Birth of a Startup

I was lucky to be involved in Mashup Demo yesterday. Despite its catastrophic lack of internet access (the irony of running an internet application demo event where there was only one computer in the entire room capable of connecting to the internet was not lost on anyone!), it was actually a fun and rewarding event.

There were several challenges of course. The first - and I hate to admit this - is that I had a slight hangover from a Christmas party the night before. Normally I am really confident with presenting, but with my head hurting and having such trouble stringing two words together in the morning, I panicked. I went into practising frenzy mode… convinced that if I tried hard, I could force my brain into submission. It was made even more difficult by the second challenge: the evil 5 minute limit!

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One of my most important tasks on my return to London was to try and secure speedy funding. I didn’t have much money left, having spent much of what I had on the business and then on a rather extravagent 7 weeks of travelling around Europe and Canada (securing clients and researching the holiday and wedding market, but when you are on Aussie dollars, everything feels extravagent!). And living in London is not a cheap thing to do - I needed money.

Although my client has paid, living in London, hiring a great designer and usability expert, planning PR, and paying myself enough to live and eat, is not cheap. I needed it quickly too, so trying to get Angel funding wasn’t really a solution, as it wouldn’t be ready in time, and if I was clearly desperate and panicky (which I have been), it would not be a good negotiating position to be in.

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I have now been in good ol’ London town for about 3 weeks. And what a whirlwind of a maelstrom of dizzy madness its been. Somehow in this time I have moved to a new country, found a place to live, bought furniture, found a housemate, plus attend the Future of Web Apps conference, applied for a loan through the Small Business Loans Guarantee scheme, and of course, ran a start-up. Calling it hectic and a trifle stressful would be an understatement, but I am determined to enjoy the ride. This is a dream come true - I have to keep reminding myself - so I need to stop focusing on the fact that I am living in the world’s most expensive city with no income, and that I am risking everything on this venture.

Instead, I am loving being back in London. In the dynamic exciting ambience where truly anything can - and generally does - happen. I always used to say that London’s magic stems from the fact that it is the city in the world where more people come to chase their dreams. Everywhere you turn, someone is trying their hardest to achieve something, and these attempts should be even more celebrated because they are doing it amidst such greyness and coldness.

I have left sunny exuberant Sydney just as it gets warm, and am here already wearing scarves and using hot water bottles. And I couldn’t be happier.

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Its been a long time since we started developing my site… many many months. It is a relatively complex application, and I have the extra challenge of financing it with my own savings, and using a (brilliant) team of developers in Europe, whilst I sit here in Sydney… so its not too terrible that its taken so long. If I had more money to throw at the problem, I could be more demanding and more tough, but the developers are working as hard as they can whilst no doubt also balancing the demands of more profitable projects than mine is at the moment. So this is how it is.

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