Learnings from a Rollercoaster 2021
2021 has been a mixed year. Was very down professionally at the end of last year and early in the year lost my grandma too.
We had no money to work on the product and it seemed bleak. Now we have launched the new version, have paying customers and funding. Here's what we did 👇
1. We started working on 3rd party products to generate some margin that’d mean we could afford one resource to work dedicatedly on the product. Meanwhile talked to these two amazing individuals who I felt like would make the perfect co-founders and luckily for me that they agreed to go through this journey together. Me and my co-founders worked on both front without any monetary compensation. Even did some part time work for financial support for ourselves.
2. Throughout these times I kept connection with people that have shown trust and kept them updated on what we are trying to do. Took every possible help that we could get.
Got some outsource work done for new logo, landing page etc from very kind people with the commitment of paying them after funding. It’s amazing how helpful around us were because otherwise we’d never had made it this far.
3. All those constant updates and even slow progress bear fruit soon as a very kind senior came to our aid and gave us a small funding so that we can work on the product dedicatedly. It’s important to mention that he didn’t ask for any guarantee for the money back or equity. He just wanted us to grow. That meant we worked with a 4 person tech team and I could exclusively focus on customers for Onethread.
4. Two months working on product led to releasing our beta and getting a few users onboard. Then we pitched in Bangladesh Angels Network for our Pre-seed funding. We got a few offers but interestingly our major investor came from a sales call. He was so impressed with the team and what we are building that he wanted to jump in the round. We had some common connections and luckily they vouched for the team. So with him and the senior earlier we closed our Pre-seed to progress fast.
Post funding, instead of launching a ton of features, we worked on the UI/Ux a lot. Taking inspiration from international solution, feedback from Market and our ideas, we built a completely new UI and deployed the early version of that this month. Now on to scaling in 2022!!