How to get funded in this case?

[monkeydj]

Get funded?

I created a few scripts to automate my personal take on music marketing and to market my musical releases. Observing my results, a few musicians asked me to do the same for them and I charge them for it. I am actually making money running their marketing campaigns and I am starting to think of creating a platform out this. I talked with a few music labels too and I got some excited people waiting for the platform to be ready.

The problem: I got a 9-5 programming job that pays the bills and I got a recently born baby, no free time (and no mental capacity) anymore to work on my platform, despite having people asking about the progress of almost daily. Also I have not enough savings to quit my job.

Dream Scenario: I would love to get some funding so I can pay my bills and dedicate 40H weekly on developing my platform.

Is it dreaming too much? Do you guys think it would be possible? How so? I’m open to suggestions.

Cheers

[PaulHoule]

My first take would be the record labels are potential investors.

No matter what in your case I'd be concerned about getting 'screwed' by anybody who understands what it is you are doing and would be able to replicate it. If you could at all get intellectual property protection via patents, trade secrets and copyright, do so!

[martin938]

But to register a patent cost money and it depends of the country of residence right?

[PaulHoule]

You can file a provisional patent for $65 tomorrow, file a real one for maybe $2000 in the next year.

[monkeydj]

Yeah, this is a creative work. Think of marketing agency. I’m not sure if a process is patenteable. In any case, the music industry changes at a very fast pace, even faster than IT. What I am offering to musicians is that they take care of music and I take care of their marketing, watching for the changes in the industry and responding to it for them. Just being agile. But that’s definitely something to consider. IffI manage to put a patent application together, I’ll definitely go for it. Thank for your time replying to my struggle. I really appreciate it! Cheers

[iab]

What kind of burn are you looking at? My subjective take: spend some time ballparking the market for this, and collect a few 5k-10k angel checks through SAFEs; show current progress, and interest from industry players. Ditch the programming job & go at this full-time for a few months.

[monkeydj]

I’d need 5k for my expenses and around 2k for running the business. I like the idea of SAFE, didn’t know about it. Ditching the job is indeed what I want to do. Thanks for your suggestion, I really appreciate it!