Isn’t it easier to just find some big money people who have connections in the business and have them foot the bill for a project like this?

Easier? Maybe. Better? Maybe not.

During my research for possible marketing avenues, I started going to meetups in Silicon Prairie (Omaha, Nebraska)  a budding entrepreneur city.   One thing became abundantly clear fairly early on. While the Prairie may be a good place to begin the journey, Omaha lacked the #community zeal that AdFor would surely need.    Family matters took me (and AdFor) out to Seattle, Washington where I attended meetups, conferences, incubator pitches, cofounder meetings, TIE Seattle workshops, lean start up classes, conventions, lectures and a whole bunch more.  I never talked about AdFor as I wasn’t ready to let the cat out of the bag… after all, I was waiting to get my patent finalized and filed. 

Obviously, Seattle had the zeal I was looking for. I constantly read blogs and surfed the internet gathering statistics regarding the entrepreneur startup and the marketing scene.  I spent excessive amounts of time researching Venture Capital firms, paying particular attention to deals that they already had in place with other tech startups.  I was looking for VC firms that had invested in startups that were complimentary to AdFor. Specifically technology relating to live digital customer service.  Skype and Google Talk plugins just didn’t fit with the idea that AdFor had to be a free or limited cost service. 

Any #deal with big money people would involve making sacrifices that would ultimately end up hurting the project. Return On Investments (ROI) would be the driving force to launch AdFor.  Sacrifices that we didn’t want to make, such as losing control of our own Board, APIS selections, communication negotiations, intended customizations, location preferences and in some cases, losing control of the database remunerations, updates and even user security.

We feel very strongly that this is not only a site that needs to be built to stringent specification, but that its WIN – WIN – WIN ideal deserves to be replicated in every action society performs.   Losing control of the project didn’t seem like a productive way to make sure that would happen.

And that’s where you come in. By going directly to the people we would love to have not only as our financiers but also as our user audience, we can be allowed to expeditiously  develop the AdFor portal without compromises, and thus maintain its integrity. What that means for you is that you get a final product just as envisioned.  NOT a final product that had been manipulated by people whose primary goal is to see how much money they can make off of it.

Hey, don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing wrong with making money, and our hope would be that we would make enough with AdFor to help finance many more Reciprocating Resolutions that we have in mind. But everybody on our team agrees that making money at the expense of integrity would be a pretty hard pill to swallow.