AskForFunding

[Martin Hash]

I try to plan ahead to write these stories by finding something unique or clever and engaging in it, sometimes sincerely, most often not, but always with a sense of curiosity. People who haven’t read many of these sometimes taken them too seriously; like was I really trying to start some new off-the-wall enterprise or do something self-deprecatory. The truth is, I enjoy the experience and often learn something that I can add to my wealth of knowledge & experience.

What I always try and provide is a certain level of tongue-in-cheek humor but it’s not always clear what that could be? For example, I ran across a website called “AskForFunding” the purportedly hooked aspiring entrepreneurs up with speculative investors. The entrepreneur would write up a proposal describing their product and the website would send it to as many as 10 leads a day depending on the category. The first 3 months of access was only $99, and even though I didn’t know exactly how something funny or interesting would come out of it, it was worth a try.

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I didn’t have a product in mind but I do have an active imagination, so I came up with a business plan that expanded on my successful 3D software in a unique & clever way, while emphasizing my personal achievements as a creative CEO. It wasn’t bad but I wasn’t asking for enough money and I’m too late in my career to be doing a start-up, I just wanted to attract interest, see what the process was like, milk it along, get something witty, funny or interesting enough to write about.

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Unfortunately for this story, nothing came of all that work, not a damn thing. I didn’t get one response, nor did anything of interest happen. I ended up sitting on the story for a couple years, finally deciding to write it up here just to clean up my possibility list. The one conclusion that I did come to is that it was a pure scam; well done and convincing but just intended to get that $99, and upgrade their naively-optimistic customers to something more expensive. Plus, it was difficult to stop the subscription; I really had to work at it and I’m an attorney, so who knows how many people kept paying long after giving up. I’m guessing the business plan wasn’t forwarded to anybody and it was all a honeypot from the get-go. At least this write-up gave it some value, and I did get some more experience with online chicanery.