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Hi
I was originally going to have this thread just about sales emails, but I think I'm facing bigger problems so I'll give the whole story.
I'm a software engineer and I've always wanted to run my own company. Back in 2016 I worked with a local hospital who wanted a way to do flow cytometry analysis (flow cytometry is a technique used for analysing blood - it's used in medical research and diagnosis) online. Existing tools were desktop based. So I built it with a doctor, becoming quite obsessed with it as it was difficult - a lot of mathematics and challenging software problems - and finally got it released at the end of 2017. It nearly broke me finishing it - many many long hours while working full-time - so after releasing it I just left it. Over the next few years about 4,000 users from around the world signed up and used it. Most were from Universities and tended just to use it once for one off medical research projects, dissertations etc. Once every about 4 months I'd get a nice email saying "thanks for our software, it really helped me".
Fast-forward to 2020 and I read Unscripted and other books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and it steeled in me the desire to start a business. I had a fundamental shift in how I think. So I decided to put together a team and build a better version of what I had released in 2017 (while it worked the regular complaint was that it was very slow and clunky - which was right). This was 16 months ago. However, I made a major mistake with the software engineer I found to help me build it (I write code in my day job and run a team of software engineers - I couldn't face writing more code every evening). Over 10 months he built something that was extremely buggy, performed poorly, and basically unusable. This was completely my mistake - I should have been reviewing every line of code. I ended up getting rid of him and finding 2.5 employees in Bangladesh and India. This time, I wrote the shell code for every feature, handing it over to these guys to do the rest, while reviewing almost every line of code. We've ended up with much more performant software and much more stable.
However, I can't sell it. I have had about 6 meetings with a company in the US that is interested in exclusively licensing it. However it took so long to finish this seems to have fizzled out (no response to my last email). The supply too has changed in the last few years - there are more online flow cytometry tools now. Over the past year I have been showing what I'm building to a professor here in Ireland, as well as a lab head at Novartis, and a lab head at a University in Munich. All have been encouraging and think there is potential. However none have really been willing to leverage their network.
I should add that my team costs about 3,000 euro a month. I earn about 9,000 euro per month. I pay income tax on the 6,000. So it's a significant outlay and it's been like that for roughly the last 10 months.
I have an email list of about 4,500 users (all from version 1). Over the last few days I sent out an email to about 400 in the list looking for beta testers. The email is:
Hi,
I'm reaching out to you as your are a registered user of myapp.com, the online flow cytometry tool.
I have just released a completely new version - v2.0 Beta - and I'm looking for 100 beta testers. For those willing to participate, I am offering a free premium account for 6 months.
If you would like to participate, please go to [] and log in, upload an experiment and do some flow analysis, then answer a few short questions at []. I will then set you up with a premium account.
Thanks
Mark
My App
The results haven't been good - not one person has filled out the survey. Here is a flavour of the campaign stats so far:

Bit more on market fit: my tool would be quite suitable for research labs in Universities. This is because they tend to have many users and existing softwares (the main ones anyway) are desktop based and each instance requires a dongle or usb. The lab head in Munich has said as much and has committed to signing up his lab. My software also facilitates collaboration and sharing of results.
So my new plan (as of this morning) is to go through all the email addresses of the users (most are PHD students) and then find a contact for the lab head of the lab the student was working in, and contact them via email. I haven't constructed this email yet.
Now I fully accept I may have built a tool that's useful enough, but people won't pay for it. If so, I want to find out as soon as possible. I do not want to fork out another 3,000 euro next month for something that will never make money.
By the way, I see this product as a way into what I believe is a very promising market. Bioscience software is ripe for modernising. In bioscience, all the money goes into hardware, not software. The software tends to be old and clunky and can't keep up with the hardware.
If anyone here wants to work with me trying to sell this thing, I'm totally open to that too.
This post has been a bit rambling so I'll leave it there for now. Any questions let me know. I would really appreciate some help - even if it's to find out that what I have isn't going to make money. I'd love a resolution at this point.
