DreadCthulhu posted:

That's a good question. The product is somewhat defined, in fact we made a few institutional sales already, but we have no idea if this will scale. In fact right now it looks like it won't, too much hand holding to make a very measly sale. If we don't come up with a better monetization route (or a different engine of growth) we're done in half a year at best. We're continuously trying different experiments, and the thing we stress hardest is the speed of iteration of such experiments. The more we try, the better our chances of striking gold and not having to go back to real jobs in a few months.

Our runway is extremely short, around 6 months at the current rate, and we've just started paying ourselves "salaries" to survive (after 1.5 years of sucking it up). Our incubator's demo day is in 3 months, so we need to fake that perfect last minute hockey stick to make it to a reasonable seed round (our industry is pretty tough as far as vc goes, so every little bit counts). The better our traction at that point in time, the better the chances of missing the timing on that seed.

At this point 80 hours is out of question, I don't even know how to do that. I agree that's kind of immature and an indication that you're not really doing work for at least 20 of those hours, but trying to live the "lifestyle". I'm a bit too old for the whole "don't shower for 3 days and sleep at work". Ideally we're aiming for 60h of well-rested work, which is pretty achievable with 6 day work weeks, but if you work intensely enough you could be done in 40.

And yes, I 100% agree that working less helps you considerably with not being stuck in the trees and missing the big picture, but there's something to be said about the power of continuous rapid experimentation. Ideally we'd have both, but it's been very tough so far.