Darkest before the dawn?

There have been so many times (too many) when we have been nearly at the end of our hopes and money, no contracts, no-one getting back to us - and then, a miracle happens and a job, or money, or both show up out of nowhere.  The stress leaves a mark though.

The last couple of weeks has been like that.  And then, good things started showing up.  Of course, not without great efforts by both of us.

We are doing a lot of networking these days on LinkedIn - it's a great resource for business.  Everyone on there knows that everyone else on there is there to make business connections and to try to sell something - but not by hard sales methods; a softer approach is the protocol.  And "can I be of help to you, or can we help each other somehow?"

In addition, our poor slave (oops, I mean developer) Andy has been putting in enormous amounts of time and effort on the software, with great results.  We now consider him a co-founder.  No-one works for nothing or next-to-nothing unless one is an owner.  We would be nowhere without him.

We put a free downloadable copy of the software out there and invited people to try it.  It's still considered a beta product so we have to let people try it out and let us know if they run into issues, bugs, or would really like it to do something more, maybe some new features that would be useful to them.  

Out of nowhere we get an email from someone in Spain, someone working in one of the biggest consulting firms in Europe, who says he is using it to do ACTUAL WORK for a big project, and he really likes it but there are a couple of bugs that need fixing - could we do that right away?  

Andy and Mike jumped on it right away of course.  A bug fix has gone out.  Mike also found out exactly what the project was trying to do with it which is valuable information because we can market it to other firms who are going to do the same sort of thing.  No, we can't charge this company for using it, but the testimonial will be incredibly valuable.  And, maybe they'll volunteer to pay us something for it, who knows.  His feedback was that they are trying out different tools on this project and ours is the best - easy to use, works great.  Nectar.

There have been other great connections and interested parties as well.  Too many to describe.  But I can say that an actual sale of the software, including some customizing work to make it do exactly what they want, is in the works.  Its not a big sale but it will feel so great to actually sell something.

Now, none of this brings in cash in the near future so Mike still has to go do some consulting.  If only he could get a contract that allowed him to spend time here in Mazatlan and earn money too, and also allow him to conduct software business on the side.........hmmmm.  Ha! This exact wish was answered today! 

Maybe we should do more "putting your intentions and desires out there in the universe".  I know one - wouldn't it be great if someone with bags of money came forward and said they wanted to invest in our software!  Then Mike wouldn't have to do consulting work to pay the bills!

Come on universe!

More to come.....