My businesses aren't bitcoin-based. Not sure if this is the right place to discuss them. I would take bitcoin, of course, but it's not the focus.

But here goes:

I have a consulting / coding firm. We're about 10 people. We do business strategy related to open source, especially early-stage. And we write and deploy open source code. The pandemic and changing market conditions hit us, and the business declined a bit, so we're rebuilding with more of a focus on the tech and less on the strategy consulting.

We're customizing code, doing greenfield development, doing a bunch of LLM work, etc. And we provide support for a bunch of open source packages for companies that would totally choose the open source thing if it only had a better support story. We're that story.

The only real issue for this business is that we are paying the bills but not really growing. We're good at sales but not great at marketing and we don't really have the budget to hire a marketing person. We need, like, one more decent sized client.

I have also launched a business to provide software and hardware in the energy sector. This is station-grade, utility-scale stuff. We're brand new and looking for our first sale, and our big win was getting invited to bid on an RFP and then passing the interview process. Hopefully we'll make that first sale in the next couple weeks and it will come in high enough to pay people for a year or so. If we don't get this sale, I might take it as a sign our market hypothesis is wrong and fold tents. We'll see.

The challenge for this business is getting invited to bid on RFPs when we have no track-record. We're coming in lowish on our first bid so we have a track-record for the future. Our first contract would be for a handful of sites but position us to bid on a couple hundred more, sell more services/products on top, etc. Market is crowded but I think we can get a toehold and there's decent growth potential if we do a good job on execution.

My strategy is to get that first bit of revenue, start paying the team (right now everybody is working for free with bonuses promised on first revenue), and only then will we really make a plan for marketing and sales. To me, keeping my focus on getting first revenue is the key to starting this engine.