The real key to avoiding failure (IMO)

This is a story about persistence and determination.

In late 2014 I had an idea for a niche product, something that I found to be very cool, a creative and innovative was to automate and deploy a full featured, properly engineered, and profitable technology solution that common wisdom among knowledgeable individuals usually agreed was at least unfeasible, if not impossible, to deploy at the small scales I was planning, and certainly not profitably. More importantly, I had already consulted on projects and custom built systems like this before, they just one-off isolated installations and certainly not easy to deploy. I designed the business as a hybrid SaaS model (there is a on site hardware component), and went to work testing and building.

By the beginning of the new year 2015 I built it (well really more of a POC than a finished product), it worked, and a poor website and few promotional emails later I had a couple paying customers (I was making only hundreds of dollars per month at that point). However it didn't blow up and grow like I imagined, and I kept my day job. As a hobby, and because I genuinely wanted this to succeed I kept building on it on the side, adding features and functions, first being an automatic billing system so I didn't have to manually invoice my first couple customers each month. All the while I was slowly picking up a customer here and there. It was actually a few years before I even crossed the $1k/mo mark, but I didn't care, any extra income was still more than nothing, and it was passive, so it didn't interfere with anything, and I was enjoying it.

Fast Forward to 2023, wife and I are expecting our first child, and I realized that this little "hobby", which was at that point now making over $100k/yr, needed to be a primary focus for me. I started to move away from consulting jobs that had been my primary focus for the past decade and a half, and doubled down on adding new features and capabilities, I rebranded and built a new website, reincorporated as a C corp to attract investors, and started building a pitch deck.

In 2024 I both welcomed my Child and also crossed the $200k mark and then started applying to incubators to try and attract VC money.

I got accepted into a spring 2025 cohort for an incubator. Through the incubator I got some excellent coaching and re-structured how I thought about a lot of my messaging and branding, and things were going well until about 3/4 of the way through the program when it was time to sign their equity warrant, where I discovered an alternative valuation election clause that was entirely fine for someone who was still finalizing their idea and still pre-production, it was unacceptable for me given that I was already profitable and growing. Additionally I was in talks with someone that had the potential to 100x the business size in under a year (those talks slowed but haven't stalled, and there's still a real chance it starts to move forward in 2026), so in June I withdrew from the incubator feeling like it wasn't the fit I had hoped for.

Now as we're getting close to rounding out 2025, I've crossed both the $300k and the $400k mark, and even had expectations for continued similar growth next year, but that was before I received notification from a customer that, while still preliminary as I write this, could easily position me for an additional 5-10x growth next year, followed by 10-20x the following year, all of which is beyond that which I was expecting (aside from that aforementioned conversation). To top it off, I still haven't hired even one part time employee, though growth of that size absolutely would be need 3-4 people hired.

The lesson I want people to take away from this is that if you are persistent, think about how the business will work years down the road at scale, not just how do you handle the early needs, and are willing to keep going with your vision long enough and hard enough, you can make almost anything successful, even for a growing niche use case in a highly established industry full of giant established companies, you just need to figure out how to frame the use case in the right way to get people to listen when you are talking to them.

And yes, I'm still open to working with a VC, but only those that treat it as a partnership, and are willing to accept non majority positions.