Have a new virtual business idea? Sure, look for an angel investor to provide you with seed funding and a contract to get most of your profits. Wanna start a new place of business but don't have money? Sure, send thousands of emails to venture capitalists and firms that claim to represent them and wait for someone else to make it before you.
If you are looking for angel funding, don't do it if you have some good experience and an idea for what you want to do. It will not get you what you need, and it will lead you into a situation where you will spend a lot of time, energy and money on raising angel money. I am not a big fan of having angel funding, but I know many people who did it successfully. I have friends that started and ended up with big successes. It does not necessarily work, but if you have some money to raise and your ideas are solid, you can get funding. I know a couple of people who started an angel fund because of their ideas and ended up with hundreds of thousands of dollars and a company. It works if you have the right stuff, unfortunately, most new entrepreneurs neither have the experience, connection or merit this kind of investors are looking for.
But when it doesn't work, it becomes ugly, where legal problems arise, audits and a myriad of different kinds of headaches.
Potential Problems
One of the main issues you should worry about is the contract you'll sign and the deal you'll make, for once, it's safe to assume that the investor who's funding your new project has a better more expensive lawyer than yours, it's also safe to assume that this investor only gave you some of his hard-earned capital to be able to make profit from you.
This idea alone should be scary to any entrepreneur, especially if it's a young entrepreneur with limited business experience, as they say, the devil is in the details.
A second problem is will be the amount of requested money over how much time you'll need it, seeing big numbers offered for an idea that was in your head could be so shiny it blinds the eye.
If you assume that you will need half a million dollars over three years to start and then create your product while thinking you can sell the business in five years, there is no point giving away 49% of the ownership in exchange for £100,000. Especially when you know that your next investment round will probably dilute the number of shares you control and you will find yourself working for a company where you started but actually have no control over its future.
The issue of control
But all of this doesn't take into account what actually happens when you actually secure a seed fund from a venture capitalist.
Basically, even when you think you have a controlling share, and that you're in charge of your new baby company, you actually don't have that much of control because even if your angel investor didn't insert a "Veto clause" into your contract, no one gives away money for free, you're sure that they're watching your every move and you're afraid and expecting interference.
In addition to all of that, there're still some major issues in receiving seed funding from investors, of course, this depends on the type of agreement you make, but still what will be the funding be given as? As a loan? As an old fashioned 60-40% partnership? or as a sale of shares in your new company? Then you'll have to worry about your shareholder agreement, and about complying with tax regulations in favor of securing your investor's interests.
Proposed solution
Even though there's no escape from needing seed funding for your new project, but cryptocurrency has opened new doors for providing funds for new projects.
For some years now, we've been dealing with the trend of ICOs. And true, ICOs and their variations (STOs, IEOs) have collected billions of dollars in the last five years. Even though a comparative analysis of the amount of funds collected by ICOs vs old fashioned funding rounds, shows that ICOs can't be compared to the regular methods of collecting funds for new companies, as it's less regulated, full of scams and needs to be popular inside the exclusive community of cryptocurrency which even with promising inclusion and decentralization have failed miserably of delivering that.
The mintME model
The solution mintMe.com proposes is simple, it resembles ICOs on one point that it's based on the tokenization of your idea but on the other hand it doesn't restrict you to the problems of the crypto-community.
In that mintMe.com resembles crowdfunding and personal funding websites such as Kickstarter and Gofundme. Where you create your idea and is responsible for the marketing of your model, but at the same time, your followers or clients are your responsibility.
mintMe allows you to create your own project's token, market it directly to your target demographic and voila!
MintMe.com doesn't control you like venture capitalists do, mintMe doesn't force regulations upon you like crowdfunding websites do. MintMe simply supports creativity and individuality while at the same time providing a safe alternative for seed funding new projects.
Even in cases where users are unable to afford direct marketing, our blog will more often offer alternatives and techniques for freely marketing your idea/token.
In the end, it all comes down to you and if you're really serious about this idea and when do you plan to act!
written by: Moe