May-December 2006, one further iteration and then trying to find business partners, investors, customers. All failed.
Money ran out. Jan 2007, took a job.
I recently dissolved the advisor group. Advisors are a fixture of startups. Advice is nice, but I much prefer effort - because Talk is Easy but Effort shows Commitment.
Here was my email to them:
I wanted to update you on what has happened with juwo.Since our only advisor meeting in June 2006, I have tried very hard todevelopjuwo/Nodepad into a beta product, get a beta customer(s), business partners so that investors could be
approached and the business built.
I explored probably 20 income/customer opportunities, and about 13 potential business partners.I could not do it all
single handed and I found it to be a catch-22 situation.
Potential partners would not show more than an interest without investor money to pay their salaries and paying customers to validate juwo technology.
Investors are not interested in investing in a product before
launch.
Investors want to see users. None (especially users) are interested in a product that is not complete and slick. To produce it, one needs partners. Even going it alone to get the product leg in place, one needs investment to pay the bills.
I needed to do some more revamping of juwo to make it user friendly and work with media players besides Windows. It would have taken about 2 months more.
However, I ran through my savings completely and have taken a job since.
My current employer has a successful startup in the small
wireless provider area.I showed him a demo to see if there was a potential to juwo becoming another line of his business. It seemed he was interested and initially appeared to move inthat direction, but has since said he "is interested but it is low on his priority list... areality of our business". This has been the typical scenario.
Hence, I am dissolving the informal advisor group. I shall continue product development on theweekends and still explore ways to bootstrap juwo - as long as I believe it has potential.
Please continue to maintain confidentiality of any juwo documents,demos, software,tech secrets, ideas etc.
Again, I want to thank you for your time,
advice and the ways in which you have tried to help get juwo off the ground.
I wish you all the best.
sincerely,Anil Philip
juwo LLC
