December?!?! Already?!?!

I just realized - Its been a little over 3 months now that I've been full-time on Upverter holed away in my parents basement. Crazy! Way back in July when I jumped on this whole thing, I set a totally foundation-less goal of being in demo mode and just shy of Alpha by mid-December. And I'll get into the reason why, but I am very happy to say that we are really close. I think we will be able to demo stuff by Christmas and hopefully do the closed Alpha thing early next year. Which is really neat/cool/awesome/exciting because it makes everything that much more real. Showing up and hand-waving is great, but at some point you have to show people something, and at some point you have to have users and the possibility of revenue. And we are on the right track for sure! Now why set December? And why push everyone to meet it despite it being a made up date? There are a couple reasons, biggest of them, is to make sure we are trying to fix the right problems.

Think of it as a timeline forcing you to focus on the low hanging fruit and a very select number of R&D innovations. Ideally when playing the startup game, as I understand it, you want to do as little as possible to fix a problem with some key differentiator or innovation. For us at Upverter it has taken a lot of dedication to the timeline to trim (and continue to trim) the list of problems we are trying to fix. We really do want to make everything better! but you need to focus, fixing a problem and getting to market lets you fix more problems, while spinning in circles and fixing too much is quite simply a death wish.

The other reasons were, December presented a nice interruption point, meaning you get all the benefits of the focused new year and then some, if you are in a position to begin ramping. December also lets us talk lots with family, feel out money, and show those supporting us that we aren't just playing video games in the basement. Its also when I thought I would be getting Steve full-time and we could manage better in tandem than I could doing demos or a launch myself. Its about 4 months, which is just about too long to build a prototype of anything that isn't too ambitious to be possible. And if it bled, it became 6 months, and from a money and financing perspective 6 months was when I figured we would need to start trying to raise money, and a demo/Alpha improves the odds of funding. So here we are, 4ish months in, reasonably on track, and super duper excited by the market potential, feedback and tech we are building. Really the only downside is Steve is freezing his ass off and regretting moving back to Canada just as the dead of winter is setting in. haha.