I have a product that's well past the MVP stage - but no network and no vc expertise. what route should I take? (i will not promote)
Hi, I dont even know if this subreddit is the right place to ask. If not, it would be awesome if you could give me a hint into the right direction. The Background: I have built a software platform over the past 16+ months that is similar to n8n, Flowise, or Dify: You visually build (or auto-generate) AI-Workflows that you can chat with - or use in automations. I describe it on the landing page as "An open-source, local-first platform for building MCP-powered AI workflows: model management, MCP servers, a visual flow builder, chat, and headless automation in one app. Your keys and data never leave your machine." imo, it is an extremly strong and capable tool and solves a lot of the pain points one experiences when working with AI. It's well past a Demo or MVP not only do I use it in its own production (an automated software development lifecycle where it improves and supervises itself), but it is also deployed at a customer site where it manages virtual machine statuses of their intranet systems. It's a free app, open source and MIT-licensed, currently sitting at roughly 600 stars on Github. We had some initial traction after "Cline", an agentic-coding extension for VSCode twittered about us in the early development, but at the moment daily user numbers seem to low. There is an online-demo, to click around and try - but the app, as it currrently is, is supposed to be self-hosted; that means you download , install and use it on your own computer or server. I can share the demo link in the comments, if that makes any difference. Now my problem: I want to do the next steps. I may be biased but I think a lot of features in this app are on-par or even superior to competitors. I want to 1) extend the reach and 2) build a business around that: a subscription service that lets you either sync your workspaces between machines or allows you to work online (or from your mobile device), on a private cloud computer we provide. What it needs is more capital, more marketing, more users. But I am a technical person - I don't have a network, I dont know anything about seeding rounds, I suck at doing marketing. I could of course start working on all these pillars right now: create promotional material or hire an agency, do more market research, do some ad campaigns, get more people to talk about it. But all that takes a whole lot of effort and time (and skill) - and if I could choose, I would rather spend that time building great solutions, because that's what I am really good at. So I guess my question is: What route should I take? Should I invest the time myself and figure all this out? Should I find someone to invest in my idea myself - or do I rather search for a team that supports me with that (i.e. I find someone to find someone to invest)?