What Finished Feels Like...and What Funding Looks Like

It's 5:16 on Friday and I'm done.

I just finished the behemoth known as a 'business plan.'

That's right - we're looking for funding.

For over 18 months, we scraped by as we built the concept for CoolPeopleCare. We pieced together site development with the sweat and late hours of smart people (who thankfully are also good friends). We wrote on weekends and at night. We worked regular jobs and then worked on CoolPeopleCare. We met face-to-face with nonprofits in several cities to see if they were interested in helping us with this idea.

We sold advertising and consulting services. We borrowed money and thanked families and friends for their generous support of our dreams as we set out on this wild ride to save the world. And now we've arrived at a place where the concept is refined. We've built something that works.

And now it's time to scale.

When you start any business (I'm only assuming here, since this is the only business I've started), you want to get to that point where you’ve 'made it.' For some, 'making it' is selling the whole thing and moving to a beach until death. For others, it's that sweet spot where your greatest passions collide with an opportunity to earn a living. For us, 'making it' means getting more and more people involved in what we're doing, who are willing to take that 5-minute dare to change their world for the better.

That's what scale is.

And, in order to do it well, we need some money.

We could continue to piece things together a month at a time, wondering if we're going to make payroll. But we'd like to make that all-important splash. We'd like to see where our tipping point is. We'd like to let more people know how they can be cool by caring.

To make that happen, we need to budget for a few things. We need to hire a few folks. We need to take this revolution worldwide.

All along we've been building this thing called brand equity. We want to be more than a Web site with a bunch of words on a page and hundreds of articles in the archive. We want to be out in the 'real' world as much as we're in the digital one. We want to help create change, not just point out how it can happen in small bursts.

And so, with the business plan finished, we begin to take the steps down the road called funding, with pit stops at places like scalability, financing and competitive advantage. We're looking for the right people who agree with and understand what we're doing and want to journey with us as advisors, investors, dreamers and revolutionaries.

I think I may take a nap now. A new day starts on Monday.