Hi fellow Yalie! DC’08 here. I’ve been bouncing around the startup and tech world for a few, so hopefully the feedback I have is helpful. One thing I’m noticin

Hi fellow Yalie! DC’08 here. I’ve been bouncing around the startup and tech world for a few, so hopefully the feedback I have is helpful. One thing I’m noticing about your journey is that you’re focusing on the software, not the customer. It is infinitely easier to start with a real customer’s problem and solve it, rather than starting with a product and trying to find someone to buy it. If it’s a valuable problem, they should be willing to pay you for the solution. Don’t give it away for free — you’ll trick yourself into thinking it’s worth more than it is. Once you sell your solution a bunch of one-off times, you have a “service”, plus hopefully a few bucks in your pocket. You probably haven’t written a line of (reusable) code yet. This will drive you insane, but it’s worth the wait. At this point, as a software guy, you’ll start noticing commonalities in the services you’re providing (nothing annoys software people more than doing something more than once). This is the first hint you may have some kind of “product” to sell. You’re now ready to go to your customers & prospects and offer a choice: get the service you’re used to now, or wait a bit (pay now though!) for the alpha version software with features x, y, and z. The software is probably going to be a worse, cheaper option than your personal service touch. That’s fine — this is a textbook example of “disruption”, where you are trying to replace your valuable service with an inferior product that has a greater potential growth curve. Now you have a software business! Congratulations, your real problems are just beginning :) Email in my profile if you want to chat. Good luck!