Do I go For VC to run Fast, or run slow with myself...

Semil

We are running a coupon site for major online retailers in US and about to start same site for UK. We achieve some great things for this project even become the top level affiliate for big consumer electronic company.

We are basically non technical guys and built a product from scratch in CMS by outsourcing the development work. We spent almost about 500,000 in the development during the period of a year.
We breakeven by period of six months, but now we are competing with big guys and have aim to capture larger market in India as coupon Industry leaders are coming into domestic market.
We have future plans, strategies and modification in pipeline. But the development cost, slow speed of development, lack of knowledge in deep technological issues and mostly outsourcing the development work to somewhat not so good team is staggering our plans.

What I think is we need a mentor, VC or investor who can invest in our product and guide us with development issues.

Is there a right way to think, or is there any other way We can grow fast ?

Sameer

If your model's arrived at - at least more or less - repeatable and scalable, and lack of tech is an impediment, yes, by all means pick up some funding. But if, at scale, the model seems completely different from how it looks now - avoid - it can botch things really bad.

For tech, its important to first get a tech/product person on board with a buy-in into the idea. Just a dev-team approach will not cut it unless there's someone who can bridge the gap between the product roadmap and engineering.

Divyesh

As I understand, yours is a couponing business and though you can do your business development offline, you essentially need your web platforms to support your customers and you would require a constant innovation on the technology front to stay ahead in the race.
Effectively even if you have a great speed going to market, you need to match the same speed on your technology, which I foresee being nearly impossible by outsourcing it. In doing so, you would be building a huge dependency on your outsourcing partner, and its a huge risk to your business as well as your customers.
You are better-off building it inhouse by funding it yourself or pick-up funds and set up a good team (obviously by getting a CTO on board) or if you can do with minimalistic skillsets on the technology front, you might as well look for a CTO by offloading some stake :)

Semil

Thanks @Sameer and @Divyesh,

@sameer can you please give me some advice on this line " But if, at scale, the model seems completely different from how it looks now - avoid - it can botch things really bad."

@Divyesh : I am worried about finding a investor, like are they going for coupon site ?

We are doing much better then expectation, keeping up focus on US revenues and start building presence in UK, too. We are going to take a bit different approach for couponing with mixture of offline and online plus mobile and web. Plus earlier I have a impression in my mind that VC or investors don't support coupon kind of products, but now i am seeing that we can get funding as we are generating very smooth flow of revenue.

Sameer

@Semil, it boils down to discovering your business model before scaling, and hopefully, not needing to VC - fund the first phase itself. If the model seems robust enough to scale without changing dramatically (product category, market segments, non-linear costs for any part of the transaction, etc), thinking about funding might be the logical thing to do.

Semil

@Sameer, we already pass out the first phase, now we need to develope furhter things or say components which leads to better conversion and customer retention. We putt a much need marketing efforts via SEO and other promotional and by which we are good and generate few thousands of visitors per month, We choose right market - going steadly in that - costs are not increasing in any other things, too. But we are lacking in two three issues very badly. First one is lack of deep technological knowledge which leads changing some basic technical things. Second We cant hire super team due to financial constrains. Though I have ideas are ready but implementation on rapid speed is not possible.

sinha

@Semil - hope this helps: Bootstrap
or Raise Funding? How do I decide?

Written by Mukund in response to your query.

Semil

@cnha Thank you very much Sir, I am just about to write for the post by @mukund Sir. It really helps me a lot. I'll post a thoughts on that blog post as well in the thread too, which are currently boiling in mind after reading a post by @mukund sir.

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