Startup - Looking for investors
 

I am working on a social app that is in the online dating space. Did a cost calculation and its
going to cost me close to $88,000 in the first 12 months. I'm investing $25K of my own money and looking for another 4 or 5 investors who might be interested in collaborating with me.

If you are interested, please contact me via email for details. I can send you an executive summary.

Thank you.

Good luck, new ventures are always a wild ride

i've been looking for projects to invest in.. if it sounds good and logical i can finance the whole difference..

problem is you are going into an area where im prolly 80% sure itll fail :(

Very slim chance of that happening, especially asking on GFY. Lots of people here who were making tons of money years back are hurting right now.

In general most investors are not risking money in unproven start-ups. You will need to have something that is awesome and still get very lucky finding the right investor.

your best bet is to find a way to get it working now and making money then you will have much better luck with investors.

True, get it up and running, try to make a little profit, and find someone to "ramp it up".

Hard to do in the dating sector I know, you need pretty deep pockets to start with...

exactly.. without even seeing the business plan id guess 80-95% chance of failure.. gotta see some profits before asking for investments...

if you told me you are inventing a way to bitch slap people through the internet, then im 100% sure itll make money.. but you are going into an area that is tough to break into and competition is fierce

good luck, dude.

I'd say closer to 95% chance or higher. No offense to the original poster. I have no idea who he is or what his project is about. I've just seen it so many times, hell been there myself on some of them on both sides.... partnering with people and financing the project. Can't say I've seen one work out, but obviously it does happen. It's just few and far between.

Most success stories are not found on venture capital but ideas that people grew themselves. Make a little money pump it back in, work hard on it for years, and with a little luck you could end up with a site / service that is successful. Then you can either sell it all, sell part of it to get the funds to take it to the next level, or keep it going and continue to make money. Look at sites like Craigslist, collegehumor, plentyoffish. The first two were self made then sold off part of it. I am pretty sure pof still owns 100% of it. In all case I believe they were started with no VC money and they grew on small budgets with a lot of hard work.

watch this guy knock facebook out, and you guys could have invested. :1orglaugh

lol, not saying it is impossible, but not likely. You can give him some of your money though if you think it may happen, you go first :thumbsup :winkwink:

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You have to actually have a working model that shows "traction" before you get investors. I've been researching angel and venture capital for the past 4 months.

DISCLAIMER: I do not know the OP and my comments are simply general comments.

Developing a project and making it live isn’t always the best route to go if you will need money in order to generate income.

If you go to an investor and you tell him “Check out my site, its live and it make 0 dollars, please invest” even thou you can say you need cash to promote etc. most people will not give you money.

Now if you manage to make it live and show that with 500 visitors a day you are making 250 bucks (just example), now you can easily find investors.

If you are in a stage where all you have is a business plan, then this stage is easier to find investors than if you had the site live, Yet still hard.

Time to see money is a big factor too, asking someone to invest in something and it will be live in a year will not fly in these days.

Now you could tell an investor the project is 95% done (given its true), and you need money to finish and market. This way he can’t say “hey why are there no sales?”

In general innovation beats copying someone. The problem is most people think that changing a background color on a dating site is innovative enough to make people forget everyone else and run to you.

How many times in the past few years did someone come to you with an idea and the convo went like this:

Them: I have this amazing idea, I want to start a worldwide auction site

You: Well, there is ebay

Them: Annoyed, well first off ebay charges 1 dollar a listing ill charge 75 cents, second ebay doesnt allow you to select what font you want for your title and I will.

You: (annoyed as hell reply with one of the two either a) Oh wow I didn’t know that, I think you got something there. (or B) well I don’t think it stands a chance, I think ebay has the market cornered and it’s hard to get tons of traffic to make a new auction site now work.

NOW if you replied with a) “Oh wow I didn’t know that, I think you got something there.” Just because you wanted to be a nice guy, you just fucked yourself really good, because here comes the genious with more garbage.

Them: Yeah, and I already spoke to a friend of mine who puts things on ebay and he told me he’d list on my site, plus my girlfriend can tell her friends on myspace and facebook about it.

You: wow that’s amazing

Them: you know dell started in a garage and facebook in a dorm room

You: defiantly wow

Them: listen to this, you won’t believe it, the domain BetterThenEbayAuctions.com is available, I registered it last night.

