Founder's Log #-2: I am struggling as a founder

I’ve been trying to build a SaaS startup for about 7 months now. I have zero customers, no MVP and no funding. I’m running out of my own savings and it’s crunch time.

One thing is clear, I’ve made many mistakes and focused on the wrong thing. I have some hard choices to make.

The startup idea I have is to offer a scalable authorization as a service. I know the problem exists, I’ve gone through the pain myself, and over 90% of the potential customers I interviewed agreed they’d prefer to buy instead of building authorization in-house. There are also competitors, so I am solving a real problem.

The solution I propose is to build a SaaS offering around the open-source project I’ve been working on for about a year. The USP is that it’s not mandatory to create and maintain an authorization model using a DSL, so it’s easier to integrate and maintain compared to competitors. The solution should also save ~80% implementation + ~70% maintenance costs compared to in-house solutions and enable tech teams to focus on product build. The solution should be appealing, at least on paper.

I partnered with a venture studio about 6 months ago, given them 20% of equity and paid $15k in fees. In return I got access to a web portal to follow a process to validate the startup idea and got access to their “team of experts”.

After validating there’s a market for the idea, the venture team advised me to start a £500k pre-seed round to fund the product build. So for the past couple of months, armed with a landing page and a pitch deck, I’ve been chasing after investors. I’ve reached out to ~50 investors, had meetings with ~10 but there’s no interest to invest. The best I got was to reach out when there’s a lead investor.

Funding attempt failed, so the venture team advised to do a cold outreach campaign. I got ~3% response rate and arranged a few calls. There’s interest!

But I don’t have an MVP! How can I convert interest into at least trials when I don’t have an MVP?

As a last resort I reached out to a couple of very warm leads, who had ideal use cases, and offered to integrate the open-source version into their stack at zero cost. But even that didn’t work, I got “it’s not the right time” response.

The biggest mistake I’ve made so far is not focusing on product build. I’ve wasted too much time doing things that doesn’t matter. While I don’t regret partnering with the venture studio, it’s not working for me either.

Where do I go from here?