estimate could be wrong, we intend to spend much less than a year working on our prototype before we can raise.

Our potential customers are almost all in SF, NY, LA, DC, and Boston. If we stayed in America, we would not be living in any of those cities, but could travel to some of them by car.

> I'd just want to know that what are bringing (financially, sweat equity, and/or key industry knowledge) are equal.

My cofounder has several more years of work experience, and more closely focused on mathematics and machine learning. I have some experience in these fields, but am more of a general software engineer. Because I am bringing the money to the table, we intend to make the equity split 51/49 in my favor.

> Are you sure you need all this money and time to get your MVP ready? If you're bootstrapping, why not stay at your current roles and code in the mornings, evenings, or weekends?

We are currently working nights and weekends and making good progress. We both work very fast-paced, demanding jobs in Silicon Valley, which makes it hard to sustain our current pace without burning out.

> Don't touch the 401(k) or Roth.

Would you suggest that instead of cannibalizing our existing funds, that we just stop contributing to our 401(k)s and save more cash for our startup? Or should we continue to save for retirement at our previous pace?

> Get your MVP done, get it into the hands of customers, and see if you find a fit. I'm not sure you need all that time and money...

I am definitely in favor of doing this, but like you pointed out, the MVP could take twice as long even when working full time.

> What would it take to know your product either falls flat or bringing in regular revenue? Do you need to raise money for that?

We will likely need to raise money. My cofounder and I have a wide variety of experience, covering machine learning, data science, and site reliability engineering. We would like to hire a data scientist with deeper and narrower experience to handle some of the most difficult mathematics.

We can build the first version of the product by ourselves, but our product (enterprise SaaS) is not likely to gain traction until someone much better can performance-tune our algorithms. We would also need a strong UI / UX engineer, a designer, and a corporate salesperson -- but we can probably hobble along for longer without those roles.