Startup lost it's Captain What to do?
It is developed to the production point, ready-to-scale infrastructure. If fact, I developed it, and I put a lot of thought and mental resources into implementing everything with a sturdy plan in mind. I invested no more than two months into it – and I did not ask for any payment. I am proud of how it finally went; the theory behind the system, the system itself, and the front-end design – all very well-built. Also cheap to maintain and operate.
The product utilizes AI technology to create short-format mobile video content aka "clips" out of lengthy widescreen content. Inside, it has a simple onboarding funnel and media-processing tooling to turn any videos into shorts/tiktoks/reels with some extra AI assistance. It is ready to be presented to anyone interested at an URL. It can embark on getting into its niche, but here is the thing...
At the last moment, everything started to go wrong with communication inside the company of the people with whom we founded this project. The trust was lost in a matter of dozen slack messages, and one of us, who was actually in charge of setting up the business entity and company processes just left the boat.
So, me and another UI/UX partner are left together. And we have our awesome system in place, but we have no CEO or domain or business entity anymore (maybe it'll hold another day or two). We are greatly motivated to take this further, despite a lack of skills to grow a startup from scratch, but it is kinda confusing now. I have some savings to make it for another 2-3 months and an awesome piece of web software which costs about half of my rent to run for month. I feel like we should pursuit selling it behind our own brand, migrating the infrastructure and getting a new domain is a matter of few days, but I also really want to hear other opinions and perspectives on the situation.
What do we do?
2 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] threadIf you're completely in the clear on that front, well, first off - your product sounds pretty interesting. Secondly, what went wrong? Does that person that had the falling out over slack still have the ability to screw you or the UI/UX person over? Do they own trademarks, the LLC registration, etc...?
However, the most important question is this: if you could take it with your UI/UX partner, and start a company and do this fulltime, would you? Or is this something you're interested in using as a portfolio project for a better dev job? Would you seek investment quickly?
Shit, if you're looking for a business-oriented person, there are plenty of people here who would probably love to jump into that role (myself included).
Basically at the current point it watches the video for you and breaks it down to all possible short clips you can extract from it, organises them into topics, speakers and chapters, plus the online editor to scale/crop/pad/caption/cc and export/distribute it. It is also a very flexible base to perform any kind of video-related editing/distribution tasks or projects whatsoever, elegantly overcoming all blockers such app could face with some real user load. I would definitely seek to partner an experienced business person who might be interested in joining this, taking the responsibility of setting the business entity google can approve and stripe can send money to, as well as leading the way to sales, and while i can take it without getting fully broke, which is couple months, i think i will engage, so feel free to drop me an email if you wanna chat about this:)
You nicely noticed it is a great portfolio which could be studied as a robust minimal modular k8s node.js microservices infrastructure, or get me a high pay job right away, but after 7 years i'm so bored of this – i want to have something i really own and care after from ground up