July 7th, 2009



New York Tech Meetup + An Alternative to Seed-Financing?

The presentation from Exit Strategy NYC at tonight’s New York Tech Meetup made me think about alternative ways to raise seed capital. When you’re raising money for your paradigm-shifting, world-changing startup, it can take a long time to build your product and simultaneously convince people with money that your team+product+company is worth funding.  You want to meet the right investor, find the right “fit” etc etc etc etc.  Months go by, and chip away at the time you’d normally spend building your product and – right – changing the world.

Enter Jonathan and Ashley Wegener.  They took a real pain-point (have YOU ever gotten out at the wrong end of the platform in Union Square?  Vom.) spent two months riding subway cars and making sweet Adobe Illustrator files and built a very cool iphone app that I have already shelled out $1.99 to download.  Is Exit Strategy venture-backable?  Nope.  But I figure they’ll probably make around $100-$250K from selling this app to New Yorkers and tourists alike.  I bet the whole process was about 3-4 months start to finish.

Now, they could spend the cash on boats and dinners and houses, or double-down and use the cash to build their “big vision”.  They’ll probably make enough money from ExitStrategy to get through that painful product-development period without starving, they have already proven that they can execute, AND they have built a product that will make a lot of people’s lives just a little bit easier.

Sounds like win/win/win to me.

Now go buy the app.


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  • http://blog.jwegener.com Jonathan W

    Hey Amanda,
    Thanks for the blog mention! Very insightful and interesting comments. You’re right, Exit Strategy NYC was bootstrapped and done on a shoestring budget: borrowed android and blackberry phones from friends, hired two developers primarily on equity and the third cheaply overseas via odesk, used 99designs for affordable logo design etc. I’m proud to say I developed an app across three different mobile platforms on an extremely tight budget.

    I’m not sure Exit Strategy NYC will be a road to getting rich quick, but who knows! It seems a LOT of people have a fundamental aversion to paying for an app..apple’s set a bad precedent. Regardless, I’ve found the process of building and launching a product to be exhilarating and an incredible experience, and I feel super prepared for whatever venture I decided to embark on next. I’ll write a longer blog post on my own blog at somepoint, but basically this experience has taught me the most important lesson of all: how to get stuff DONE. And learning to do launch marketing and press outreach has been a fantastic learning experience too. Not to mention all the fantastic people i’ve met and had the chance to hit up for advice along the way!

    Thanks,
    Jonathan Wegener, ExitStrategyNYC.com

    PS I’ll let you know when I buy my first boat, err, I mean, jumpstart the next stage of my tech empire :)