| META: Thanks for posting. Thanks for immediately warning us that this could degenerate into personal attacks. To anyone posting, please think if what you are saying has a personal attack in it. If it has a personal attack, don't make it. -- I certainly understand that you are not some kind of epitome of evil. And I respect that with $150 and a realistic business plan that you would take my application for funding seriously. However, there are lots of people with unrealistic dreams about businesses. They have no idea what kinds of businesses actually get funded. They don't have referrals. These people are tough to filter; I'm sure money doesn't filter all of them. It seems a little unfair to the peasants when you take $150 from some sincerely earnest entrepreneur with realistic dreams of success. While being a not-for-profit does make your motivations sincere from a legal standpoint and you do provide a valuable service to people, mostly for free, you're nearly the very definition of for-profit enterprise from a utilitarian standpoint. Most people don't understand your valuable service and they just see you keeping money. Are you willing to consider alternatives to application fees? You could charge $25 like Jason suggested. You refund the money for people that get rejected. Or as pg proposed, you could donate the money to the charity of your choice. Maybe you could take that $150,000 and let public high schools have a pitch competition. That will probably get you a positive return over time. Another alternative: keep the existing application available, possibly with a fee reduction. However, you read all applications sent via Twitter for free. If you want, I will reject Twitter applications for you for only $75 an hour. Another alternative: do it like other successful angel groups that don't charge for reading applications. Reject people that apply without reading the application criteria. It's not hard to reject people. Maybe you could get people on Mechanical Turk to do those rejections for you. |