Hey folks, back with another business update in the solopreneur world. Let’s jump in.
My last week(s) in business
As many of you know, the last few weeks/month or so have been spent on fundraising for my immigration tech company (Visto.ai) which continues to take up most of my time. It’s a necessary, yet not the most fun part, of being a tech co-founder (I much prefer working on product, sales, marketing, etc.).
The good news?
We’re making good progress. I feel like fundraising and tech companies in general have been glamorized by Hollywood (The Social Network, etc.) with focus on the big business success stories, like the Amazon’s/Facebook’s/Google’s of the world. But in reality, the journey usually isn’t as pretty.
The reality is that most tech companies fail, whether it be at just trying to get off the ground, or trying to fundraise, or trying to scale… there are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong.
I almost wonder if being a tech co-founder is painted as being too pretty a picture, but hey, who am I to make that determination?
Either way, I’ll continue to try to paint the picture of what my experience is like and you can make of it as you will.
What I’m thinking about
As we get closer to the (hopeful) close of our fundraise, I’ve been spending more time on budgeting, expense tracking, revenue projecting and all of the other fun financial activities that come along with running a tech company (especially during a fundraise).
Surprisingly, it made me realize how little of this I was doing while running my more “traditional” solopreneur business, aka my immigration law practice. While I did monthly bookkeeping and annual tax stuff with my accountant, there wasn’t much forward-looking prep – ie. revenue projections/goals, runway calculations, etc.
For those of you working on more traditional/service based businesses, is this something you do? Am I alone here?
My month-to-month financial prep for my firm used to consist of retroactively looking at my revenue from the last month and making sure it was much higher than my expenses, and that was pretty much it.
But when you’re trying to bring investors on board and raise money to build out your team, it’s crucial to calculate your burn rate (how much you’ll be spending per month) and revenue projections (some investors want to see where you think the company will go, and also so you can calculate how many months you can go until you run out of cash…).
Anyway, it’s been an interesting exercise – especially because the only thing we can guarantee when it comes to projections, is that they’ll be wrong (the key is keeping the wrongness to a minimum :P).
What I’m reading
I’m about half way through the second book about Jeff Bezos/Amazon by Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound. If you’ve been on my list for a few months, you’ll know I read his first book, The Everything Store, quite recently (and you can read my review of it here).
I actually didn’t realize Stone had written a second one until I saw it in a used book store last week, and promptly scooped it up. It pushes 500 pages but is a great read so far. I’m over 1/2 way through and should have a full review for you in my next update.
Anyway, that’s it for me. Have a great week, keep grinding and if you need some more of my content, make sure to join the email list here!
