As the Founder & CEO of a startup, I'm constantly reviewing Excel spreadsheets, networking, rolling up my tech-sleeves to keep the business moving forward. To date, we've not yet secured any outside investment, so resourcefulness and a tight reign on spend has kept us afloat. It's been a catch-22 for us: developing a product with unique capabilities in an over-saturated market requires fast iterations and cross-platform agility, both which require significant captial. But that capital is hard to realize when you're the small fish (tadpole even) in a huge pond. And so we've decided to start a crowdfunding campaign. In addition to the much-needed funds we hope to receive, I think it's a great way to grow a viral marketing base and provide some additional validation to our vision of apps & services.
And so we launched our campaign early January 1st at http://indiegogo.com/fotojelly with the goal of $35,000 to fund accelerated development and broaden our platform support to Android and/or iOS. We chose Indiegogo because of the low barrier to entry - KickStarter, while the brand name for crowdfunding, presents a few hurdles that make it less attractive for us. It took a couple of weeks to put together: a spreadsheet model outlining the features that would be worked on, the cost of perks, and researching lots of projects across both KS and IGG to try and determine the optimal positioning of our funding "ladder". The added benefit to all of this is having a much better focus on what our priorities are, and the costs associated with each. This data will also help us rationalize the capabilities we provide for free and which could justifiably be part of a paid app or subscription.
The dashboard IGG provides is basic, but serviceable: over the next 30 days I'll have a browser tab open, continually refreshing the analytics, making note of how we're doing and what each of us at FotoJelly can be doing to evangelize this opportunity for friends, family and supporters to help fund our success.
Another thing you learn when running a startup is to be humble, because you quickly realize that you're not going to be able to rise to any level of accomplishment without the help of others. It's the side of entreprenurial endeavors that most don't see - girding yourself up each day to accept criticism, justify your effots, and ask for time, talent, and money of others.
So with that, I'll ask. Please take the opportunity over the next couple of days to take a look at our campaign, my video below, and learn more about FotoJelly from our website. We truly believe 2013 has the potential to be a phenom year for us, and would appreciate your support!
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xilcC4DvPt4]
Wishing everyone a health, happy, and succesful 2013!