We Can't Do This Alone

My son and I have been building this project for over a year now. Just the two of us.

We've done everything. The design, the backend, the frontend, the infrastructure, the events, the content, the flyers, the social media. We've written every line of code and taped every poster to every lamppost.

And at some point over the last few months, we both arrived at the same conclusion: we can't keep doing this alone.

The marketing person search

We talked to a bunch of people about marketing. Some were freelancers, some were agency types, some were friends of friends who "know someone."

A few seemed genuinely interested. They liked the idea. They understood the problem. They could see the potential.

But then we'd get to the conversation about money. And the conversation would end.

We're not charging for the app. We don't have revenue. We're building this on a shoestring, fitting it around everything else in our lives. The budget for a marketing person is somewhere between modest and nonexistent.

And marketing people, reasonably, need to be paid. This isn't their passion project. They're not going to spend their weekends crafting Instagram campaigns for an app they didn't build, out of love for the mission. That's not how it works.

So we'd have a great conversation, get excited about what they could bring, and then watch it dissolve when the numbers came up.

Every time.

Back to what we know

Which means we're back to doing the marketing ourselves. Flyers and Instagram ads and Nextdoor posts. The stuff that's not our core competency. The stuff that takes time away from building the actual product.

It's frustrating because every hour I spend on a social media post is an hour I'm not improving the app. And I know the app is where the real value is. The matching algorithm, the event curation, the follow-up features, that's what makes this different from everything else out there.

But none of that matters if nobody knows the app exists.

The VC question

My son and I have talked about approaching VCs. Not seriously, not with a deck or a plan. More like the way you talk about a holiday you can't afford. Hypothetically.

But when I'm honest about why the idea appeals to me, it's not really about the money. I mean, money would help. Obviously. But what I actually want is someone else in the room.

Right now it's just us. We make every decision. We have every doubt. We celebrate every small win with nobody to tell. There's no outside perspective, no experienced voice saying "this is normal" or "you're doing the wrong thing" or "keep going."

The doubt is louder when there's nobody to share it with. Which is ironic, given what we're building.

What my son is thinking

I think his doubts are different from mine. For me this is personal. I started building because I was lonely and I wanted to fix it. For him, it's also professional. He sees this as a chance to build something real, to break out of what he's doing now, to prove he can ship a product.

We don't always talk about the hard stuff openly. We're British. We just keep building and hope the other one is doing alright. But I can tell when the energy dips. When the commits slow down. When he's wondering if this is going anywhere.

He hasn't quit though. Neither have I.

Sheer bloody-mindedness

Someone asked me recently what keeps me going. I didn't have a good answer at the time.

I think it's stubbornness more than belief. The belief comes and goes. Some weeks I'm convinced this is going to work. Other weeks the numbers look like we haven't even launched yet and I wonder if I'm deluding myself.

But the stubbornness is constant. I look at what's out there, the apps people use and complain about, and I know, I genuinely know, that what we've built is better. Not just different. Better. The psychology is real. The curation is thoughtful. The follow-up features actually work.

The problem isn't the product. The problem is that nobody's seen it yet. And solving that problem requires skills and resources we don't have.

So we keep going. Not because we've figured it out, but because stopping would mean admitting that a good idea isn't enough. And I'm not ready to admit that.