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Watched a founder demo his app at a meetup in Austin and get torn apart in real time
Two months ago I went to a startup meetup in Austin and a guy demoed his app for 15 minutes. He had 4 users and one of them was his mom. An investor in the crowd asked what he charged and he said nothing because he wanted to grow the user base first. The room went quiet for a long second and he just packed up his laptop. I keep going back to that night because it showed me the difference between building something and building a business. What would you have told him if you were in that room?
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laura94020d ago
The thing nobody brings up about that night is that the investor who asked the question probably wasn't trying to dunk on him. That is just the standard first question you ask a founder, and the guy had no answer ready, which means he never once practiced saying his pitch out loud to someone who might push back. That is the real gap, not the free users. You can launch with zero dollars coming in and still have a clear answer for what you plan to charge and when, and just having that answer changes how the whole room looks at you. What gets me is he packed up after one hard question, because a room full of people asking tough stuff is free feedback you cannot buy, and he walked away from it. I would have told him to stay after and talk to the guy who asked, since that investor was the only person there taking him seriously enough to poke at it.
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