We haven't been posting for a while, so I will try to start doing it again somehow regularly.
Right now we are having several problems with the startup, and I am sure these are common headaches for many people out there:
1- Physical distance with your cofounder. Not living close to each other is a problem, add that the 7h time difference between London and Hong Kong, and there you have a problem.
2- Doubts. It is normal when a cofounder doubts whether to go on or not. No more comments for the moment.
3- No cashflow. No money, no security. An internet startup for someone without contacts or large amounts of money is something like this: You work for a while, maybe several months, to get a first version of your site to hit the internet. Then you keep working on it while doing marketing to try to get people to use it, and at the same time try to get investors to make your original homemade cake a bigger, more sophisticated and expensive cake.
4- No concentration. Our situation is this: I am part time employed, devoting afternoons-evenings to the startup. Don Quixote has even less time as he is full time employee. No concentration means less productivity, because you can focus less time in the same task. This ends up in frustation and slow delivery of stuff.
5- No support. Coming from Spain, where internet entrepreneurship is still a quite difficult thing to find, there is a sense that nobody really takes you seriously. Even here in Britain I can sense lots of scepticism from my colleagues in my morning-job. I think that is normal at the point we are, without a prototype to show, so people think you are all blabla and no real thing. I WILL MAKE THEM SHUT UP.
6- People might not like it. Yes, we have ideas and some people don't like the idea, or don't believe in it, or we ourselves think it might be crap. Who knows? All good ideas have been looked down at some point. Again: who knows?
7- No clear business model: Sometimes it seems that web/ internet businesses are a win all / lose all game. If your website is not popular, you will earn pocket money from adsense. On the other hand, if it is very popular you might become millionaire instantly. Are there examples of people making a decent living of websites without being millionares? Middle class entrepreneurs? Do they exist?
8- That the big fish come and eat us. That we do something and google or facebook or youtube copy us in a sec (as opposed to buying us for millions) . That has happened in facebook before with some popular apps (Top Friends I think? can't remember).
That's the depression list for now. I'll come up with something more cheerful next time.
