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David - congrats, sounds exciting.
You might want to talk to these people:
http://springboard.com/ -
Have you looked into NESTA? - http://www.nesta.org.uk/about_us
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I'll give you £5 for 51% of the equity and member number 001. Final offer.
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In fact make that 'One', I'm post-numerals.
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how about this for the tax man:
start company.
employ yourself on PAYE at exactly the threshold of tax (£7,475 per year)...therefore you will not pay tax but will continue with tiny Nat Ins payments....pay yourself annually (or quarterly if you envisage income in the first 3 months) in arrears....meaning either 1 or 4 payslips per year.
If it all takes off, give yourself a payrise and pay the relevant PAYE tax and Nat ins due from then on.
Disclaimer: not an accountant.
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Ok not a charity case but why not get some referral links/fees set up with the big bike shops. We all get through a lot of consumables (tubes, chains, nuun, etc...) so if you can get a micro-payment referral fee each time, it has to help, a bit.
There are other ways of making money from us without our trying too hard. I would guess that people would be happy to opt in to market research (cycling related) if we knew it was for the Benevolent Dictator Fund. You never know, we might get some swag from it.
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^ all my friends that run their own show do this, and also something called dividends. They're all rich so seems to work
Their accountant's details please...
#notsorich -
Ok not a charity case but why not get some referral links/fees set up with the big bike shops. We all get through a lot of consumables (tubes, chains, nuun, etc...) so if you can get a micro-payment referral fee each time, it has to help, a bit.
That already happens. CRC, Wiggle, Evans, Hargroves, etc.
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My best mate works here. You probably don't have the scale or criteria for them to invest at present, but he may be happy to meet up to talk about how to prepare for investment.
Whilst you make the point that there is no clear definition to your business plan and even your objectives for the utility of the product at present, that is true of many start-ups that take angel and VC investment. You can't use the fact it is impossible to have a clear plan as an excuse not to have one, as you simply won't get investment without a business plan, and it will never get off the ground.
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Oh, I'm not saying that we're purposefully not going to have a business plan. A strategy that outlines our assumptions, how we're going to test them, with a growth plan and best guess revenue predictions that we can constantly test is an absolute requirement.
What I'm saying is that we couldn't produce a business plan that would satisfy a High St bank into lending capital. Their requirements are different, much lower acceptance of risk meaning that they really require business models that are already proven and well established.
Most of the form templates for business plans would be empty. A lot of the assumptions of the business model need testing, but to do that you need to start with the assumptions and then work on tests that prove the model. This is what I mean when I say that the business product in the early part of the company history isn't a product as such, it is comprised of tests that validate the assumptions to determine the size and growth potential of the market opportunity and then delivers an minimally viable product into that market.
I bet I'm not making sense yet. I need to have these conversations a few hundred times before I've spent enough time to learn how to say less.
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^Pah.
Owning a soul is so overrated...
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^ I believe it's a functionality thing.
On a side note, I'm selling some cycling cards, and a pound from each set will go to the forum, so if you want to help David out and get some goodies in return, drop me a line:
http://www.lfgss.com/thread75035.html -
Absolute Radio are announcing a chance for a share in £10,000 in assocation with Santander for new businesses. There's supposed to be a place to enter on the Absolute website. There was a reference on the homepage the other day that just linked to Santander but there's nothing obvious on the homepage or anywhere else that I could find just now despite it still being announced today.
May be worth contacting them to ask for details and offering to run their website so it's ties in with what the dj's say is on there!?Edit - found link - http://www.absoluteradio.co.uk/freebies/competitions/santander/comp.html
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About
LFGSS: Turning a hobby into a technology startup
Posted by
@Velocio
Good point - I had forgotten this, a couple of years back I did some work setting up a rack and designing a network for a wealthy friend/ex colleague.
All the cabling/hard work was done by building contractors, I just setup the Cisco kit (firewall/router/remote accesss/WiFi) and NAS, UPS etc