So we sent the business plans out to approximately 20 people in the mail before the holidays. Most of the potential investors are friends and family, which will hopefully invest love-money in our company. I’ve also spoken with and are beginning to speak with business angels and VCs about our business. They seem intrigued with the idea and have complimented us on how thoughtful we’ve been with our strategy and planning. Like everybody else, they want to see execution, which we’ll hopefully be able to show them by the spring. At this point, I think that convincing an early-stage VC to invest in us is futile. Barring the fact that they would probably want 51% of our business for $250,000 (not going to happen), they are probably not that excited about investing in a start-up with a couple of young guys only a few years out of undergrad. I can understand this but am disappointed nonetheless. I always thought that VCs invest in start-ups, but that seems not to be the case, unless you define start-up as 10 employees, management with gray hair, and $1,000,000 in revenues.There are several business angels (wealthy businessmen) who have read our plan and are interested. There is a possibility that any one of them would invest up to $250k, but that’s a slim risk. The tough part here is that most of these guys are full-time executives and are very busy with their everyday life. Following up with them to discuss a side investment is time-consuming and difficult. But then again, nobody said raising money was easy… It will probably require months of follow-up and proof of execution (a working technology) to convince any of these guys to jump in. We’ll just have to keep you posted. JT
