The Inheritance Channel.com

FUNDING

To get TIC off the ground: $250,000

$250,000 is derisory compared to the typical doomed mismanaged grandiose multimedia startup aspiration, usually in increments of $10m. (Failory.com has some all-too-predictable stories.)

At the intelligible level of $250,000 — $10m is not intelligible — you know you're dealing with a frugal specialist who spends other people's money abstemiously and purposefully, and who lives in the real world of monetised multimedia increasingly cheap to expeditiously source, produce and deliver.

Stage 1: Right now, personal bootstrapping

TIC can just about afford to keep itself above water until it finds $250,000:-

• we're now looking for Real Deal funders: Stage 2 below could happen at any time

• we're not looking for donations

• we're not looking for any professional assistance except insightful, informed, well-connected help to find appropriate candidate funders.

This website has now reached a state of sufficiently informative terminal inertia. There's nothing we can usefully add to it at this stage. There's no need to tart up this startup. TIC does also have:-

• a two-page executive summary

• a 79-slide quick introduction

• a pellucid sensible business plan

• an articulate founder who knows the subject backwards, knows what needs to be done, and is keen to have a calm, sensible conversation with a Real Deal funder and no-one else.

Stage 2: That $250,000

Stage 2a: calm, sensible, detailed exploratory conversations with appropriate candidate funders with whom TIC strongly resonates intuitively. Someone akin to a co-founder. A partner. Not in it for the exit. No 'pitch', 'deck', 'pitch deck', 'funnel', 'runway', 'pivot', 'traction', fantasy projections or any other nonsense.

Subjects for discussion include:-

• TIC's initial substantive program and how to accomplish it

• financial disciplines, controls, allocations

• an appropriate investment, ownership and corporate structure in one or more appropriate jurisdictions (far from being one of a startup's first things to set up, these two are properly among the last, to be done in conjunction with the committed funder). Tax and other relevant efficiencies are paramount. TIC is in principle open to using an appropriate investment trust or similar approved tax-congenial vehicle. TIC will never use a Delaware 'C' corporation.

Stage 2b: founder and funder have agreed terms and the initial way forward, the collaboration is signed and sealed, and we proceed to Stage 3.

Stage 3: Viable

With $250,000, TIC is a viable global multimedia enterprise. A founder-funder partnership. No funder foundering. No founder floundering. Nothing to invent, test or prototype.

How can such little capital keep TIC alive? Because:-

(1) revenue: monetisation per platform is relatively clear in some of its fundamentals;

(2) revenue: TIC will pre-sell multiply maximally. With pre-selling, the net cost to TIC of the finished product is zero;

(3) expenses: generally, much digital multimedia content is relatively — and increasingly — cheap or free to acquire, polish, customise and deliver;

(4) expenses: that general principle is all the more applicable to the field of TIC inheritance;

(5) expenses: much economy can be achieved, and frugality instilled, by breaking other rules of badly run, profligate multimedia businesses:-

• no dinosaurs

• no employees: everyone a self-employed freelancer

• no 'teams'

• personally accountable individuals of substance who know the value of other people's money

• no gross-remunerated C-suits (you bring your own salary and bonuses. That's fair)

• no corporate jet (not even a lease on a paper plane)

• no fixed premises

• no expense accounts

• no-one and nothing phony or fancy

• no unnecessary software or hardware

• no dependence on advertising

• no premature producing

• no inappropriate inventory

• no inappropriate speculation

• no inappropriate commitments

• no buying exorbitantly priced, premature or otherwise inappropriate services

• no overdoing anything

• no obsession with 'growth'

• no getting busy

• no reinventing any wheel

• keep everything calm, sensible, rational, monitored, costed, evaluated, valued etc.

And TIC will make the most of:-

• free and cheap content

• free and cheap sources and service providers

• existing fully developed markets and audiences

• automation

• free and cheap AI including re content, products, combinatorics, market identification and customisation

• the latest sustainable profitable digital multimedia methodologies. TIC intends to be in front here.