My experience so far as a first-time founder is similar. We invested thousands of hours of our spare time into building a strong foundation and a working product running on top of it, but lack traction mainly because we had day jobs and truly pushing and marketing our product was impossible.
The incubators and investors we've talked to seem undeterred by our presence of a product without traction, but the equity they're seeking puts us more on par with a couple guys with an idea. It makes sense, but the low valuation means we're now looking at consulting options and other means to build out enough infrastructure to attract paying customers.
I don't regret the route we've taken (yet) and I'm excited to see how creative we can get, but it is interesting to see our experience eloquently presented by someone else and some reasons why. It's obvious now, but like most obvious thing it wasn't obvious until it was.
The incubators and investors we've talked to seem undeterred by our presence of a product without traction, but the equity they're seeking puts us more on par with a couple guys with an idea. It makes sense, but the low valuation means we're now looking at consulting options and other means to build out enough infrastructure to attract paying customers.
I don't regret the route we've taken (yet) and I'm excited to see how creative we can get, but it is interesting to see our experience eloquently presented by someone else and some reasons why. It's obvious now, but like most obvious thing it wasn't obvious until it was.