I’m running the entire show almost by myself

Sure, let's chat...but how?

Good questions. It's not one of those type of products like an app that sells itself. It's an educational platform that teachers use related to testing. Once I get an appointment scheduled and do an online demo of the product, people seem impressed. The difficult part is getting past the gatekeepers and hitting all the right people up for appointments. School administrators are either busy or not open to new things.

If I had a group of 8-10 people calling all the time, the pipeline would be full. For now, it's just me. We need investment to hire, but we need sales to get investment (traction). Typical chicken and egg scenario.

The other business is in a high growth area, but it is saturated and commoditized. My old business is competing against one company with an $11B market cap, another company purchased by a company with a $200B market cap.

Are investors impressed with this venture ?

Being honest, no. They come up with various excuses. One might be "you dont have enough traction" (how does one do this if you dont have the resources to put salespeople on the street?). Another is the sales cycle can be slow, especially for big school districts. However, I sold our first client in 10 mins on the phone and the second in 15. I dont have the deep rolodex of contacts for investors and we have only presented in front of a few angel groups or early stage funds, to no avail. The guy I hired said many people werent interested in our industry.

Might be they arent impressed with our management team. Ive got a good track record, helping take two companies public on the NASDAQ (my personal sales and client lists were what those companies used to impress investors), and I became a VP at the second one, which had 600+ employees. Beyond that, I dont have a rock star CTO and my cofounder comes from education. I am not the kind of guy that will overembellish during an investor presentation, like some others out there. I think Im solid, but Im not the kind of guy that screams this CEO has it all.

We have come a long way. Our platform is built and functioning, we have filed a provisional patent with the USPTO. and we have customers, albeit they are small and pay little amounts of cash.

If I had a rockstar CTO and maybe someone else on the mgmt team, we might be able to raise some capital. That's a big might. Seems that investors are looking for every reason NOT to invest more than why they should.

If you helped take two companies public and became a VP in a big company why don't you have the means to hire sales people?

Good question. With the first company, I used my options proceeds to put a downpayment on my house. The second company's shares didn't go anywhere as it was right before the tech bubble burst in 2000.

If I had the spare cash hanging around, it wouldnt be an issue.

And then you see an app like YO and you get sick ?

The market is the market..Simple as that.

Yes, the market is the market, but I think most of us can agree that it is misaligned priorities. Yo is not something that serves anybody, and quite frankly, it's a ridiculous business model (if there even is one).

Yeah, it is interesting. Most of our work is complete for the first version of the system, so having a CTO would be to impress investors so we could raise capital for round 2 of development and sales/marketing.

Seems like most "investors" dont really want to invest in making a small company bigger, but rather are just waiting on the big payout. I've seen some really dumb business models out there, including this one, which I cant understand.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/18/yo-raises-1-5m-in-funding-at-a-10m-valuation-investors-include-betaworks-and-pete-cashmore/

Here I am busting my hump for something that not only is good and useful for society, but has promise to make good money. Then these monkeys come along and raise capital.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant. Good luck to you too!

Investors invest in anything that has lots of users. A lot of the times these users were acquired using scammy tactics, but guess what Investors don't care... because they know they can pawn it off to other unsuspecting schmucks later.

At the end of the day its a numbers game, you either need customers, or users. Investors are dumb they really don't understand business models even if they claim they do so. So they behave like lemmings.

The digital goldrush.

Swoosh!

Wow, how true. Lemmings.

My favorite experiences are meetings with potential angel investors. Many are former doctors and lawyers, and suddenly become digital experts and experts regarding all things in education. Maybe their only experience is attending school. You spent 8 years directly involved in education and almost 20 years in tech and within 10 mins they are telling you how to run your business.

One of my favorites was meeting with a group of older gentlemen and watching them argue for 30 mins over how the term "Rolodex" was or was no longer appropriate to use in the digital age. Yeesh.