Two years ago, I met for the first time in my life a successful web entrepreneur: Fabrice Grinda. I was working with a few friends on my first startup project, SubMate, a site allowing subway, bus and train commuters to discover the people that share their commutes.
I did all the wrong things I could do, but you got a start somewhere! With Fabrice, it was a first meeting and we didn’t know each other, we presented a business plan that no one with experience had reviewed, and we tried to convince him to invest in our project. We didn’t know him before, and had no recommendation. Boom. Shameless presumptuous first time entrepreneur. Fabrice was kind enough to stay with us until we were done though ;-)
As the end of that meeting, Fabrice asked us how far we were in the development of SubMate. I replied in a flash, full of a naive and inexperienced over-confidence, that the development was outsourced in India for the v1 and would ship within 4 weeks.
It never shipped. Fabrice was the first to tell us that an idea is worthless without its execution, which is worth everything.
A bit later that year, I met with Darren Herman, another successful New York entrepreneur. Darren told me the same thing. Darren also told me that when talking about production time-lines, you should hope for 1 (whatever unit of time), expect 2 and plan for 3. If it takes less, you’re lucky.
Yesterday, Venture Hacks twittered that “The ‘Execution Gap’ is the space between the astronomical opportunities before us and our ability to grasp them”. It reminded me of that first meeting two years ago. Darren and Fabrice were right. I learnt it the hard way.
Fabrice sums it up in that post: Fund Raising 101.
For CabEasy.com, I took a complete different route than for SubMate. A route that actually makes sense. It allowed me, 2 months after the initial idea, to get a product out the door, get some initial reviews and feedbacks, get some users, and lots of contacts. Now that it’s there in the wild, there is visibility on its improvements, and the execution risk is taken care of. But especially, I have something to sell.
On to the next steps: finding customers, paying or potential, and then get some funding to scale the service!
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