10y
Thanks for your message and thanks for the feedback.
What keeps the wheels moving for a startup is funding from investors, that's just a reality a startup has to live with until it becomes profitable. What makes a company profitable is consistent and repeatable sales.
In a nascent market that's harder to achieve, but not impossible.
It is easy to assume "any" sales is good for the business. Unfortunately, that's not how startups work, you have to have "good" sales, in order to move the business forward and create a good outcome on the fundraising side.
Also, It is easy to assume every lead that comes our way is a lead worth spending time on. Spending the least amount of time on leads that may not go anywhere is extremely hard to do, but essential when you operate with a small team and a very small budget.
These are all things you only learn when you are front and center fundraising or selling. Until you have that experience it is difficult to place that into context or appreciate the push back on chasing bad deals.
Our business model has been changing and evolving and that's common in an industry moving as quickly as ours. The only real sales we've had are built on strong partnerships. Nothing else has given us real results.
Many times we waited too long to cut bad deals. It is a painful process, but necessary in order to stay alive and remain attractive to investors.
We are still growing and learning, no one has a special recipe, but we are closer than most. Everyone has an opinion though and that's ok.
We are one of the leading drone companies in the world because we understand how to work with clients, we hire and retain amazing team members and we are constantly learning and adjusting.
Also, we caught the interest of some of the best and extremely successful entrepreneurs / investors in the world because they liked our strategy, they appreciate our approach and they love working with our team.
Even at the board level "sales" is not what we discuss, we discuss distribution, partnerships and making sure we have a solid business model that represents growth.
We are still figuring things out, so long as we are innovating we always will.
Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
CS