You: WOW it was available?

Them: yeah, my girlfriend found it, im so glad I have her in my life, she’s so different than all other girls out there.

You: I agree, shes not your typical girl

Them: Anyway, I will need to raise like 200k to make it happen, the potential is amazing, even if I capture 1% of the market im looking at making over $2 million a month.

You: And you can definitely capture more than 1%

Them: I know that, and I just checked, ebay has over 23 Billion dollars of cash in the bank, you know once they see us out there they will make an offer to buy us.

You: Yeah they don’t want anyone killing their business

Them: You know myspace sold for 600 million and youtube for almost $2 billion, I wouldn’t be surprised if ebay offers us 1 billion dollars just to go away

You: Yeah, who knows, even if they offer you $100 million it’s a great return

Them: (angry) $100 million? If they offer me that I’ll tell them to take a hike

You: Yeah you are right, $100 million is kinda low

Them: So im going to raise money, I know you for a long time, I feel I should give you the opportunity first

You: (now you feel officially anally violated, all you where doing was being nice, he knows you have cash, now you are in a bit of a trap) yeah sounds real good, I appreciate that

Them: I figure ill sell 1% of the company for 200k, obviously if it was someone else I would only offer them 0.5%

You: sounds real good (now you pull out the old bullshit line) you have a business plan?

Them: Yeah im working on putting it together

You: Well once you have it send it right away

Them: Def, please I trust you so I didn’t have you sign a NDA, but don’t tell this to anyone

You: (about to throw up) def. not you know you can trust me

And right about when you think you got out of it, and you start dodging him like someone would try to doge a bullet, you start hearing from the whole planet that hes telling everyone that you are on board, your friends start thinking you went nuts, hes babbling and why? Because you couldn’t just do the right thing and tell them “Sorry your idea is not unique enough.”

Fast forward 8 months, you bump into him or pick up his call by mistake.

Them: Hey whats up

You: (contemplating should I just bang down) hey how you been

Them: Well let me bring you up to date, remember my girl, turns out she was a all out gold digger whore, she used me

You: wow im surprised

Them: Anyway that auction idea, I decided not to do, but if you want to do it I have no problem with that

I can go on and on, but im getting a bit tired lol

Tell us your experiences

Couple questions....

1. Does Them = the Camgirls guy?

2. This sounds like a true story, did someone hit you up with that exact convo?

3. If the person "them" wants to make money his best shot is to take naked pictures of his amazing girl friend and build a site for her. :winkwink: oh wait i see they broke up, then he should do an exgf site lol.

I bet tons here had convos like this or close to it

this is a true story many times over

and in most cases the good smart amazing hote super model girl looks like a washed up crossdresser

Lol, that was hilarious and I can definitely see that happening, reminded me immediately of this guy - http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=919358

Ideas are best left for when everything else is done.

I've been on the wrong side of the conversation EB went over a few times. :disgust:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

But I got this new idea now......

haha, that speech thread does sound familiar!!

never even saw that thread lol

Thank you for your valid input guys. Yes we already have the beta version out, we are running some internal tests and ironing out the bugs. We are hoping to go live by end of April and our mobile apps will be released in the following months. First being iPhone app in May.

It does seem we are better off doing this ourselfs and going back to VC's when we want to expand. Will keep you all posted.

EB tell everyone the story you told me about your friend who got all those free lunches! That's a classic story!

You're investing such huge amounts of money. Unbelievable... Good luck with your social app that is in the online dating space, mx8829.

By the way, "Executive Summary" = Excellent section in the business report. Well done.

I met Mark Z. at the Foggy Goggle on Boylston St in Boston in 2004/2005. I was introduced casually through a former friend (think trustfund douche bag who likes to boast and was talking to him about investing) because we both had things going on on the web. He was a major douchebag (Mark) and I tossed his "The Facebook" card in the trash literally 5 seconds after he walked away. He had wanted me to email him about some PHP dev.

100% True Story

So ya...it's possible :1orglaugh

Oh man, that's epic. :1orglaugh

send me the executive summary please. [email protected] - thank you

wow I need you...I been trying to get the sport of NYC one-wall Handball to go mainstream for 10 years...it's still a future project for me, but at the moment focusing on adult for extra monthly income. Handball is the poor man's sport...its been tough trying to generate income from my Handball websites.