As one of the founding members of this team that had to return to fulltime work after depleting my personal financial reserves, our inability to explain what we were doing in such a way that convinced investors to back us has been frustrating. It was hard to understand why everyone we talked to loved the idea, loved our traction, loved our numbers, loved our team, but wasn't ready/willing/able to invest. We continued to follow the advice we received and constantly modified our pitch, but we were never quite able to convey the story in a way that investors needed to hear it.
Calling off the search and refocusing on Product Development was definitely the right decision for us, but it was a hard lesson to learn.
Although we continue to push forward, and we're seeing some awesome growth and a rapidly expanding passionate player base, there's no doubt that our progress is still not what it could be if we had been able to leverage investment dollars.
As a member of an nReduce company (http://QONQR.com) I can say that we've been very happy with the helpful and constructive feedback we receive from the other entrepreneurs in our group, and the weekly accountability of demoing progress to our peers has helped to keep us delivering regularly. nReduce itself is reporting their own weekly progress (as other commenters have mentioned) and Joe and Josh are really killing it.
Calling off the search and refocusing on Product Development was definitely the right decision for us, but it was a hard lesson to learn.
Although we continue to push forward, and we're seeing some awesome growth and a rapidly expanding passionate player base, there's no doubt that our progress is still not what it could be if we had been able to leverage investment dollars.