Revamps and future plans

Miles has conveyed a lot in his last post, and to say the least, I couldn't be more proud of one my best friend's decisions or be more excited about creating this partnership to pursue this business venture. Definitely not a year, a month, or maybe even a week ago I would have thought that we would actually have to make the decisions that we have made in the last couple of days. We always thought we would pursue this idea, but now the scope of it has become so much more real and serious. I am still taken back by the fact that we are actually doing this, for me, this is a dream come true. I feel very fortunate to be able to follow a dream at such a relatively young age.
But why have we come across this fork in the road that has caused us to make such a definitive decision? Why has this happened so fast? And what am I actually talking about?
We realized this past weekend that we made our first big mistake and that we will need to fire our web developer. We came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way he would be able to finish anywhere close to on time for the given amount of money that we were paying him. He had also lied to us on a number of occasions. This had huge implications. This has forced us to find and hire someone else and launch at a much later date. We found out to do it properly, we would also have to spend about 4 times as much money. The combination of a later launch date, increased investing, and hiring of a new developer really caused us to question how much we wanted to do this. The risk and level of commitment all of a sudden increased dramatically.The website that Rohit had produced for us thus far just didn't have the feel and functionality that we envisioned the site to have. Not to mention, he just hadn't produced much. In order to really obtain a product that we would be fully satisfied with we recognized that we would have to design every single page, aspect, detail, functionality, button, menu, and feel of the entire application ourselves with a detailed power point presentation and supporting word document with links to existing webpage examples. This seemed like a daunting task and initially we both certainly didn't want to do it and felt we were wasting our time because our expectations were that these guys were going to do it for us.
The 50 slide (still working on it) presentation of the application we envision turned out to be a great exercise that has not only allowed us to receive another detailed quote and convey exactly what we want, but has also tremendously increased our confidence in our product. As we built and designed it, we realized, wow, I think we really have something here that we would really want to use ourselves. We could simply not drop the project. We talked a full afternoon discussing fears, excitement, worries, our passion for entrepreneurship, time constraints, money issues, the business' potential, just anything and everything we could think of. It began to hit us what we were really getting ourselves into and how much we really wanted to pursue this.It also hit us that if we are going to come anywhere near successful with this that it is going to taking a lot longer and that our investment might not pay off for a while. In hind sight, we simply didn't have realistic expectations. Entrepreneurship is really an all in or all out thing. Launching months later and spending much more only to have a semester of testing at two schools would simply not be anywhere near adequate. The decision essentially came down to whether we would commit to pursuing this directly out of college or not do it at all.
We made a final commitment and decision to really go all out with this making this a full time job from here on out and continue after college. THIS IS OUR JOB AFTER COLLEGE?!?!? There is no guaranteed success, no guaranteed income, no guaranteed anything really. We are surrounding by uncertainty, it is both frightening and unbelievably exciting. I cannot begin to explain all of the thoughts, worries, emotions, feelings, and excitement that is all just racing inside our heads. Before we might most likely would of had a back up plan with a job lined up so that we could make a long term commitment at the end of the year, now, we just made it.
Our journey, I am sure, will be filled with ups and downs living a completely different lifestyle we would have envisioned out of college. We are also strongly considering doing school part time now as well. I will be looking into how this works at BC tomorrow. Miles has told me he is down for it, and I certainly am too. This would mean that we only take 2-3 classes and continue our majors into a fifth year. This in itself is another huge decision that I didn't think we would have to make. What else is happening? We are in the process of hiring the new developer and we are also giving our first presentation to a potential investor and sales person we may hire Tuesday. Very excited.
I have already written a lot and there is so much to say at this point. I feel it is so hard to convey just how excited we are about this and how many questions are streaming through our thoughts. We are really putting ourselves in a position where success is our only option. This has to work! We will certainly be living frugal for a while and our lifestyles will be forced to change. I am sure more sacrifices will bound to spring up and even tougher decisions will have to be made.