Business
Between the two of us, before our life together and then during, Ed and I have been actively involved in the start up of seven businesses. All, with the exception of this one began without venture capital. This was not our desired way to begin a business, however, in these pre-crowd funding platform days no one would loan money on a great idea unless you had collateral.
Fortunately, neither of us let a stumbling block like not having money prevent us from moving forward. If we did we would never have made it here, to the most exceptional one of all. We used to joke with one another about this and say “What if” were words that would never be put on either of our tombstones.
So far the cost to assemble our venture is $165,000. This total includes legal and professional fees, software development, mathematician, CIW and security for which we’ve paid $120,000 towards, leaving a present balance due of $45,000. We’ve agreed to make a payment of $15,000 by the end of March and made arrangements with all parties that have a balance due to accept a monthly payment that we won’t be required to pay until we reach the point where we are operating in the black.
Since we re-opened the 20 shares we had left, we received commitments from current investors for 10 of them. I plan on holding the remaining 10 shares back until the test betting phase is complete. At that time we will open these shares to new investors that are not yet part of our group for a yet to be determined amount. Initially we were figuring an investment of $10K for each share however before realizing the monthly operating expenses we’d incur towards the essential maintenance of tweaking and adjusting our betting tool as well as other operating costs, to have enough money in hand in our betting pool to make money on our bet investments will require more. We do have outside investors chopping at the bit that are ready to plunge in when we reach this point as they see what we’ve already accomplished and what we are about ready to do and will decide on the amount required to cover for these essentials we’ll establish a per share investment then.
Next post we’ll share what this means in value towards your investment now, it’s increased worth in the very near future and then an estimated worth at the end of our first year.