So It’s really early days for my new idea. I only found out on Friday that I’d been given that all important ‘yes’ on the seed funding to make this thing happen, but already I’ve been making some great progress as well as encountering some pretty tough obstacles to overcome. But I thought I’d write a few words about the last few months - what I’ve been up to…
The story so far
I’ve been working on this for months. As well as running 3form and doing some nice things with the web like The Big Picture I’ve been running my idea in the background, which has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
I got the idea, and sat there for a few days/evenings in a row blasting out some programming code and a rough design. I can remember that first week (it was a while ago now) where I basically played around with a few different ways of making my application and by the end of the about the fifth day had learnt the essence of Ruby on Rails, got a hacked-together application running, and was quite pleased with myself.
I got totally blocked on doing anything with it by being insanely busy with overlapping client projects and other commitments. Less ‘bootstrapping’ and more ‘backburnering’, this lead me to steadily put off doing any more work on it. I think this might actually have been down to my choice of platform and the learning curve I experienced - more on this later.
I took the idea to the b-tween festival last year and won a prize for the best pitch in a ‘quickfire’ presentation competition. The format was a rapid-fire 13 slide presentation that fired off a slide every thirty seconds and you as the presenter had to deliver a talk over the top. At that point I was still in ‘backburner’ mode but through putting myself in a position where I had to sell my idea to some pretty high profile people really focussed me. It was a lot of fun! The audience laughed, they liked what I was doing and I made some good contacts.
So I came back and decided I wanted to make the thing happen - but how? Running a small web agency day-in day-out means that it’s nigh on impossible to take time out for a ‘personal project’. And it’s not the kind of thing you could take to a bank. They’d take one look and say ’sorry - did you say your model is entirely free?’ or ‘I’m really not clear on how this makes money’, or ‘tell me again - you use something called a mouse?’
Do the research. The big break for the project was being part of something called The Graduate Apprentice. It’s a scheme run by a local networking body called Birmingham Future. They run an annual competition for one young straight-out-of-university graduate to go into three different businesses and get a taster of a variety of different business models, all over the period of just one year.
It was the first year, and Darvinder Kang, a smart talented guy arrived at my office one day straight from helping merge two hospitals at the NHS for a four months and before that working at a large accountants - Deloitte - for another four.
I dropped him right in at the deep end with the task of finding out everything he could possibly find out about the particular group of people my new site is aimed for. What do they do? Where are they? How many? How long do they spend online? Loads of stuff. And he compiled it all into a rough business case document.
How did I fund the research? I also put him live on some projects as the project manager and billed him at a lower than standard rate, but he covered his costs and did a wonderful job at the same time.
That took about three months before we had everything together.
Review the prototype. It had been some time since I’d last taken a look at the prototype and it wasn’t really as good as I remembered it. It didn’t really do the things that I was really interested in. So I found a few days in my diary and made a concerted effort to upgrade it.
Throw the prototype out and start again. What actually happened is that I took one look at the Ruby on Rails code that was running the prototype and had a bit of a change of heart. Let’s see - what could be done using our own PHP system instead?
The result was that in about three days I’d rewritten it from scratch and improved it significantly. I was happy. This was demo-able to potential investors and supporters. It even worked on an iPhone really nicely too.
Find potential funders. As part of the research phase we’d identified a handful of sources of funding for the idea.
In the UK there is a lot of support for ‘creative’ and ‘digital media’ around. I’m not sure if this is the same elsewhere in the world, but if you work in these areas you can get access to grants, loans, advice, mentoring, networking, lobbying, and all of that sort of stuff quite easily. The problem is finding the things that are actually going to be any use to you.
So we had a list. And then up popped an announcement from Screen West Midlands saying that a new fund was coming online. At this point I was already sitting here with a sixty page report on ‘how my idea was a great business idea and somebody should support it’.
Serendipity kicked in. Sometimes it just works that way. So I spent a few days (about four) doing the finances, a pretty huge application form, polishing and rewriting the business plan into a document that I’m really quite proud of and submitted all of this stuff to Screen West Midlands.
It has a nice personal ‘first person’ intro. It’s not tired and stuffy. It has big text. It has nice diagrams. It’s easy to skim. The idea works on one line. All those usual rules.
Deadlines really work for me. So this serendipity gave me a nice big nudge to make the thing move forward - there was a deadline. Which is very handy for giving you the impetus you need to get something finished.
The thumbs up. I’ve had the word that we’re going forward, there are some conditions I have to iron out, but the big question is “What do I do first?”
I’ll talk about that in my next post as well as what the first week has been like…