Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/112770
have an interest and expertise in those areas,��� he says. Which is exactly how Bivins found some of her most valuable advice. ���I met someone recently who said, ���Oh, you don���t have a website? Well, you can do it really easily. Here���s how I did it,������ she explains. ���So now I���m working on a website. I met someone else who said ���If you���re going to charge fees you want to be able to use a credit card. Here���s this company or this service.������ �� Develop a good team of wellrounded advisors and mentors. �� Be able to explain how investors will get their money back. �� Look for people who have an interest and/or expertise in your business. Consider their investments in time and knowledge which is often more valuable than money alone. Seeking investors for the Flickey project, Dayal recently made a presentation to Hartman and Angels on the Water with promising results. ���At this point we haven���t made a commitment, but it���s (Flickey) got the opportunity to go nationwide,��� says Hartman, describing the high impact potential that makes a new business appealing to investors. As for Flickey���s future, its creators say the sky���s the limit. ���The future is not on hardware or in physical bandwidth; it���s in electronic digital distribution, via the cloud (computing),��� says Dayal. ���That���s where we want Flickey to be.��� Flickey: Finding funds Flickey���s creators also face one of the primary hurdles small business hopefuls encounter ��� funding. Capitalizing on the high demand for Bollywood movies (three times that of Hollywood movies), the group turned to India for Flickey���s initial deployment. After a lot of legwork and persistence, a Bollywood producer liked their idea and agreed to give them content (movie licensing) ��� provided they had investors. Yet the investors they���d approached wanted content before they committed capital. Flickey was stuck in a ���chicken and egg��� situation. But not for long, as the persistent team used the roadblock to point them in a new direction. ���Now that we know what both sides want, we need to get early seed capital and approach lower end distributors that have 10 or 15 titles, not 750 titles,��� explains Dayal. One potential local source for that kind of funding is Angels on the Water, an angel investment fund in Oshkosh which provides seed and early stage funding for new entrepreneurs in Northeast Wisconsin. Hartman, who serves as chair of Angels on the Water���s provisional board, offers some practical advice on how entrepreneurs can make their business appealing to investors: �� Does your business solve a problem or meet a need? �� Be able to describe your customer and be specific. (Do not say ���everybody.���) w w w. i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m Challenging convention to deliver results. There are plenty of reasons to build with Boldt, including more than a century of experience. But perhaps the best one is the way in which we approach your project. Communication ���silos��� are replaced by collaboration; routine methods by creative solutions; missed opportunities by bold new possibilities. Bring your next project to Boldt. And see how it feels to be the priority. 920.739.6321 | boldt.com M a r c h 2 013 ��� Insight | 23