A European telco wanted to work with us to bring Sapiengraph to fruition. The CEO found us when the CEO read our post titled "Open-sourcing Sapiengraph CCTV."
I had two thoughts:
- Wow, this blogging habit is paying dividends
- It looks like this Sapiengraph thing still has a life of its own.
A fun technical project
My CTO thoroughly enjoyed working on Sapiengraph CCTV. Somehow he found joy in bridging the shitty software gap in CCTV cameras. Besides, I still believe that there exists a market gap for commercial CCTV hardware with modern cloud-based software implementation.
The proposal
If someone wanted to bankroll us to spark joy in my CTO, I would take it up. So the proposal was a year's worth of an engineer's salary. Simple. We will build it, and you get the rights to everything, including the source code. And we sell it together.
But alas, the proposal was rebuffed because the quoted sum was too high, and he wanted a revenue split instead and an upfront investment on our end to flesh it out.
It is a no-go for many reasons.
- We prefer to work with more substantial companies for which a low six-digit sum is a drop in the ocean.
- We prefer to focus on the primary product that we are working on right now.