We don't have money anymore and didn't pay our employees the last month. The CEO fails to convince investors or buyers.
What do you advice?
1. How much institutional support (and energy) is there to get the paid version shipped? Is everyone else burnt out and jumping ship, or could you realistically stay the course and get that product out the door?
2. Even if you shipped the paid version, would the revenue be enough to cover the burn rate? It looks like you guys raised 3 million over the course of the past year, and burned through it (correct me if I have that wrong, just getting the data from your Angellist page). At that burn rate, your premium version (at your stated price of $5 per user per month) would need to onboard roughly 50,000 paid users to be at the break-even point (though probably more than that since your costs would go up). Is onboarding than many users feasible?
If you can ship the premium version and onboard a ton of users all before the rest of the team throws up their hands...maybe you should go for it; give it one last college try.
But I don't see that point coming. And I think it is the reason we are falling
Five bucks per person-month doesn't make sense in either market. It's $5 too much for people building their business on Drive and Evernote. It's too little for 10,000 screen organizations...they know you will go broke. And then there's an asterisk on the free plan and another deal for students, so I'm left wondering if it's worth figuring out the value proposition before I think about learning how to use it.
If it was an enterprise product, it might make sense but that's not live fast. die young, and leave a good looking corpse business strategy compatible. Students probably don't need mobile task updates for group projects. In the middle, though, there are good user stories and price points. $400 per month for up to 20 users...that sounds like a way to qualify businesses and reduce the number of sales.
And if you can't make the bottom line $5000 per year better for 2000 companies, then it's time to throw in the towel.
Good luck.
Your mission now, (based on your skills & expertise)-- identify someone who you can help and will pay you for your services. You can make this "pivot" either individually or as a group. Put your heads together as the sales & biz dev team. Get out there, start asking people what projects they might need help on. Do it now!
