I followed up with a few potential investors who've had my pitch for Sproozi today. It's been a week or two since I heard from them and I honestly wasn't surprised when they came back with a no. Not hearing anything doesn't exactly show a great deal of excitement.
I'm an optimist though and on the bright side I haven't had a conversation or a meeting that I haven't benefited from.
With first VC I met I had a pretty friendly audience, I knew him already, and I got some really good advice about how aspects of the pitch, the business in general and some introductions. With another, less friendly, it was clear I hadn't done my homework. In yet another I learned a bit more and took on board the suggestion that I get a core set of users together to beta test the project - that basically just launching it blind was probably not going to go anywhere.
The rest of my meetings and conversations have been just as good. In each one I've refined my pitch further had clearer and better prepared answers for questions but I think I may be making one mistake that is keeping me from getting funded- trying to0 soon.
I'm starting to think that, because I have to explain the idea. I really s to be able to just give someone a link they can click and play with. With a link and 10 minutes, countless objections can be overcome and services that sound similar dismissed - it also gives a pretty clear idea of exactly what the thing does. I can't possibly manage that level of understanding in any pitch, no matter how long or how refined.
So what's next? I've got a side project I keep hinting about that's painfully close to ready to launch very soon and then I'm going to keep working on Sproozi, get it to the point where I can send that link, develop some feedback from users and get some interesting data - get it to the point where I'm talking about what we are doing, not what we want to do. I'm not put off, if anything I'm more focused on distilling Sproozi down to the minimum set of features I can launch with.
If you haven't already, signup for the super-secret-pre-alpha on the Sproozi site and as soon as I get there, I'll let you know.