Working on my startup: ProtoMatter

https://www.protomatter.ai/

Automating Clean-room plant propagation using robots

There are about 2-3+ Billion plants cloned in laboratory conditions per year which are all done by hand. I am in the process of trying to develop a MVP to automate this task while also getting customer conversations to get early adopters.

What I am struggling with is that I don't know if I should focus on developing the MVP which will cost 20k-40k & 4-6 months to develop or put in place a pilot program to get customers willing to buy the machine / pay up front before I start developing. Hardware startups are rough usually because their MVP takes so long to develop.

I am currently bootstrapping while I am pushing for more conversations trying to do both at once. I could personally finance the venture, but it seems like a poor move to just take on all the risk personally? I have am setting up conversations with a few VCs, but that is a month out.

I'm working on this full time at the moment. I have a couple people who I have talked to who could be co-founders but nothing has materialized yet. So I am just all over the place at this stage in the process.

I spoke to 4-5 potential customers and 2-3 of which are 'interested' in what I have but seem only interested in the 'validation' stage which only comes up after the huge personal investment on my end.