Point 1:

the apperance.

The businessangel must belive that he has it to do with motivated and also experienced people, this generates
"trust" in your abilities, and that you pursue the tasks.

In the end you using other peoples equity. And since they
have limited knowledge about you and you collegues (principle -- agent problem), they must trust in your marketing proposes and your
personal apperance.

-> A good advice: go over your web-apperence. You website
looks not very appeling from it looks. Its not very nicely
structure, returns server errors (you are an "online" company!),
and soed not have a nice style.
Maybe you try to put some effort, a day or two to at least
structure and style yout webpage.
As a 1-mill dollar investor I would at least have a peak at the site.

Point 2:

Make the investor have enoug information to asses if this
investment is yielding a profit for him over a reasonable time.

-what are the key selling points of your product
-what is different to compeating products
(even if it is just to be less costly and more flexible
than a large company)
-how well runs your architecture
-how can you re-use your architecture in future products, or different uses (like a marketing portal for example),
or as use in university research projects
-what do your expect to learn by the pertnership (if you where
perfect, you would not have to ask for help)
-make a discounted cashflow analysis (or at least propose
cashflow expectations), a business angel or any investor will do that
to assess an investment (profit/risk ratio)
-set reasonable deadlines (concept approval,alpha, beta, testingphase)

...

hm, and stuff like that

Understood. I just wanted to "align" what I had heard with what you stated. But fully appreciating the effect that one word can have on your plan, especially your executive summary, any "buzz" you can throw my way is very helpful!



Spent about 1 month doing nothing but researching and putting this information into my BP. I now have a pretty firm idea of my distribution channels and I have tons of "If we get the money, I'm in" agreements in place.



That is why I'm going for angel investors who will take bigger risks on a dream than a VC (or a bank which does NOT deal in risk of this magnitude). That's why my pitch is based on the following:

-I've been doing this for 5 years. (industry knowledge)
-I have the prototypes to show my progress and validity of the idea (due diligence)
-I don't know of anyone else that has the qualifications to make a physics education virtual world. (company advantage)
-I know of only one company that approximates our companies mission and they are just now getting started (market advantage)

All I can do is sell them on my opinion that I'm the right man for the job, the market is ready to explode, and this is the project to ride that explosion to millions! Shouldn't be to hard, right?



LOL How many times have I chastized people for coming on the boards with a "If we build it, they will come" attitude?

In fact, with my understanding of the current market and the educational system, I can pretty much say that I can build a CRAP product and when this makes it's way to market, it will STILL succeed!

Of course my product will not be crap and I'm not here for "one shot" success story and the future be damned, but I'd like to think that one of my greatest success factors is that I've taken the lessons (those that I can find) from past failures and tried to learn from them. And boy, is there a lot I can choose from!

90 percent of all business-launced virtual worlds fail

On the contrary!

Remember that discussion we had a long time ago over admitting that your game was A7? The whole "remove any trace of A7 branding" in our games?

If you recall, my arguement then was that there was no point hiding this fact for eventually anyone who is interested in you would find out... and may not take kindly to you trying to hide soemthing from them.

Same thing here. But it's all in how I present it. In this case, the "few bugs" that prevent us from release becomes THE REASON to get more money, put more people on it, or simply switch engines!! Do you see that I can turn this failure in the engine or our team as an excuse to say "look, I've been underfunded for 5 years and all that's keeping me from the public is one or two bugs... that's not bad!".



Correct. And, when I get the time, I have JCL on the back burner to help me through these bugs through paid consultation with Conitec... so I know we can get that bug squased and it won't take a million dollars.

No, the million is because I want to do this RIGHT! And sure, I could spend the next year fixing bugs, rebuilding, releasing what I have and earn, who knows, a few thousand a year. But in that year others with MILLIONS have gotten ahead of me, they've heard me talk about this in the last 5 years, it will occur to someone that it's not a bad idea and voila! I'm earning 1000's with a small game while others are earning BILLIONS off what I can safely call "my idea".

So no. The time is right for aggressive action. My past proves that I can do it and I can do it with little money. No, no, no, the time is right to kick this idea into over-ride and that will take 1M in year 1, 10M in year2 and ???M in year 3.

Put another way, 80% of the million I'm asking for is for employees... and this figure is the same regardless of game engine.

How do you think I ended up here in the first place!



Check!!

I have Dr. Richard Bartle as a general VW consultant, I've been in contact with Jay Moore as a game business consultant, I have former lead writer for Star Gate Worlds Anne Toole and the co-writer of "serious games: games that teach..." Sande Chen as my writing consultants, and I have a cadre of people from my previous grants who want me to succeed (so they get their money back). And last and certainly not least, I have you guys!!!!

I guess what I lack in talent, I make up in networking!!!!!

Especially with angels since trust is all we have without strong sales to back us up.



Honestly, I feel that as long as you bathe, they would be more concerned with the former than the latter. Doesn't mean that t-shirt and jeans are approriate, but you will NOT get me into a tie for a measly 1M bucks... 10M... hmmm... welll......



That's the old site. We are going to open a new site in the next few weeks to coincide with my pitching efforts. That site has been months in the making and several thousand invested in it. As you state, it would be absurd for anyone to believe in my abilities as an online company if my online portal is crap.



Thanks. Since everyting is "guesswork" at this point, my strategy is to create several financial models based on what I feel are the relevant metrics for the company (account acquisition rate, account churn, price point, advertising expense) etc. Then I shift the conversation from "Can you make our money back" to "what are the best choices in the variables to make our money back".

Much more easily answered now: www.thevniversity.com