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My story begins back in October last year (2015) when a crippling breakup with my past co-founder and the company I founded was coming to a bitter end. I saw the work I had spent the past 2 years on go to waste so I was feeling pretty low and on top of that my ex-co-founder tried to Sue me adding additional shit to the already large steaming heap. A little depressed I would sit around doing nothing but endlessly scrolling on Facebook and Twitter trying to distract my self from life's woes, but I was always left disappointed and sometimes even more depressed at what my 'friends' and certain pages deem to be noteworthy. If it isn't an abundance of posts about Kanye West's self absorbed antics, it's the verbal diarrhoea Donald Trump has spewed out that day. I concluded why this was; most of the posts were from people I have very little in common with. The girl I went to school who is now married with a kid has very little in common with me and vice verser. I wrote a blog posts about my findings which you can read here
But social networks have become the go to place for news and interesting content. Why? There must be a better way of consuming content, right? (I know I am writing this on Reddit one of the best discovery platforms on the web, but even reddit is doused in problems which I believe can be improved)
As time went on I started forming an idea on an improved way to share and discover content. But nobody ever changed the world with an idea right? Luckily I am a self taught full stack developer with experience in UX design so I had all the skills needed to get started building on this concept.
Armed with the right skills, the nothing to loose attitude, a tiny amount of capital and few short months at my disposal I thought why not just do it! So I gave my self a target of 5 months and £500. Long story short, 4 months and £350 later I launched Grado on the iOS AppStore.
Since then I've been working full time trying to fix bugs, add features, grow my user base, create a brand and manage just about everything. I have been loving every minute of it but I realised it wasn't possible to do it all on my own. I had received some good feedback at this point suggesting the idea was pretty good but there was work needed. With this I thought it would be wise to start looking for for a potential co-founder to help me on this new journey.
After meeting a few different people I met Rahul. He had come from an interesting background of recruitment and sold his past company, which was impressive at the age of 24 (my age currently). Plus he was the first person I met who wasn't full of shit and could also code!
Now there is 2 of us and I think we are a great team. We both have a aligned vision of the product and a detailed road map of where we wanna go and how to do it. We have the skills necessary to build such a company and we now have a stable, fully functioning app we are proud of. Rahul has optimised the app and has been speaking with potential investors and marketing the app as best he can with the resources at our disposal. BUT the problem is we are still struggling to get users. This makes it very difficult to get funding. However to get users you need to have the right product which we do not have (yet) and do not have the capital to develop the platform new features, nor the resources to market it and grow.
I guess what I'm asking is, what's next? We have a good team, a fully functioning product with potential. But now we have hit this large hurdle. Do we give up? Do we slow down and let the app grow organically on its own. Or do we push forward aggressively, but if so how and in which direction and how?
I apologise if the question is a little broad but I am looking for any ideas, comments or feedback. Or just to hear about similar journeys and experiences.
Cheers guys!
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