new Irish web start-up, looking for investment

Zander1983

JD Dublin wrote: »

Just my 2 cents worth, avoid wasting time on these government sponsored funders, the time would be better spent on developing the business.

Ask anyone that has applied for and got funding. If they got minimum wage for the time spent on applications/business plans/meetings/reports, they would just about break even, that is unless they raise half a million from state funding agencies.

Yes if it is global domination you are after, use a .com name. if you want to stand out in Ireland, use a .ie name, I think it adds credability to the website. This credability in my opinion is partly due to the fact that it is difficult in the first place to get .ie.

thanks for the tips, yeah enterprise ireland have been no help. We have a .ie and .com

Trojan

Re: funding, I've found the same - a lot of that type of funding is simply not worth the trouble.

There's a Website Reviews forum if you're looking for feedback from web professionals.

etab

I have actually found the Enterprise Boards reasonably helpful. I estimate we invested around a 50 hours but achieved funding from enterprise board. Enterprise Ireland won't look at you at this stage. The EB want to hear you are different and that you will create jobs, tick both boxes and its well worth trying for. The first step is to enter their mentor program, worth it for the contacts alone.

JD Dublin

etab wrote: »

I have actually found the Enterprise Boards reasonably helpful. I estimate we invested around a 50 hours but achieved funding from enterprise board. Enterprise Ireland won't look at you at this stage. The EB want to hear you are different and that you will create jobs, tick both boxes and its well worth trying for. The first step is to enter their mentor program, worth it for the contacts alone.

Do you mind me asking how much you actually raised? Is it repayable? I'e heard the ''get the contacts'', ''tick the boxes'' arguments before and they do apply if you go all the way, but if you dont then the contacts and box-ticking is a waste of time.

etab

We got around 7k, if you have a phone conversation with the mentor or someone at the enterprise board you will get a very clear picture without having to do much work. Contacts are rarely ever a waste of time. If you are competing with something which is already in your area, there are no grants. You won't get a grant to open up an online butcher if there is already one in your area, you have to prove your novel and you will create jobs. Different grants are repayable depending on which one you get if you are successful, but you shouldn't mind repaying if successful in the future, getting the money now is the tricky part.
Farmers are prepared to do a lot of box ticking to get their grants, so afraid we might have to too

Zander1983

etab wrote: »

We got around 7k, if you have a phone conversation with the mentor or someone at the enterprise board you will get a very clear picture without having to do much work. Contacts are rarely ever a waste of time. If you are competing with something which is already in your area, there are no grants. You won't get a grant to open up an online butcher if there is already one in your area, you have to prove your novel and you will create jobs. Different grants are repayable depending on which one you get if you are successful, but you shouldn't mind repaying if successful in the future, getting the money now is the tricky part.
Farmers are prepared to do a lot of box ticking to get their grants, so afraid we might have to too

Do you recommend we go to the dublin county enterprise board or enterprise ireland? are they seperate entities? We applied for hothouse through enterprise ireland, got no feedback for 6 weeks, and only after emailing them did they come back saying we weren't successful

etab

Zander1983 wrote: »

Do you recommend we go to the dublin county enterprise board or enterprise ireland? are they seperate entities? We applied for hothouse through enterprise ireland, got no feedback for 6 weeks, and only after emailing them did they come back saying we weren't successful

Yes, Enterprise boards are likely your only option, pick the local one for your business location. Enterprise Ireland has stricter criteria and generally you need to be bigger i.e. planning to have 10 or more staff quite quickly (not sure on exact requirements). Found hot house a little frustrating for responses too. If you have a mentor with enterprise board it will add further credibility to all your applications.

IrishExpat

On an unrelated note:

While you have made good use of the Elgg platform (thought usually used between schools and students, or forums), if I were in your developers shoes, I wouldn't have used it.

I know it's open-sourced code and the community is active - but it's very bloated and slow. If your site were to grow to 100+ profiles and you found an increase in traffic, you 'might' find some problems.

I speak from experience: we have used it before, while working with a Spanish language school - and it couldn't handle the amount of data and users logged on at once.


Just my 2c.

maxmarmalade

IrishExpat wrote: »

On an unrelated note:

While you have made good use of the Elgg platform (thought usually used between schools and students, or forums), if I were in your developers shoes, I wouldn't have used it.

I know it's open-sourced code and the community is active - but it's very bloated and slow. If your site were to grow to 100+ profiles and you found an increase in traffic, you 'might' find some problems.

I speak from experience: we have used it before, while working with a Spanish language school - and it couldn't handle the amount of data and users logged on at once.


Just my 2c.

This project has morphed into something a bit different and we're not supporting www.iwillmakeit.ie anymore.

I wouldnt agree about Elgg. Theres lots of different ways to speed up Elgg. Facebook for kids has 250k members. Profile Engine has 5m members. Both are extremely fast. Caching and dedicated hosting do the trick.

asherbassad

Zander1983 wrote: »

Thanks for the comment. I'll fix that mistake. There are only two of us trying to do design/development as well as business side so mistakes are been made!

"being" made.

Do you need a proofreader?

VINCWM

The main issue I had when I looked at the website is that I got lost. I had to spend 5+ seconds to look for somewhere to go and that is too long. A website (and especially a Home page) needs to be clean and to the point.

It's a good idea and I can see it work but I think you might need a re-design i.e; Less text and better layout.
By the way, I really like the colour scheme.

All the best.

miju

my main prob with site is when I went to it first thing I saw was loads of spam under latest posts