Lost in the process of building a start-up in the UK: What shall I do?

0 pointsby ibmthinkpad14 anni fa3 comments

I came up with a business idea few years ago. Since my background was not programming, I decided to hire a developer to build a prototype to test the market while adding more functions to finish the site.

So I hired a freelancer (who seemed the most suitable considering my limited budget), built a prototype and gone live a year ago. By the time the site gone live, it exceeded the initial budget and took 3x longer time than anticipated (there were some technical challenges).

As soon as we started working on the second phase of the development , I realised that the developer was running out of skills, and he hinted me about this.

Now I have a quarter baked site with vital functions yet to be implemented. On the top of that, I am frustrated with the fact that, with the state of the site, I can't market the site despite having a marketing background. As I believe, there is no point of having visitors if I can't retain them.

I guess I have only three options at the moment

1. Go back to work and save enough money to be able to hire someone else/agency (My concern is the amount of time it will take and also I am quite paranoid that someone else may start something similar by the time the site is finished)

2. Look for a technical co-founder ( I tried this already. Went to few meet-ups and networking sessions where it seemed everyone had a great idea and more interested to talk about Techcrunch rather than building a product. After reading some blogs/forum, it seems it is a typical start-up scene in London)

3. Try to raise money from angels/VCs (This is the last thing I always wanted to do, as I know how hard it can be without proven success previously, let alone being on your own)

Now my question is, is there any other options open for me? If not, what is the best option from the above?

Your valuable opinion would be appreciated.

3 comments

ibmthinkpad14 anni fa

@waldr

I am trying to build a marketplace. The quarter baked prototype is live, the site is just the skeleton of what it suppose to be.

In terms of the engagement, last 12 months analytics: site is getting up to 600 uniques per day, average 4 page views/user visit duration/user 3 mins nearly 5000 emails on the database

And this figures are without any marketing. I haven't been marketing the site because it is not ready.

Yah completely agree that point 3 isn't viable.

@hoodoof

I wish if I were a coder

waldr14 anni fa

Would be helpful to know a bit more about what you are building?

Can you strip out a lot of the functionality and get something basic up to test whether or not you get any engagement?

I'd completely rule out point 3, you'll get very little angel interest (no chance from VC's) at this stage, especially in the UK.

hoodoof14 anni fa

Start writing the code to fix it and implement the features that you want.