Starting to become a regular haunt

Monday the 25th came, and after a weekend without my significant other, I was in business planning overdrive. I met Halim in Ramen-Ya (the same place I had visited a few weeks earlier with Ronald) and we caught up on the progress that we had made.

I started things off by reeling off a host of apps that I had found, three in particular that had peaked my interest;

  1. UrbanSitter — U.S. version of the idea which had recently received 15m USD VC funding
  2. DateNight — Canadian version of the app which had recently received 500k USD VC funding
  3. OuderMatch — Dutch babysitting website that lists over 100,000 babysitters in Holland in an old fashioned pin board format

These similar sites made it clear to me that not only was there a market for the app in the Netherlands, but also in the U.S. and Canada and if we executed properly, there would be a high chance of success.

The insurance question was easily answered with a few google searches giving me three or four suitable insurance policies so it was clear that not only was there a good market, but it was also operationally viable.

Halim’s developer friend Bram was unable to join us for this meeting so we decided to spend the rest of the meeting discussing pathways to market and our respective commitments to the app (given that I will be leaving for a 6 month round the world trip in a month or two).

We set a date to meet with Bram for the following Tuesday and agreed a number of actions in the meantime;

  1. I would prepare the beginnings of a pitch document by compiling a 1 pager to brief the developer of the general idea
  2. I would mind map all potential features of the app and all contact (user) points and their respective motives for using the app

At this point, it is already becoming clear that Halim and I are on different wavelengths execution wise. He is held up on finding a name, assigning titles and talking about future millions of dollars. The issue is, none of these are important if there is no business. I had to keep asking the question “yes, but what are the next steps for this week”?

Hopefully this gets better with time.