Looking for Investors - Low Risk Web Development Company

[GoCoded]

Looking for some investors for a web development company called GoCoded. A friend and I have the name, a strategy on how to market and draw traffic to our website + word of mouth, an idea about how to price our products and services, and some connections. We are looking to get some money to transform the project from an idea to a profiting reality. For background, we have both recently graduated from college (UC Berkeley and UC Irvine). I have thought about a few taglines, but what we offer to people through our company is simple. We want to give people premium quality web work at an affordable price.

To fund this project, we are trying to draw in about $10,000. We have already acquired $5,000 in investments. As with them, we offer a 20% return on investments by the first week of December 2012 (before paypal fees if we use paypal to send out the returns). Your investments will be used to primarily for marketing and legal fees.

If you are interested, send me a private message and I'll try to do my best to contact you. If you are interested in being part of our initial clients, we will document your information and contact you when we finish getting the rest of the website, legal work, and business location finished. Thank you.

[GoCoded]

I also forgot to mention, the minimum investment amount if $1000. If you did invest $1000, we would give you $1200 by December 2012. If we reach profit margins in the initial stages quickly, we do not mind paying it back earlier. Each investors name will be listed on our website as a thank you for investing in this project.

[DigitalPalette]

I also forgot to mention, the minimum investment amount if $1000. If you did invest $1000, we would give you $1200 by December 2012. If we reach profit margins in the initial stages quickly, we do not mind paying it back earlier. Each investors name will be listed on our website as a thank you for investing in this project.

Listing your investors on your website would be a very quick way to detract from your branding.

[GoCoded]

Thanks for the advice. This is the stuff I need to hear cause I'm still thinking this over. Would it hurt for branding even if we put among the footer links for about? To header portion of the site is listing more products and such and probably no discussion for that. Do you have any other tips you could offer? I'm still young and foolish .

[DigitalPalette]

To be honest, while it is nice of you to offer it, many investors would prefer to not be tied into the business with their names being display and what not. I am actually a new-launch web design firm myself so we are in the same boat . I have studied business and have had a corporation in the past which I recently dissolved, however.
As far as investors, try to do it without them. While it may give you some motivation to find clients because you know someone will be expecting to be paid back, you can really do it on your own if your determined. Also set up your contracts in ways that you are allowed to freelance work out if you cannot complete it in time. This will allow you to eventually just work on finding clients yourself and not the web design/web development portion itself. The hardest part then becomes finding a good freelancer.

For more tips I would need to know what will be the most common service you would provide?

[GoCoded]

Thanks for the info. I've got the freelancer stuff down actually thats how I originally planned to do this and have a quality check going based on my end. I could probably start as is, but I was hoping to get some funding for marketing and seo purposes, but I really like your thoughts. Thank you so much and best wishes in your web design firm.

[DigitalPalette]

Thanks, best of luck to you as well.

[GoCoded]

To answer your question, I was planning to provide web development for personal/home use and small/medium business but nothing for large corporations yet. These could range from creating 6 page web pages sites to possible small social network like sites. I would probably do most work in wordpress and some work in a self made CMS, but it depends on the package I offer them.

[GoCoded]

From your experience so far, could you maybe explain some problems that you forsee me going through and what the best fashion to address them are?

[DigitalPalette]

As far as CMS goes I have to tell you Wordpress. Your self made one will eventually break (as does Wordpress) but Wordpress has so many people working on it you can easily google any problem and get it fixed. Plus the plugins can make things like e-Commerce simple to provide and your clients will be impressed while you actually just saved more time than writing your own commerce system. Best of all, some small businesses are told by consultants (for whatever reason) to specifically hire a web designer who creates Wordpress sites.

The main problem I am running into is like with most businesses, getting clients. There is a definite lack of businesses in my area that have suitable, if even, websites. Working full - time at my job makes this difficult. If I could even get one client every other week I could justify moving down to part time pay. Moral of the story, your going to have bills to pay so don't think it is below you to work full time and dabble in your side business.

Other problems include the clients just not understanding some concepts that are simple to us. Consultation will eat up some of your time just teaching them the basics of things.

[GoCoded]

Yeah getting clients will be hard. Where are are you from? The economic recession is causing lots of business issues and people are less then willing to up front some money for this purpose.

[DigitalPalette]

I live in South Florida and I will agree about that. It is a good selling point if you can tie in the fact the business will see increased profits with a new website.