Respect

I find it increasingly annoying that people who haven't made the slightest effort to understand what I am doing can be so dismissive. Society is like that today - my colleague and I have spent the best part of 18 months full time, self funded on an idea that may or may not be viable or may or may not have a market - let's be realistic we could both be barking mad and need to locked up but generally, 99% of the people we talk to who get what we are doing are impressed and once the conversation gets going you can't stop THEM, not us :-)

It's the 1% who don't get it, who dismiss it out of hand who can't be bothered, who've read something somewhere or watched Dragon's Den and are therefore, by association, experts in their field having the outright temerity to tell me that my plan is too long, my web site doesn't tell me what the product (and it's a service not a product) does. Then you get the glibness of how do we expect to monetise it etc. Until now I've been defensive and frankly a little hurt by this but now, I'm on the offensive, I like to hear them out and see how many major businesses they've taken to market and then we start to see the cracks appear. I'd use an extremely disgusting swear word at this point that I wouldn't be proud of but that is what these people are. Useless goshites as someone once coined them. I thought it particularly amazing that one guy, who had obviously read all there was to know about the subject pontificated on exactly how many pages are in a business plan, what VCs want to see, how ideas need to be expressed in just one sentence - even if these were major ideas, how these guys had a 30 second attention span, what our elevator pitch should comprise of and so on. Incredulous with wonder I wasn't but for sheer entertainment value - you might even pay to see this sort of contemptible bollocks at a comedy store.

Anyway - annoys the hell out of me but after today - I will use a different approach and let them run and run until they choke themselves.