Inside CoPress

on July 10, 2009

in Low Priority

Five different possibilities. I think all of these could be worth applying to in a month or two if we go for-profit. They generally offer a small amount of funding in exchange for equity. Hat tip to Ryan for pointing this out to me.

Update on the possible transition to for-profit

Published

on July 5, 2009

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Susan Linch was kind enough to connect with Greg and I on the phone this evening to talk about the potential financial and legal implications of moving from a non-profit to a for-profit. I’ll do my best to reconstruct my notes, but also encourage everyone to ask follow up questions in the comments. As points of information, we originally incorporated on January 13th and the end to our official fiscal year is June 30th.

Google Ventures

Published

on March 31, 2009

in Low Priority

Andrew Spittle gets a hat-tip for this link, although I could’ve sworn I saw it in the news earlier: Google is starting a venture fund. The application process is sending them an email with 3 typed pages or 20 slides, and the cool thing is that they offer a range of funding (I think we’d be most comfortable with seed funding). This is something we might consider doing, although probably in the two to three month range. I don’t know that we need to jump on it immediately.

March 8 2009: A Bundle of Board

Published

on March 11, 2009

in Medium Priority

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Ok, I know I’m three days late on this but here it goes anyway. On the Sunday conference call were Adam, Joey (via phone on vacation), Greg, Miles, and Bryan.

Organization

We started off talking about Sunday night’s first (unofficial) board meeting. There were two big questions on the table. First, whether to run through the official logistics in the very first meeting, or just have an informal discussion about the bylaws. We ended up doing the second, ultimately to our benefit in my opinion. The second focused on the responsibilities of the board. We decided that they should be responsible for: hiring and firing the Executive Director, approving an annual budget, and ratifying changes to the overall vision of CoPress.

We also covered the teams plans for over the summer. Greg will be taking an internship in Dallas, Joey isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do, Adam isn’t sure either, and Miles’ job probably won’t start until January.

Operations

Operations was light this week. I had a small little rant about using more descriptive subject lines in email. I’m finding myself having to search through past email, and it doesn’t really help to have email titled “smiley face.” I propose that we use primary keywords like “Operations”, “Hosting”, or “Scheduling” and then the topic for the email.

Adam discussed getting more consistent contributions from team (there are some areas in which various people have been dropping the ball), and the general consensus is that we should use Project Pier more often for this. We also need to be better about getting on people when tasks have been dropped.

Financial

I was finally able to sign the signature card at Bank of America last week, and it’s on its way to Florida for Greg’s. We’re going to run into a problem trying to get Joey on the account which will require submitting an amendment to the articles that we filed with the State of Florida. Greg will have a draft of those by Friday.

We’re also going to put together some spreadsheet wizardry for a cost/revenue timeline so we can better forecast our income and spending. Joey is going to work on this next week because he’s on semi-vacation this week.

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Possible Revenue Models for CoPress

Published

on February 15, 2009

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Some rough ideas for the future of CoPress funding.

Hosting

If we can figure out a way to scale that is more economical than LiquidWeb, we might be able to turn a small profit once we get enough schools on board
Ideas include looking into Amazon S3, dreamhost, mediatemple, etc…

Support premium

We ought to start doing this anyway, but charging a monthly fee for additional support seems like a no-brainer
We can most of the monthly premiums to a student who is willing to take on the account. This makes us seem less evil, mitigates our risk, and keeps our own workload down.
We should also offer support on a hourly basis. And turn most of those profits over to the student providing the support.

Foundation/grant funding

initial startup costs need to be funded this way.
CUP: we’ve got similar goals, we need a contact
We’re still looking into the various funding methods

Cut of connecting developers with schools in need

CoPress gets to put the project in it’s ‘gallery of code’
CoPress provides a list of developers and their skills
Schools can list a project that they need done
Developer and school can match each other, or for a nominal fee, CoPress can match the two up
CoPress can suggest a cost for the project, or the two can figure it out on their own.
Fee ideas:
- $25 to match a prog to a project
- 5% cut of the total payment goes to CoPress
- 15% if they don’t want to list the project in the gallery (opensource it)
- Suggest rate of $200 for small projects (< 8 hours)… work up from there

Ad revenue sharing

CoPress developed tech that will cross post stories on sites that have relevant content.
Sorta kinda like what ICONN is trying to do, only we do first/better.
Any school can opt-in to the network, and can see a huge list of stories or search by keywords/location.
Fee idea: Running a story gives 60% to the content creator, 35% to the person running the story, 5% to CoPress

CoPress ad network

Leverage the power of the community to get a small ad network started that focuses on national, high-end ads, marketed toward alumni and students
We’d need to hire at least one full time person to manage this, and likely 2+ developers to code the backend framework
This has the potential to pool resources in the same way that we have with hosting. Think: unionizing the college media to get better ad sales. This is the one advantage the CP has that we don’t.
CoPress could take a very small, 5% cut of this.

Donations

via The Point
$750 by the end of Feb.
for seed capital

Spot.us

pitch a story on college media, this would be a collab. effort to write, and CoPress could take the fee.

VC Funding

Joey knows virtually nothing about this, but I see this as an option, especially if we decide to take on the ad network.

School Sponsorship

setup our own foundation
eventually run off an endowment

Look to expand our services to small, local papers

title says it all, but we could easily charge local papers 5 times what we charge colleges, and have them still think it was cheap
colleges are never going to have much flexible cash

Donation ideas

Published

on January 28, 2009

in Medium Priority

Just to prove that I’m doing my job: Check out some ideas to get donations.

L3C

Published

on January 28, 2009

. 2 Comments

Intersting alternative to 501c3 status: L3C. I think we might be too late to catch this boat (since we’ve incorporated in FL), but an L3C can operate as a for-profit and accept donations like a 501c3.

Fundraising idea: Ideablob

Published

on January 22, 2009

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Not entirely sure what the gimmick is, but I came across “Ideablob” a while back which apparently will offer $10,000 dollars to submitted ideas that receive the most votes. Might be worth entering.

Google opens up gApps for reselling

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