This is the backstory on our company's first product launch. This is from the Humanity In The Loop podcast episode titled Product Launch Backstory and Introduction to the “Humanity In The Loop Podcast.” Welcome to the 9human.co blog.

In January of 2020, just prior to the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, after 10 years of watching the market, and seeing that no one had executed on this idea, we started to create venture capital lists. The first list was U.S. venture capital firms. And the second list was venture capital firms outside the United States. By the time we finished the two lists, there were 224 in the U.S. list of venture capital firms, and 100 firms on the list outside the United States. The thing is, while this was all happening we had already started thinking of creating more lists. And we knew we were on to something way bigger than our original idea. 

So, let's step back. And we will give you a little insight into how we created the first two lists, and all the lists that followed. This was done old school through search. It took four months to do. And we imputed each and every firm on the list manually. We also did all the copywriting ourselves. It took working seven days a week, 18 hours a day, to finish the first two lists. 

Okay, so let’s move on. We realized we needed to build on our idea so we created lists for startup accelerators and incubators, crowdfunding sites, job sites, graphic design software, and UX UI design software. And again, the lists were created manually. Also, we did all the copywriting ourselves. After seven months of working 18 hours a day, we scrambled as fast as we could, and we launched. Okay, so let's tell you a bit about the site. You could scroll through the lists really fast, and link to any site really quickly. There weren't very many images on the site, so It was really fast.

So, after we launched, the reality that we were going to have to find customers, set in quickly. We didn’t have any marketing budget, only our social media, and we found out quickly that it was hard to even get people or startups to the site. It had also created a burn rate at the company, and that was definitely scary. So, after only about three months we decided to pull the plug. We made the decision for the long term survival of the company. We also thought, someone, or another company, might see our overall vision for this product, and we were concerned we could get copied. It was simply too early for us, and we made the overall decision to just be patient and not let a product launch take the company down. We hope you found this backstory on our first product launch valuable. If you like the blog so far keep a lookout for more posts.