My Startup Story #5: That Will Be $1 Million, Please
It’s all fun and games until you get hit with a quote for a million dollars.
Now that we had all essential pitching and investment documents drafted, my co-founder Rob and I felt very confident in our plan for Mammalz. Surely, the level of excitement we were feeling would rub off onto potential investors. And what development team would not want to build such an incredibly cool and complex app?
It was on our first phone call with a development shop that I heard the term feature creep. For those of you who aren’t familiar, app designers — especially non-technical app designers like ourselves — have dozens of ideas for features they would like to implement into their app. Of course, we felt all of these features were essential to Mammalz from the beginning. We had a very bad and stubborn case of feature creep.
What we should have done, and what we eventually did do, was boil down Mammalz to its minimum required components and pitch our minimum viable product (MVP). But, before we realized this, we had pitched Mammalz in its full-fledged, beautiful, 10-years-from-now version to every top development shop in the US. We got back quotes ranging anywhere from $250,000 to $1,800,000. Yes, 1.8 million dollars (and we would get to say the app was “made in America” — what a deal). So, if we couldn’t have everything we wanted in the first version of Mammalz, how could we get there? What would the very first version look like?
Before we had any idea what our MVP would look like, we went after our first opportunity for investment: the 2018 International Wildlife Film Festival. That festival marked one year since Rob and I had met. This time, we were pitching something very different from a film. We didn’t know what the app would look like yet, but we did have a cool video!
After pitching to a few nature media industry giants, we learned a valuable lesson: do not seek investment from within the industry you’re going to disrupt. For some reason, they don’t like that, nor do they really understand what you’re doing (or they would have already done it themselves).
Back to the drawing board, we went. We needed to start slashing some features of Mammalz that we were extremely excited about and punt them down the development timeline. For a couple of passionate creatives, this was a real challenge. We also needed to find a new place to search for investors… and it wasn’t going to be in Montana.
After Rob’s 20 years in Montana, the birthplace of his career, lifestyle, and friends, he knew as well as I that we needed to find a new state to call home. It was time to sell our houses and move our lives across the country, all for a crazy dream.
