The pixels hit the page
This time last week I was craving company. Or maybe, a company. Sadly no useful conversations have resulted from my LinkedIn and Twitter appeals for angels and developers — yet.
Not to worry, there’s plenty of time for all that.
The biggest achievement of this week was probably meeting with my accountant, Anthony, to go through the financial model I’ve put together. It’s the first time anyone’s looked at this so it was gratifying it emerged relatively unscathed. There were good suggestions for improvements, however.
Most significantly, I’ve tried to more accurately forecast cash needs, given the requirement to order product in bulk. Obviously this is the big difference between running a pure software business vs. getting into the hardware game. Cashflow is going to be very up and down and my big realisation was that the business is going to need a combination of loans and a second round of funding to provide working capital.
The good news is I now have a way more realistic model, which should withstand more investor scrutiny. Hoping to get some more feedback on this, my teaser and the investor deck from my brother-in-law Kev this weekend (once the Rugby World Cup final is done and dusted).
Notworking
I’m not a big fan of networking. I’m not very good at it. I tend to scan the room for the people I already know and attach myself to them. So I figured it was good to push myself and try something new. I saw a post from a connection promoting a Table Crowd event with Eze (pronounced: easy) Vidra, an ex-Googler now at the helm of Remagine Ventures a VC co. “making investments at the intersection of entertainment, sports, commerce and data”. Not only that, Eze is the founder of Tech Bikers — a charitable bunch of technologists riding long distances for charity. (I’ve since signed up).
It was a great evening. It’s remarkable how many people are out there pursuing their passions and building businesses. Truly inspiring. I sadly didn’t get to speak to Eze — there was a queue at the end of the evening. However, he did indirectly answer the question I went to the dinner with. Race.Radio is not a VC-grade start-up. It’s not using sufficiently advanced technologies and I don’t think it’s got the potential to scale to tens of millions of users. And do you know what? That suits me just fine. I can stop entertaining the idea of joining incubators and accelerators and focus on building a solid, revenue-generating business that will hopefully reward angel investors handsomely.
One more brief thing
Then the really fun stuff. Design.
I’ve chosen to work with a designer called Bern. You can take a look at his website and portfolio if you’re curious, there’s some nice work for the cyling brand Huez there. We were introduced through one of my consulting clients, who he did some lovely work for. He’s a real craftsman, he’s shown loads of enthusiasm for the project and prefers to work collaboratively.
This morning we spent a very pleasant couple of hours talking about design references and inspiration, then he spent some time this afternoon just playing around. I’m already excited after the reveal of just one icon. What do you think?
Over and out.
