50 Investors said NO to us. So, now we are building our Startup in public.

4 min readMay 1, 2022

I reached out to more than 50 investors for my startup, and everyone said NO to us.

From Startup incubators to accelerators to angel investors, I reached out to everyone you can imagine.

But no one was ready to invest USD 25k for 10% so that we could leave our daily hustle and focus on building the product.

one of the many rejections we got in the early days.

But why do they say NO to us?

All I can sense from their response was that we don’t have some proven track record or a proxy to qualify as an entrepreneur. (Institute or college).

My co-founder (also my brother), who is now 30, has failed twice in college and doesn’t even have a proper college degree with Zero corporate experience.

He used to drive a truck before covid 19 and picked up on programming during the pandemic due to lockdown (Read this to know more about his journey)

Being a brother, I know he is extremely hard-working and super intelligent in writing code.

I started my career by selling newspaper subscriptions in a small town followed by working in a warehouse of D2C brands and finally in a software company.

Just like in the past we know that we will figure out some way to build things up.

In the end, some wisdom prevailed, and we realized that “if we could solve the problem for a small set of people, we could make customers our investors” and we started building Float.

Some random quote I read on the internet

Next big phase in our startup journey ??

Launching a Startup is like flying a plane, unlike here the customers pay you after the flight, not before the flight.

So we need a long runway before a take-off (money) and some fuel while we fly (more money).

So, I started building a financial safety net for me and my brother. I joined a SaaS startup and started making courses in the morning (3 am-10 am).

I used to sell those courses on skillshare and udemy.

I am really thankful to udemy and skillshare for putting food on my table.

Read this if you want to know more about my Journey

From Selling Newspaper to Building a Tech Startup — A life story of mine

What are we building now?

While I was working in a tech company I was frustrated by the effort it requires to explain a simple integration guide in the product documentation.

From uploading multiple screenshots to writing about the different integration steps.

The page length was becoming more than the length of the great wall of china and, the user experience was like reading a Wikipedia article (Text-heavy)

Someone created a full webpage just for a dashboard tour

As an example, this company has made a complete webpage just to give a dashboard tour.

Basically pasting multiple screenshots will overcrowd the webpage and not everyone is comfortable reading an integration guide in plain text and images.

Surprisingly videos are hard to catch up in this case.

So me and my cofounder decided to solve this with a chrome extension i.e Float.

So, Just turn it on and it will automatically take a screenshot of all your steps and allows you to add text annotation on the top of these stacked images.

Imagine this as a PowerPoint presentation with a series of stacked images with text annotation on the top to explain a product guide.

Here are some popular use cases of float.