Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Great idea…no money!

Teague Bengtzen, President

www.CardCafe.com

Once we had the idea of online greeting cards we could not sleep! Every morning we would meet with new ideas, “What about the printing the sender’s return address?” or “What about being able to schedule cards to be sent in the future?” or “What about offering gift cards and chocolate and gift baskets?” or “What about letting the customer upload any amount of photos they want?”. The idea was the easy part. Now what do we do?

It was determined that Card Café should be a global business – chipping in a few thousand dollars here and there would not cut it. We needed big money. We started going through everyone we knew. We were sold on the idea, now we had to sell them. We found it was not hard to raise money because we already had the experience and equipment (we owned a printing company) AND the idea was something everyone could understand and see the need for. $200,000 seemed like a lot of money so we set that as our goal. We burned through it in a few months. Raising money was one of the most time consuming projects for the first 2 years and it is NO fun!

We found having samples of the product to show our friends and family made a world of difference. People have a hard time visualizing what “could be”. We also found that asking for small amounts like $20,000 increments made it much more appealing to people. Also, many of the people we spoke with wanted to know what our exit strategy was - people want to know they can expect a return in 5 years or less.

A word to the wise - whatever amount of money you think you need – double or triple it!

Posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Card Cafe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.