Thanks
Mark
I was originally going to have this thread just about sales emails, but I think I'm facing bigger problems so I'll give the whole story.
I'm a software engineer and I've always wanted to run my own company. Back in 2016 I worked with a local hospital who wanted a way to do flow cytometry analysis (flow cytometry is a technique used for analysing blood - it's used in medical research and diagnosis) online. Existing tools were desktop based. So I built it with a doctor, becoming quite obsessed with it as it was difficult - a lot of mathematics and challenging software problems - and finally got it released at the end of 2017. It nearly broke me finishing it - many many long hours while working full-time - so after releasing it I just left it. Over the next few years about 4,000 users from around the world signed up and used it. Most were from Universities and tended just to use it once for one off medical research projects, dissertations etc. Once every about 4 months I'd get a nice email saying "thanks for our software, it really helped me".
Fast-forward to 2020 and I read Unscripted and other books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and it steeled in me the desire to start a business. I had a fundamental shift in how I think. So I decided to put together a team and build a better version of what I had released in 2017 (while it worked the regular complaint was that it was very slow and clunky - which was right). This was 16 months ago. However, I made a major mistake with the software engineer I found to help me build it (I write code in my day job and run a team of software engineers - I couldn't face writing more code every evening). Over 10 months he built something that was extremely buggy, performed poorly, and basically unusable. This was completely my mistake - I should have been reviewing every line of code. I ended up getting rid of him and finding 2.5 employees in Bangladesh and India. This time, I wrote the shell code for every feature, handing it over to these guys to do the rest, while reviewing almost every line of code. We've ended up with much more performant software and much more stable.
However, I can't sell it. I have had about 6 meetings with a company in the US that is interested in exclusively licensing it. However it took so long to finish this seems to have fizzled out (no response to my last email). The supply too has changed in the last few years - there are more online flow cytometry tools now. Over the past year I have been showing what I'm building to a professor here in Ireland, as well as a lab head at Novartis, and a lab head at a University in Munich. All have been encouraging and think there is potential. However none have really been willing to leverage their network.
I should add that my team costs about 3,000 euro a month. I earn about 9,000 euro per month. I pay income tax on the 6,000. So it's a significant outlay and it's been like that for roughly the last 10 months.
I have an email list of about 4,500 users (all from version 1). Over the last few days I sent out an email to about 400 in the list looking for beta testers. The email is:
Hi,
I'm reaching out to you as your are a registered user of myapp.com, the online flow cytometry tool.
I have just released a completely new version - v2.0 Beta - and I'm looking for 100 beta testers. For those willing to participate, I am offering a free premium account for 6 months.
If you would like to participate, please go to [] and log in, upload an experiment and do some flow analysis, then answer a few short questions at []. I will then set you up with a premium account.
Thanks
Mark
My App
The results haven't been good - not one person has filled out the survey. Here is a flavour of the campaign stats so far:

Bit more on market fit: my tool would be quite suitable for research labs in Universities. This is because they tend to have many users and existing softwares (the main ones anyway) are desktop based and each instance requires a dongle or usb. The lab head in Munich has said as much and has committed to signing up his lab. My software also facilitates collaboration and sharing of results.
So my new plan (as of this morning) is to go through all the email addresses of the users (most are PHD students) and then find a contact for the lab head of the lab the student was working in, and contact them via email. I haven't constructed this email yet.
Now I fully accept I may have built a tool that's useful enough, but people won't pay for it. If so, I want to find out as soon as possible. I do not want to fork out another 3,000 euro next month for something that will never make money.
By the way, I see this product as a way into what I believe is a very promising market. Bioscience software is ripe for modernising. In bioscience, all the money goes into hardware, not software. The software tends to be old and clunky and can't keep up with the hardware.
If anyone here wants to work with me trying to sell this thing, I'm totally open to that too.
This post has been a bit rambling so I'll leave it there for now. Any questions let me know. I would really appreciate some help - even if it's to find out that what I have isn't going to make money. I'd love a resolution at this point.
Thanks
Mark
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