back on track.
guys and gals,
It’s been a hard time for us for the past months and I guess you thought we’d be dead by now. There’s been little progress in the development and we’ve been fighting the usual start-up struggle. We run out of the resources that we thought would take us to a public iPhone beta. They didn’t.
We tried for a long time to push the development even without any resources, with lot of help from the guys initially on the project, and other friends trying to fix and & finalize the beta. Working with limited resources is good in many ways. It triggers creative thinking and often more optimized solutions than if you have unlimited resources, but working without resources, that doesn’t last for long.
Since the beginning of the year we’ve been trying to figure out a sustainable model to continue the development and to get things up running again. It’s with quite a relieve that we finally have found a path that we believe will help us in short-term but more importantly in the long run.
We invited you to become a part of a beta team in September last year, and we haven’t forgot about you. We know that you care about your address book, and so do we. The app has yet to reach a level where it doesn’t act as ambahoo. At some points the app has been a little funny and mixed people and numbers, and even though it’s surprising at times there’s no way we’ll let this happen to you.
Delays and problems and the heavy winter behind, we have exciting & bright times ahead. I’m promised myself to never say “soon” again so I won’t, but I truly believed in “soon” last year… we only had weeks until release, right. But you learn as you live. When it happens, it happens. Until then, make sure to back-up your contacts!
Yours,
first round.
soft loan // IK2
Being a start-up you’re constantly moving between your vision – which to most people is something dreamlike and unreal, and reality – which is struggling to find financing to realize your vision. It’s a very frustrating situation because you know that if you only had that money you could take that concept of yours and go build it.
There’s obviously many ways of financing a project, and all of them has got pros and cons, and strings attached. The most viable option for us was to to go for a soft-loan as a first step to get going.
In Sweden there are quite some option for this kind of financing, all depending on where you are in your progress and what kind of project you want to pull off. We’ve been discussing both with Teknopol and IK2 and they’ve both been very positive to our project.
I contacted IK2 back in October when I first aired the idea to some people. I met Johan, the Head of Innovation of Almi, and we started to discuss how to move from that stage, to next. He’s been a great supporter ever since and in the beginning of this year he suggested that we’d apply for their soft-loan to make things happen. So we did.
In late February we filled in the loan-application, which very much resembles a business-plan. Customers, Market, Strategy, Financials etc.. you know the deal. Well, many lines later and some complementary market-strategy-plans it’s now in harbour.
I remember the call from Johan, when he me told we got the loan. It’s amazing how happy you can get, to receive the news that you’ve got another batch of money to pay back. I couldn’t stop smiling though. The fact is, that it’s a sign that we’ve been working hard, we’re in the right direction, and we’ve got something that’s worth investing in. I’d like to express my gratitude for the belief in the project, and all the help that we’ve received so far from the people of IK2, Teknopol and everyone else that’s been around – advising us on the way towards a realization.
It’s an amazing time we’ve got in front of us, and here’s a quote from Johan @IK2/Almi on the matter.
“we believe that ambadoo has an exciting time ahead. The need of a good contact system escalate in pace with the development of the media, in combination that the world is becoming smaller and our network is becoming bigger, and the increasing impact of the social networks around” – Johan Olsén, Head of Innovation of Almi Företagspartner Skåne