erica.biz - Erica Douglass shows you how to build an inspired, successful business.

And this time it’s business that has broken my heart.

I have a friend (or one of those “business acquaintance” types, since he doesn’t really know me outside of my role at Simpli) who is starting up a wireless ISP. He wants to be the Wal-Mart of wireless and target suburban areas that don’t already have DSL or cable modems. I think it’s a good business idea, but his business is much like mine in that there is a lot of competition. What happens when those areas he targets with his wireless company get DSL or cable modems? What happens when customers need more than 6Mbit bi-directional? (This will come more quickly than anyone wants to imagine.) There are a lot of “what-ifs” with his business.

Knowing him, he will probably be successful. It’s incredibly frustrating, though, when I have a company that makes well into 5 figures every month, and I am really struggling to find investors to invest even $10,000 into my business. Contrast this with him–he has this “napkin idea” of a wireless ISP, which has 0 customers and 0 revenue, and he’s already received $235,000 in investments for his company. I want investors to help Simpli become the front-runner in distributed computing to achieve true 100% website and email uptime, and, while I do have some investors who are interested, I don’t know when the checks will actually come in.

In the meantime, AboveNet is having some of the worst issues I’ve ever seen. They’ve had three outages in 5 days. I’m ready to move out and get a new location with multiple network providers so we don’t have to be chained to them. I feel stuck, however, because we don’t have all the money I need to invest in the new location to make it totally 100% redundant. That’s where the investments come in, but it seems the potential investors I talk to all say “That’s a great idea, but I don’t have the money right now. Sorry.” And another door closes on my dreams.

No one out there takes it harder than me when we have an outage. I wear it as a personal badge of pride that Simpli has fantastic uptime. When we’re down, and especially when it’s completely out of my control, there’s nothing I can do but answer unhappy phone calls from customers. Half of them berate me and threaten to leave and half of them seem to want to hang out on the phone forever and ask me questions until it’s back online. Some of them say things like “This is unacceptable.” Do you think I don’t know that? Do you not realize that every cell in my body wants to go down to the damn datacenter myself and reboot whatever switch or router it is that has fallen over this time? Believe me, whatever pain your business is feeling, I’m feeling it 200 times worse, because I have hundreds of customers upset with me (even though no outage this week has been our fault.)

We are ready to move. I have everything in line. I’m waiting for one or two investments to make it happen. I have a meeting with a couple potential investors tomorrow, so I will hopefully close something. This has just been a very rough day for me. One potential investor finally backed out, saying (how many times have I heard this?) “Yes, I’m interested, but I don’t have the money.” When I expressed disappointment, he actually had the nerve to say “Don’t stop prospecting just because you’ve had someone [him, in this case] say ‘yes’.” Perhaps I just have too much faith and trust in others, and I have to learn the hard way that hardly anyone ever follows through with what they say they’re going to do. Cases in point: Not only him, but AboveNet, who guarantees 100% network uptime. Cheers to that.