Thanks for the advice! I'm an avid reader of your blog, so it's cool to get feedback from someone I admire in this industry.
A lot of the comments here are bringing up the question of if and _why_ we need to raise funding, which has been something we've asked ourselves (and are asking ourselves even more in light of these comments). Essentially it's a combination of necessity and validation. We're college students ourselves and we realized early on that the only way we're going to be able to make this business successful is if we treat it as a full-time job and throw everything we have at it. We all quit our actual jobs because the website needed the focus, and that isn't a sustainable path for much longer, even if we do have a couple thousand dollars revenue in the business bank account. However, I definitely have to disagree with you that this should lead us to consider closing up shop, just because we personally don't have enough funds to continue running this out of pocket until it can run itself doesn't mean the business doesn't have potential and should be abandoned.
Choosing Door #1 while continuing to knock on Door #3 has always pretty much been the plan, we just don't know where to find the investors for Door #3 and that was what led me to posting here. I didn't really expect it to get so much attention, haha.
And a lot of people are critiquing our business plan/strategies--which I am grateful for and do actually appreciate--but I didn't really intend for this to be an elaboration of our business and I didn't really write my OP in order to explain how everything works and what all our financials/projections are, rather I wanted advice about moving forward from here. Yes we can keep doing the same thing we're doing and slowly build (and that's what we're going to be doing), but we don't think it's unreasonable, as a tech startup, to be seeking some sort of funding in order to grow faster and more efficiently.
We're actually using some of the money we've made to hire someone to come over to our house for 15 hours a week and sit on Skype and find/maintain the property listings in our database, as that's the most menial and time-consuming bottleneck we've identified. That way we can continue to focus on product dev and sales instead of having to devote a good chunk of every day to making sure the website is up to date. This should free up enough time for the three of us to take on another school, and just keep doing what we're doing.
> And a lot of people are critiquing our business plan/strategies--which I am grateful for and do actually appreciate--but I didn't really intend for this to be an elaboration of our business and I didn't really write my OP in order to explain how everything works and what all our financials/projections are, rather I wanted advice about moving forward from here.
In order to properly provide advice about the next steps, this context is necessary. If it is costing you $10,000/month to pull in $500/month revenue, then you must begin to consider its viability in its present form and come up with a different revenue model before you go from broke college students to indebted college students.
It sounds like you have already made up your minds about the way you want to go. I would recommend really reading all of the commentary here, because these are all questions that anybody with any money is going to ask, so you should have good answers.
Yeah, I understand what you mean and I tried carefully to phrase that in a way that avoided sounding dismissive of what has been good and insightful critique--we've all been reading everything posting on here and following up with a lot of commenters off-site, which has been really cool and helpful.
If you guys are actually paying to learn from a college that is the first thing to change. A business owner used to say to me "Kid you have to take the bull by the horns" and I never really got that until later in life. It's true man. I a self taught programmer and I had the option of going to school or working at a start up. Aside from the personal pleasure of school - it just fucks you up. For real. 1)Quit wasting your time in college. 2) Quit waiting for somebody to walk up to you and write you a check and say I believe in you - it's an illusionary permission slip. 3) Work on this more.
Think about it - whats the worst that can happen you have to go back to school? You can't get a job? Bullshit this is your resume and your education - trust yourself and go for it.
As a counterpoint, I really think my formal education was valuable for me, and I'm glad I didn't quit to go work on something for one or two extra years. Also, whether or not it's justified, my impression is that there is some stigma about not having graduated from college among many hiring managers.
Basically, don't drop out of college just because someone on the internet tells you to, think it through.
If you get into YC and it looks possible to raise a big round, then it might be time to start thinking about dropping out more seriously.
Thanks for the advice! I'm an avid reader of your blog, so it's cool to get feedback from someone I admire in this industry.
A lot of the comments here are bringing up the question of if and _why_ we need to raise funding, which has been something we've asked ourselves (and are asking ourselves even more in light of these comments). Essentially it's a combination of necessity and validation. We're college students ourselves and we realized early on that the only way we're going to be able to make this business successful is if we treat it as a full-time job and throw everything we have at it. We all quit our actual jobs because the website needed the focus, and that isn't a sustainable path for much longer, even if we do have a couple thousand dollars revenue in the business bank account. However, I definitely have to disagree with you that this should lead us to consider closing up shop, just because we personally don't have enough funds to continue running this out of pocket until it can run itself doesn't mean the business doesn't have potential and should be abandoned.
Choosing Door #1 while continuing to knock on Door #3 has always pretty much been the plan, we just don't know where to find the investors for Door #3 and that was what led me to posting here. I didn't really expect it to get so much attention, haha.
And a lot of people are critiquing our business plan/strategies--which I am grateful for and do actually appreciate--but I didn't really intend for this to be an elaboration of our business and I didn't really write my OP in order to explain how everything works and what all our financials/projections are, rather I wanted advice about moving forward from here. Yes we can keep doing the same thing we're doing and slowly build (and that's what we're going to be doing), but we don't think it's unreasonable, as a tech startup, to be seeking some sort of funding in order to grow faster and more efficiently.
We're actually using some of the money we've made to hire someone to come over to our house for 15 hours a week and sit on Skype and find/maintain the property listings in our database, as that's the most menial and time-consuming bottleneck we've identified. That way we can continue to focus on product dev and sales instead of having to devote a good chunk of every day to making sure the website is up to date. This should free up enough time for the three of us to take on another school, and just keep doing what we're doing.
Thanks again for the advice!
Sean