Thanks for the heads up. The button is only active after you've successfully added a comment - as we presume you haven't finished if you haven't made one. cheers!
I don't really see the analogy. MS bootstrapped fairly naturally (with the help of a great deal of luck along the way) from BASIC to progressively more sophisticated OSes, each of which closely followed well-established pre-existing models. AFAIK (I'm not an expert) there are no viable existing models out there for a big next step from the Boosted Board.
Even assuming infinite battery life, what's the form factor? A wheelchair won't cut it. A Segway-like thing won't cut it. A unicycle won't cut it. A conventional bicycle won't cut it. A recumbent bike or trike won't cut it. Roller-skates won't cut it. Exoskeletal legs won't cut it. Many of these things are of proven usefulness, but they've never been general-purpose substitutes or augmentors for pedestrianism. A version of some of the above which folds into something unprecedentedly small and light might begin to cut it, but how is that achievable within present-day engineering constraints?
You're looking at a solution that solves the problem for 100% of people. Most products don't do that. The popularity of bikes proves that.
You only need to solve the problem for the majority of people ( >50% ) to be considered a good solution. The solution may prove to be elegantly simple.
There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem is and how little you know how to solve it right now.
This sounds like a bad idea. We are not King Solomon, nor should either party want his help. For simplicity's sake, neither party should take the opinion of anyone other than a lawyer on this.
This product looks great. I think that automating the sales process, from prospecting to closing will be a vertical that'll see huge growth over the next few years. Anything that helps companies make money faster and integrates with salespeople's existing workflows is an obvious winner. That's the good news, the bad news is how low the barrier to entry for this market is right now and will continue to be with the current business model. The company that becomes the leader in this will work out how to make something that is seemingly highly commoditisable (email sending and read receipts) solidly defensible so the next startup down the block can't just undercut you on number of prospects contacted per pricing tier. I suspect the answer will have more to do with more impressive mass personalisation rather than any network effects these companies can create. Fascinating space, this is a growth sector without doubt. The companies I recommend checking out: Stacklead, AutopilotHQ, Yesware, Streak and Docsend among others.
