DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS
After a relatively quick round of interviews, technical reviews, proposals, and a blur of 12 calls in 3 days we have come to the end. We have settled on a new developer and will be signing the contract tomorrow. This means things will start moving forward quite rapidly from here. Not saying anything else about the chosen developer until we have a signed contract, but we can say we are incredibly excited and privileged to be working with a development team that shares our vision for what Grahamity can be. We are so excited to be building a thing that will help so many people both in the US and around the world improve their lives.
INVESTOR INTEREST
The next thing has to do with funding. We have been approached by two investors so far regarding the platform, but we turned both down due to a long-term mismatch in vision. It's
quite a strange feeling, turning down "free" money (and a good amount). But, there is a long-term vision for the product and we believe we can deliver what the trainers/instructors/coaches, and other professionals need if we have control over the process without the hoops. Having control over the direction and being able to respond to what our clients need is far more important to us than having the capital to make the initial development process easier.
The plan was to bootstrap the entire project through the first three phases anyways, so the capital an investor would bring to the table is not as appealing. But, we are still interested in finding a like-minded partner with the experience of bringing software to market with some success. There is still so much we do not know about the endeavor we are pursuing. We would value having that person in our corner more than 10x the startup capital we need! So if you know someone, please have them give us a call!
CROWDFUNDING
Along the lines of funding, we will be launching our very first Kickstarter in a few weeks and can't wait to get the word out to friends, family, and anyone else who could use it.
The Kickstarter launch process is so much more involved than we expected it to be. This is a great thing for supporters of Kickstarter projects, and a bit more work for us. There's certainly confidence now we didn't have before when engaging with a campaign off of the platform. Seeing all the work the vendor has to do in order to put the campaign up there, I won't hesitate in the future if I see a project that interests me.
In order to run a campaign on their platform you must: - Submit legal information about the entity.
- Submit personal information about the founder (like financial stuff).
- Submit a complete outline of expected costs, delivery time, R&D, shipping, phase of funding, and a bunch of other stuff.
- Connect a bank account that must match the legal name of the business.
- Connect all the people working on the project.
- Agree to the TOS
You do all of this realizing that if for some reason you do NOT hit your funding goal, you will
not get any funding from this resource. All this to say, it's a lot of work, but we believe the visibility from this platform will cover the initial development deficit.
PLATFORM TIMELINE CHANGE
The last big update is that there may be a timeline change on delivery for the core product! The initial developer gave us a minimum time to market of 6 months from the date development begins. The developer we have chosen believes we can shorten that down to just 3-4 months! Obviously, this would be amazing, but we are still going to put the delivery date as October 15th; just to be safe.
All in all, not a bad week. Thanks for sharing, thanks for keeping updated, and thanks in advance to whoever sends that link to the person who is going to be the know-it-all on bringing software to market!
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