As I sit here on a cold pre 2009 Christmas evening, we have begun to set in motion the Loopthing network's focus on the UK capital. So what does that entail other than a hell of a lot of hard work. Well first of all we need to build a relationship with the London business community and express our service as being beneficial to their everyday business needs. This will be initially conducted through some targeted promotional campaigns and key affiliate building. Some key meetings before and after the New Year will prove our most important yet.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, here's a quick interview with myself outlining the current Loopthing project.
Other than that we've got some important work to finish over the next two weeks. This year isn't over yet.
At the moment we at Loopthing are trying to source capital for our seed funding round. We always anticipated this would be hard, and our expectation has been correct.
The avenues we have chosen to source this investment from include - Business Angel Partnership, Enterprise Ireland Growth Capital, and most recently cmypitch.com. As of yet no concrete interest has been received from BAP and EI, so last week we targeted the latter to access alternative Irish and UK investors.
The Loopthing project itself is just about to turn into revenues based on the OpenScore application, and we as of yet have not introduced any advertising to the network. With the corner being turned on monetisation and new developments on the horizon we would consider the project a very attractive investment.
So what are the potential barriers?
Given the innovative business model, investors may find it difficult to invest until a proven revenue stream is generated. If that's the case then it's a bootstrap, prioritise and monetise scenario. Unfortunate given the growth opportunity, but necessary to succeed.
Although Ireland has become a very wealthy country, I believe the vast majority of our investment strategies are still quite traditional. Our vast obsession with property ownership being one of these key traits, and this is not just based on risk aversion as we have recently learnt. This is starting to change, but the current economic environment has placed temporary restrictions on funding opportunities. However new funding routes are being developed for the funding gap with find ourselves in.
The upside is that no matter what environment you find yourself in, there will always be funding available for good projects. So we must continue to work hard and advance our product offering to ensure we are classified as such going forward.
