Tuning into the twenties

Happy new year folks. I’m back.

December didn’t see much meaningful progress, hence the lack of updates through the month. And then hey presto, a new decade. The twenties. Wow.

My Hyper Island Master’s research paper (which was actually my research into the market opportunity for Race.Radio) was due on 15th December and so there came a point where I had to knuckle down and hammer the keyboard. I hit the deadline and it was pretty good — I think. I’m going to try and chop it up into some digestible chunks and dish it up here on Medium.

By mid-December there seemed little chance of rustling up any investment by year-end. Then a consulting job conveniently swallowed up the majority of my available time. The year could easily have fizzled out, but a couple of very different, but equally encouraging calls meant I was able to switch into holiday mode feeling positive about the coming year/decade.

Firstly, the investor-cum-adviser I mentioned in my last post called to let me know he’d had a couple of positive conversations with “very high net worth individuals” who may be prepared to invest and would be capable of putting up the full amount. Big hitters. We’ll be picking those conversations up this next week.

The second call was with Darius, one of the co-founders of YodelUP — a remarkably similar concept to Race.Radio, but targeting skiers and snowboarders. I’d found it while searching crowdfunding campaigns. While the website is still live, the Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its target and the product never made it into production. I wanted to understand why.

Darius was unbelievably generous with his time and advice. I won’t go into it all now, but it related predominantly to the challenges involved in developing hardware — and finding investors willing to place a bet on hardware. The thing that actually stuck with me was the remarkable amount of grit, hustle and resilience Darius had shown in trying to find investment and bring his product to market. Truly an inspiration. Ultimately you could argue he’d failed, but he came across as anything but a failure. He wasn’t sorry for himself, expressed zero regret and only talked positively of what the experience had taught him and where it had taken him in life. I resolved to show the same tenacity in chasing my dream — and to share my experience as willingly given the opportunity in the future.

So, to last week. The consulting work took precedence, but I was able to find a few hours to switch the website over from Squarespace to Shopify and rejigged the financial model for the nth time. There were calls with Michael about the next phase of development, Matthew about the design of the bone conducting earpiece and Bern about moving the brand identity forward, then an interesting video chat with one of our potential PTT partners. It feels good to be moving things forward again.

Over and out.