Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 3)

Sramana: What was the initial iteration of FluidWare?

Aydin Mirzaee: The first iteration was interesting because it was based on my former company. I had been trying to raise venture capital, and everyone told me that I had to get money from the Valley. It is easy to say, but I did not understand it. I went out and tried to find a bunch of email addresses for venture capitalists who were located in the Valley. I found a couple of hundred email addresses.

I recorded my first corporate pitch on YouTube and I sent them all a copy of that pitch. A lot of top tier VC firms started getting back to me, not because they liked the idea I pitched but because they were intrigued that I would put my pitch on YouTube. Apparently back in the day that was unheard of. There were even some blogs that wrote about it, I was coined as LonelyDork15. There were a lot of people commenting on the blog and criticizing me.

Those comments made me stop and think for a while. Why were they criticizing me? The majority of the comments were useless, but some of them were actually constructive criticisms which were useful. That led me to build the world’s first anti-social network. The concept was to create a venue where you could post something to the site and have the world find problems with what you posted. You could then create an award for the person who provided the best constructive feedback. That was the first iteration of the company.

We launched that site, and it just didn’t work. In hindsight that seems obvious, but at the time we thought it was a good idea. The reason it did not work was that people were not willing to put their material online to be publicly criticized.

Sramana: It takes a lot of self-confidence to open yourself up to that criticism.

Aydin Mirzaee: Exactly. That is why the site did not work. We realized that anything to do with the word “criticism” was not going to be effective. However, we had this software we had developed and we needed to do something with it. We decided to meet with a bunch of people in town to see what we could do.

There was a guy here at a university who found our software to be interesting because he ran a business plan competition. We changed the platform to a feedback platform, and that triggered an idea. He was willing to pay us a custom development fee for us to build him a site where students could apply and judges could offer feedback.

We have never been funded from an external investment source, so that sounded like a good idea. I had my savings from Nortel, which did not amount to much. When he offered to pay $10,000 to build the tool, I found it to be a good proposition.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
1 2 3 4 5 6 7