Hello World, it’s been a rough six months from zero to getting our first paying customer and earning revenue. You start off with a friend, an idea and a vision barely glimpsed in a club — ‘It’s like, a huge dance party on a server!! IRL internet!! Everything works like magic!’ I remember slurring drunkenly in November.

Next comes when you quit your job, tell your mom about that job, get yelled at for quitting your job and reality sets in. You start living on your savings, worry about health insurance, pray never to fall sick and learn the biz-lingo of MVPs, verticals, ROIs, addressable markets, ECOPS and ‘pivoting’ as though you’re not a human being but an Excel spreadsheet scrambling to find the right formula, going ##!ERROR!##

Your first carefully crafted slides sent with fingers-crossed comes back with a “This is the most terrible deck I’ve ever seen, I had to read it four times before I even knew what you were talking about” and that horrifying, sinking feeling that you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, and that you should’ve stayed in that pretty salary job and everything is going to hell.

We learned to pitch the hard way. There was no book, no mentors, no advisers, no money when you first start out. It’s just you and your co-founder, knocking doors and doing pitches until you run out of voice. You get a lot of ‘your product name is terrible’ or ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about’ or my personal favorite: ‘I don’t see any value in this’. You can’t even defend yourself, you just have to stand there and take it and take it even when you feel yourself dying a little inside. A bit of your soul, cookie crumbles.

Here’s what people never tell you about startup life. A lot of it is mundane, boring, grunt work. Imagine being stuck in an MMO game where you’re grinding levels without knowing whether you’ll ever make it beyond that 2 by 4 patch of 8bit forest waiting and slaying the same stupid monsters over and over again and then going back in for respawn. Tedious as hell. Gold-farming would actually be fun at this point.

It’s the moment you least expect it when you actually level up. No one will ever tell you how many points you need until you get noticed, and by that time you’re finally up++;! You’re so dead exhausted from fundraising that you can’t even celebrate because of all the legal paperwork to follow-up through. Remember that investor check so dearly won? Well, it comes with term sheets and conditions and lots of sit-downs with lawyers and that biz-lingo finally comes in handy when you calculate things like ‘option shuffle pool dilution’.

And yet, YET! You can put everything into it, and still get rejected for absolutely no reason at all, while at the same time get accepted and follow-up emails for something you don’t even remember doing. Startups in a way, are worse than chat roulette because at least people respond back. Investors? Hah! Squeezing water out of rocks would be easier.

The first pitch I ever did, I stuttered, unable to get the words out, couldn’t remember the script and when I got off the podium I wanted to leave and cry but I had to sit through and watch everyone else do a better job than I did.

Now I can tell you what we do, without missing a beat. We’re Interface Foundry, our CMS framework lets you browse and build personalized databubbles. These databubbles pin information to specific locations, places and times — bringing together all your data like social media feeds, connected devices, schedules, widgets and interactive local maps and all those other pesky individual apps into one responsive clutter-free interface.

You don’t need to download anything at all, just walk into a building, an event, a place or time and BAM! The interface just pops up to show you everything you need, and all the tools you have. When you leave the area or the time ends, it disappears. No tracking, no surveillance. Just like magic!!!

It’s been six months, slowly we’ve inched our way into survival. First month was the worst, the mistakes: bad slides, not knowing terminology, no connections and struggling to find the balance between where your friendship starts and the work-day ends.

Thank God for Google (so we could nod and pretend to understand what ‘seed round preferred’ meant while furiously searching) and sheer persistence and dumb luck.

We started with small things, like finding places to practice pitching, then going to parties and meetups and investor panels. Use your money wisely. There could be an awesome investor event but it costs $350 to get in, but here’s a smaller monthly one with networking breakfast for $25. Then do lots and lots of reading, especially on things you don’t know about. It’s OK to be stupid and not know what due diligence is when you start out (but not too long), no one begins perfectly. The key is to pick yourself up, admit you’ve messed up and do it until you get it right before you run out of time.

And time, you see, is really the most important thing of all.
The longer the time you have to burn, the more likely you’re going to survive.