I have been in on a few discussions with money guys lately, as clients try to get their financing together for rollouts. The common message: really, really have your act together.
The wobbly US economy has made investor cash much harder to come by than it was even a few months ago.
Screens.tv has an interview piece up with the head of an early stage investment group in New York, and the guy has one particularly strong summary of what anyone who’s starting a network needs to have organized.
“To get professionally funded and beat out the other 99 companies looking for the same dollars, you are going to have to be firing on all cylinders,” says David S. Rose, chairman of investment group New York Angels. “That means you need a great and experienced management team, a carefully-thought-out business model, a truly unique selling point, existing access to your customer base, a very realistic and rational pre-money valuation, and a very, very good answer as to why your business should not be simply a customer for one of the other myriad solution providers already in the market.”
Simply put, you typically need way more than an interesting notion and some contracts.
Rose says there is money out there, and a belief among savvy investors that the advertising landscape is changing and moving this way. But as he says, anyone who wants money better be seriously buttoned down with his or her plans.