Some of you may know and others may not, but I have been involved in a side project for some time now (for those that did not know, it should not come as any big surprise, after all don’t most peeps who work at a startup get involved in a side project or two? I mean most of those that I know are involved in at least one on the side. I guess we are “startupaholics”). Anyways, back to the topic, sorry for the digression.

My side project has been something that I have been working on for awhile, and like all projects, it has gone through many iterations and has not launched yet (yet being the operative word). Throughout the process, we have vetted the concept, then idea, then prototype with various levels of people; from VCs to Angels to other startup CEOs. Everyone (for the most part) really dug the idea, but they wanted to see something more tangible, something more than just a prototype, they wanted to see a live product in action.

The first time we heard this, we just dismissed it as a cautious VC who does not want to take a risk on a relatively unknown commodity, not to mention we did not fit their investment strategy (in other words, we were small potatoes to them and they could not get the kind of return they would be looking for on the amount we were asking for). So on to the next and the next and the next (if you have not gone through this process before, trust me, it is not easy nor is it quick. I am learning the hard way.) and we started to recognize a pattern in the responses. Like I mentioned previously, everyone saw the value and completely got what we are doing and thinks it has good potential, but they all said the same thing: build it and launch it and get back to us. After hearing this for the umpteenth million time, it finally hit us. We needed to just get over the fear of launching without investors and figure out a way in which we could do it on our own.

We finally started believing what we were hearing and figured out a way to get a simplified version of the product built an launched. It is safe to say that if enough smart people are telling you the same thing, then maybe, just maybe, they are on to something. In our case they were, it just took us a bit longer to realize it. So if you are out there pitching your product and you start getting similar responses, I implore you to listen closely to what they are saying, they just might be saving you from a lot of headaches and disappointment. If they say build it and launch it, I say go for it, what do you have to loose?

I leave you with this, it comes from a conversation I had with a local CEO (paraphrased of course) “would you rather have 20,000 pissed off users that are mad because you are all the sudden charging them for something that they were getting for free? Or would you rather have 0 customers and a product that has not launched?” Guess which one we chose?