I think every entrepreneur can immediately understand what it means to say ‘we are live’. It means a bottle of Champagne sometime around 1 am (always way later than you had planned) and lots of more coffee the next morning. Our moment of glory was sometime during the night from July 11th to the 12th. Almost two years after conceiving the idea of a Business Plan as-a-Service platform at the Old Town Coffeehouse in Louisville, Kentucky and more or less 9 months after we started finally putting code towards making it a reality, we are finally ready to learn if our idea can fly.
We had quite a few up and downs along the way. We were shopping it around for close to a year without finding anyone willing to do it for us (lesson to be learnt – if you won’t do it, no one else will).
But we had this itch which kept us going. We had this sometimes overwhelming clear vision of how we would use http://launchd.eu to develop all those other cool business ideas we had. It was us who wanted to have this platform. It was never just about launchd, but about what it would enable us to do.
Maybe now is the time to say what we envision launchd to be: a platform for entrepreneurs and companies to develop business plans. CRM meets Project Management meets Business Model canvas meets Market Validation. Got it?
Let me try that again: When we first started to look into developing business ideas, we quickly found ourselves using Teambox (very cool), Excel spreadsheets (heck, there is nothing you can not do in Excel), Dropbox, Wiki, Word documents, Google docs, Survey Monkey and so on. At some point it just became too much – and we thought that there must be a better way to bring all those disjunct pieces of information together. Around this time we stumbled upon Customer Development and Lean Startup. And suddenly everything fell into place – at least in our minds – and we knew exactly how our dream ‘business development’ platform should look like.
So this it .. we did it. And I think it is only appropriate in this first blog to give thanks to my wife Gabby for enduring my sleep deprived crankiness and to Nele, the wife of my co-founder Jonas for doing very much the same.
launchd.io 