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Also interested in projections, and what level of equity is on offer for both 1k & 2.5k options.
Calm down Deborah Meaden.
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Calm down Deborah Meaden.
Either that or Hilary Devey...
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Also interested in projections, and what level of equity is on offer for both 1k & 2.5k options.
A good simple question with an impossible complex answer.
Right now, I can't tell you exactly what the % is for what price.
The other developer is asking his family and friends for help too, and we plan on sitting down with an advisor and weighing up the amount of investment against the equity we are happy to give out.
As a general thing, seed rounds usually expect to give out 15-35% to angels and series A investors to fully fund the startup for it's initial runway.
Source: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-equity-to-give-first-round-seed-investors
But that usually means all staff wages and spare to expand, the padding for legal and accountancy, office space, hosting, equipment, etc, etc... which usually means that they need far more than we need.
It also usually means funding it for a couple of years, but we actually hope to produce revenue and not require further funding (it's a dream I'm currently buying into).
We've taken the view that if our costs our far lower (through bootstrapping, self-sacrifice, using our own equipment, etc) that we are less risky and have a far lower burn rate, both of which will increase the chance of success (longer runway, more chance to get it right).
We've seen figures for other bootstrapped startups in the UK ( http://seedrs.com/browse_startups ) that vary wildly depending on the sector, domain expertise, experience, etc... but for vaguely where we are it tends to value 5-10% at around £30k-£50.
We're doing it slightly backwards, in that initially we aimed to solely raise the seed through donations and patronage, and now we're reacting to people saying "I want to invest properly" and determining what that level of demand is so that we can understand how much we might get that way... and use that to go get professional advice about how to value and come up with a % (probably by asking John over at http://www.seedcamp.com/ as he's helped advise on a few things before).
So the honest answer is: Unsure yet. Depending on demand and advice we'll offer a % that we hope you find fair.
Edit: scratch that... more than fair. The other developer will have family investing, and I will have you guys... love goes two ways and if we're told 5% is worth £30k and we're only going to get £20k from investors... then we will more than likely round up wherever possible and give more than we need.
In essence... there are cold hard numbers, and then there's the fact that I know most of you and your faith in this makes me want to give you more than the cold hard numbers will suggest.
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Don't go giving all of it away on free coffee to LFGSS members.
beer and coding? in.
See? Cheaper than even the stipend I live on.
I see on the 'new' home page there is no Miscellaneous and Meaningless. Very wise.
football thread, cool guys, fighter planes etc >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
^ they'll each have their own forum
t.o. is right... they're not on the new home page because the activity levels place them at Page 6 of the results of something. But the point is that a user could see the need for a new subforum/microcosm and just create it themselves.
Such microcosms/subforums would have their own little world in which they exist, and you could either subscribe to them or totally exclude them from your view of the world.
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Has Node+Mongo been considered in place of a Python(Django)+Postgres stack? This is the perfect application for the flexible document based nature of mongo, and Node's realtime strengths could really benefit other aspects of communication along side the thread views. A PM system leveraging XMPP, with a browser based client a la Facebook, for example.
That aside, I know a crew of quality Django devs, who specialize in sprint work. I'll hit em up and see what theyre saying.
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How much equity do I get for channeling my power of prayer to your enterprise?
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The work within a forum is highly parallelizable, there are a limited number of entities and yet every page will touch a few of them many times.
Hence we chose http://golang.org/ for the APIs to take advantage of that.
WRT databases, we know that we aren't actually dealing with semi-structured or document based data, we are very much in the relational data area. So we opted for a SQL solution, and the very best free one is Postgres.
The web front-end could be anything, but we see a lot of love for Django and Rails and chose Django as we're calling APIs rather than using ActiveRecord and it just fit nicer.
As for the PM system... let us just say that very long term, we do not see the web site as being the only way to interact with the data. Forums are communication tools, and so are email, newsgroups, XMPP clients, IRC, etc... we honestly don't see why the communication wouldn't surface through other protocols. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to respond to an email and a post appear on the forum.
As for APIs... I have a strong personal view nowadays. I used to think APIs were a technical problem, and that they had to be pure REST and hypermedia overload... but now I realise an API is a person problem. Here is the developer, a person... and they want to get things done. Too much REST purity and hypermedia overload and you create friction for the developer rather than help them... I'm going for pragmatic APIs that are developer intuitive over purity.
The specs we've drafted to date, use Stripe as a big piece of the inspiration: https://stripe.com/docs/api?lang=curl#top
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BTW... this technical rubbish... most of you wont' care.
Just look at http://demo.microcosm.app/ and see what we're aiming at. Realising that none of that is the finished thing, but it's there to communicate potental.
I'd rather focus on what it is, that we will do it, and getting the injection of funds to get the ball rolling.
How, and the very fine details of implementation, those are huge confusing distractions to most people who will read the thread.
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In, but things will be made a lot easier if I sell plenty of copies of my book...
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Good luck with it all, David :)
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That mock-up thing is rad as fuck! Hurry up and get some bank details or something up so I can blast some patron money in your direction!
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I have voted and pledged as a patron. I would be interested to have a look at the investment when more details become available, at the moment cashflow says "no" to that, but it might be different at the time. Anyway, I will uphold my existing pledge - and be happy to do so. I am impressed with what I see.
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I am in - the amount of time I waste around here
furious_tiles
Regal
handtightenonly
Emyr
Object
rogan
villa-ru
t.o.
Wrongcog
rounce
Mickie_Cricket
BringMeMyFix
hollow__legs
Oui3Kings
Andrew
the-smiling-buddha-
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About
Crowdfunding the creation of the next version of LFGSS
Posted by
@Velocio
Front-end templating is fine by me, as i dont have any direct experience with any of those techs so get back to me when your starting front-end!