The proposal is more specifically for content producers, but we might fit the bill in an obtuse way.
Tag Archive for 'funding'
I’m headed downtown later today to meet with Nick Cottle and Carolynn Duncan of the Portland Ten, a project to help foster 10 startups reach $1 million in revenue by October 2010. I’m not sure that we’ll be headed down that track yet, especially because they want to work with startups based in Oregon, but they offer Startup Checkup meetings where they ask questions and give feedback on the entire scope of our business. I thought I’d try this out in order to get wise advice on some of the biz dev questions we currently have.
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.
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.
On Sunday evening, Adam, Joey, Greg, Miles, Bryan, and Kevin joined me for the Sunday night conference call. We were quite successful is keeping it brief, especially because we were plagued with a series of Skype difficulties in the middle of the call.
For operations, Miles installed SugarCRM in the past week. It’s pretty darn powerful, but we should be able to grow with it.
On editorial, we talked about producing content the preceding week. For one reason or another we didn’t publish on Thursday, but I though it was alright if we miss occasionally. In the upcoming week, we’re going to run a post on topical wikis for student news (which I still have to write) and an opinion piece on why reporters should be allowed to comment on their articles (Joey). We also have two stellar ideas for This Week in CoPress including a discussion of monetizing online and also bridging the gap between print and digital. In the forum, we’re going to kick off discussion on tips and tricks to bridge that gap.
Financially speaking, we didn’t apply for the J-Lab grant that was due last week because we didn’t feel as though we fit the criteria. Signed contracts are now going to live in Project Pier. Our initiative to fundraise via The Point isn’t working so well, and Bryan suggests that we just ask for money in general instead of specifically for hosting.
We also covered community, hosting, and organizational stuff Sunday evening. Earlier we were interested in having the first CoPress Unconference associated with NewsInnovation Philly, but there are now concerns that it would be too close to finals and graduation for some people. A few people in the CoPress Network have suggested they would be interested in doing website critiques. We might schedule the first of these in the next couple of weeks.
For hosting, we now have 6 to 8 schools set to come on board in the next several months (I’m not entirely sure of the timeline). We’re also looking to set up a program where, if hosting isn’t really your thing, you can still support us by buying your theme with an affiliate program, etc.
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
I don’t feel as though our fundraising campaign on The Point is going all that well. Personally, I think we should spell out our expenses a little clearer because $750 might seem like a lot of money. Any other ideas or thoughts?
Today marked the first stab at our new conference call format: each director spoke on their area of responsibility for a time. Time limits were enforced — though this was mostly because we had scheduled another conference call with 7 django (and one ruby on rails) newspaper CMS developers. With that impetuous, we were insanely efficient on this call, which is why this summary will read as many short points — that was the nature of the call.
Hosting
Miles has been hard at work, and we expect to sign several new clients soon. The Whit transition went very well, and the support for them has been minimal of late.
Looking toward the immediate future, we recognize that the revolution theme we used for The Whit has limitations and probably ought to be re-examined for the future. This process might be rolled into an attempt on our part to partner with some theme providers.
Editorial
A pat on the back to ourselves on publishing all five days last week, that’s been our goal all along, and we’ve now officially done it, and we plan to do it again this week.
Noting that there is an AP style guide for print products, there probably ought to be a blogging style guide (mostly for links) online. CoPress has started a wiki page for this and hopefully it turns into a useful resource.
Operations, Financial, Community
The core team will be establishing office hours so that people on the team (and eventually the community) will know times when they are sure to be able to get ahold of us.
We’re excited to have Drew and Jared taking a bigger role on the team, we’re looking forward to their expertise 
CoPress is launching our first donation campaign tomorrow. We’re looking to get some seed funding to offset the cost of the hosting setup. The campaign is structured so that all you have to do is give a few dollars — anything helps!
One last quick note on the website: we recognize that the forum is too complex right now. We’ll be scaling it back to make it easier to use.
The call finished just before 8:00 EST — the fastest call CoPress has ever accomplished!
Would anyone be interested in taking part in a roundtable discussion for monetizing online for an upcoming This Week in CoPress? I’m split as to whether we should talk about what’s working now, or have a “crazy ideas” discussion. On a conference call with Anthony, David and a couple others a month or so back we had a lot of fun talking about how location-based advertising might apply on a college campus.
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