Hey. I’m fairly new to London and have so far spent the year working on a self-funded startup with a non-tech cofounder.

I’m currently looking for advice on familiarizing myself with the tech scene here, recommendations for where to meet the right people, or even just some advice.

A little background on what I’ve been working on: it’s an online discussion platform — inspired by Facebook groups, Discord and my history working on a hugely popular forum.

We just launched as very limited beta, sending out invites to some of the ~3000 people who requested one so far. There are currently only ~100 active accounts but things have gone relatively well.

However I’ve definitely made some mistakes: having only one co-founder (particularly a non-tech one), not seeking out external funding, as well as building the API and web and mobile clients entirely by myself, not following the MVP advice enough and taking too long to launch.

I’ve been working 16-20 hours, 7 days a week with few breaks all year (bad idea) and along with the social isolation and my cofounder recently departing (personal/relationship issues) it’s taken a little bit of a toll.

Fortunately I’ve taken the last few weeks off and am ready to jump back into things. But I need to rethink my strategy and seek outside funding or at least some advice.

People really love what we have, but some work is needed before publicly launch.

I still believe this thing will be a success, but I’d greatly appreciate any advice, or a chat over a coffee if anyone in central/east London is interested in anything I’ve said, or even works on/knows of a startup in a similar space.

Thanks for reading.