#27–19th March: On a Wing and a Prayer

@Email

3 min readSep 7, 2022

We did not need twenty-four hours to respond to Mr. Skype. It was a gorgeous day, so Dave and I sat outside in Bryant Park and did a call to debrief Alex and Ackerly.

We walked them through the changes Mr. Skype proposed around launching with fewer social sites, adding a new feature and bringing forward our China launch to accelerate revenue growth.

We all agree that it made sense and believed it was technically doable. So, all that was left was for me to re-work the revenue figures and draft the email.

That next morning I sent Mr. Skype the following email:

“Hi Mr. Skype,

We have thought about your suggestions on the roadmap and revenue/upside (please refer updated version of deck) and have done the following:

ROADMAP (major changes):
2011
1. Focus on 4 major social sites for BETA launch which would make up about 80% of US social market (minus LinkedIn).
2. Accelerated development of 1 key new feature for BETA: “Family Profile” = ability to view entire family social history e.g. parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, kids, etc.
3. Accelerated development of “Visualization plugin” for BETA. Give user ability to show social content in some really cool visual form (ability does not exist today) using combination of Twitter/Flickr or Facebook/WordPress, etc.

2012: Brought forward development of mobile and web versions of socialSOS

2013: Brought forward entry into China for socialSOS

As a result of the accelerations in the roadmap we will deliver greater upside on revenue for 2014 (negligible for 2012–13), mainly due to addition of China and India*.

*NOTE: India market figures were revised to include projected internet growth rates for PC/mobile. India is expected to be fastest growing internet market for next 3–4 years, and will be 3rd largest after China & US by end 2013.

Please email us with any questions or we would be happy to set up time to discuss.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

Best,
Nikhil & Dave”

There had been no hint of an offer to fund us, but we were quietly hopeful because this was the closest we had come to a potential yes, thus far.

A few days later we received a response from Mr. Skype.

He said that he remained committed to our idea and believed it had great potential, but his business partners did not feel comfortable making an investment at this stage. He suggested we bootstrap socialSOS and get back in touch once we had a BETA version that could be launched.

This had been our last warm lead. We were not ready to give up but our quest was beginning to feel like a dead end.

P.S. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:

#27–19th March: On a Wing and a Prayer

@Email

Written by Nikhil Vaish