Update

I am too fucking lazy to make a daily journal -- yet every day I lament the fact that I have no record of my life.  You could call it a Catch 22.  You could also call it lame-as-fucking-hell-you-lack-drive-you-stupid-indolent-son-of-a-whore.  (no offense mom, it's a term of art.)

So the gist of it is this:

• I had received semi-bad advice that I could build this platform entirely on Wordpress and then either handle the math manually or I could have someone build a plug-in in PHP that would do the math so that the website was responsive rather than static.
• I pursued this path for 3 months.  In month 4, I brought in one of my best friends M., an asp.net developer, to build this program in PHP.  He spent a month learning PHP and prepping for this weeklong hackathon.  
• He arrives.  It is great.  We spend 5 days trying to build a PHP plug-in. 
• Turns out Wordpress is a pain in the ass.  Learning how to plug-into PHP is as big of a problem as actually building an entirely new platform.  And it's gonna be buggy no matter what. 
• We pivot 5 days into his weeklong visit.  Scrap the entire Wordpress concept, move to a completely custom built web application in Ruby on Rails.  M. has never coded in Ruby on Rails before.  
• M. spends 4 days furiously learning, synthesizing and building the Ruby on Rails app.  He gets to about 70%.  The difficult 30% lies ahead.  He goes home, leaving me grateful.  
• We are left rudderless.  No developer, just a front-end developer, and a web application that requires Ruby on Rails.   Four months and nothing to show for it, and now I need a fucking developer. 
• We talk to the single developer who finds promise in our concept.  He thinks it is compelling.  He is a great developer.  We have dinner with him downtown to discuss customer acquisition with the secret hope to somehow get him involved in our project as a developer.   He is a ruby on rails guy.  He is extremely intelligent and articulate.  He understands what we are doing.  
• He tells us, in nicer terms:  What the fuck are you doing?  You guys know what you're doing.  You know the law, you know the economics, you know the market, you are more prepared than anyone I've met.  What is the hold up?  Why haven't you launched?  Is your concept validated?  Why not set up a dummy page that makes people pledge to a local business and then have it lead nowhere, just so you can validate the concept?  Just go and do it.  Do it.  Doesn't have to be pretty.  Doesn't need bells and whistles.  It just has to work.  It has to be validated.  Get your own friends to fund the loan if need be.  Just do it.
• Stunned.
• That is a very good point.
• What the fuck have I been doing for months?
• Immediately pivot again.  Launch now.  Launch now.  Get it in the world.  Learn from it.  ASAP. 
• Set up an appointment with a major venture capital firm for a product feedback session in exactly one month. 
• Attending Slow Money National Gathering for a week, the week before the meeting with the venture capital firm.   Have the prototype ready so you can talk about it.  Describe it.  Demo it on an iPad.  Get investors.  Have a product to sell when you hit the ground.  That's three weeks away.
• Holy shit, October is going to be fucked.  
• But the malaise is over.  It is balls to the wall, get this shit built time.  

Hence, slightly less time for the blogging and the updating.  I spend my days looking at html mock-ups, mark them up, build the contracts, write and re-write the copy for the website.  Think about models.  Think about businesses.  Think about how to get the money.   Figure out how to calculate debt coverage ratios.  Everything it takes. 

Yay.