Frustration

Since September 1999, I have tried to build a business from an idea. When I first had it, I imagined that the business would exist by Christmas 1999. In fact, we earned nothing until December 2001.

But ok, we were earning money. And, I'd done something few people ever do. What's more, 2 years later and 4 years after the original idea, we're still around. sirlochlin, my company, pays my salary.

But since December 2001, I have tried to develop a visual business. I want to get to the point where the talk about ideas is over and I can point to the fruition of dreams. I want to see specific tools we've made, cool applications, great "oooo-ahhhh" processes. Then I can say any of the following:

"See? THIS is it. Now how many did you say you wanted?"
"Here's what it does. As you can see, there's plenty of scope to fits with your functionality, so integration between us would work very well. A 50-50 budget would give us 100 grand to start with. Shall we?"
"And here, ladies and gentlemen, you can see a comparison between the solutions along two criteria: usability and results. This is why we've been so successful in entering this market."

And finally, when we have more money....

"Hey [insert name of programmer], can you spend today building the first cut of the interface we whiteboarded yesterday? Cheers. I want to see if it works as we think it will."

But here we are, in February 2004, and all this never-ending talk of ideas and in-the-future stuff is enough to send me to pot. And in 6 days we have to convince the Board (of Directors) of Creative HQ, the business incubator of which we are a (provisional) part and in which we have our offices, that we are worth keeping around. They require that we are earning $500,000 per annum by the 24th month of our residency. And we have to convince them that we can, largely on the basis of stinking, waffly, stupid IDEAS!!!

GRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!