So Five minutes Ltd is currently searching for investor :)
But I wanted to write little bit more about how that happened. First of all it took me a while to realize that it is actually possible to ask for money from someone. It was not in my nature to ask for money anybody. I guess I was raised that way, which could be good. But in another, business sense that just does not work. I was never told that is ok to ask for money if you have a smart idea and you can make profit for your self and investor. If you can make you both happy that is cool isn’t it.
Different example are young entrepreneurs in USA. I was a couple of times in USA and I saw that for example they don’t even think about starting a business without at least some funding. And today those amounts are usually 1 or 2$ mil. Quite common funding for people who actually have no reference no experience etc… Wierd, but it seems to work :)
But here, things are little bit different. Investors want to see that you already have some successful business. I don’t mean successful in a sense of popular and money burning but more like profitable :). Which actually makes more sense to me too.
So. Now after we realized that, we started to look for investment for our new project. We wrote business plan, make few presentations, worked on our pitch and started to make more and more contacts.
Guys like Seth Godin and Marc Andreessen helped a lot. Huge :)
I was actually astonished by the size of that whole investors, VCs, business angels scene. How many of them are out there, how much money they have and how hard for the is to find good projects. But the problem is that guys like us asking for money is even much more there :)
We started locally. On webstart. Berislav , Ivan and their crew did a great job and brought really, really cool, real life investors to Zagreb.
We are currently in talks with three investors from that conference and all three of them are interested in some ways in our company.
After that we were on presentation at Business angels of Slovenia. We met one really interesting/interested guy there. His name is Zvone Jagodič and he is founder of najdi.si which 75% he sold to Slovenian Telekom for quite nice sum of money. Now he is looking for partners :)
We also talked to MCI VC fund and Poteza fund. But they are looking in more grown businesses than ours.
Business angels of Croatia are just founded and I expect that it will take a while before they actually invest into something. Of course we talked to them. But no success so far :)
That’s all for now.
We are looking forward to one European conference on which we were selected from big number of startups to present our idea. We cannot publish any details yet.
So just stay tuned and you will found out which one.
Also I plan to write here about my theory how Microsoft will kill Google in next 5-10 years so if you want to argue with me please come back :)
Tags: English
