[webmaven]

Do you really need to roll out to 150 campuses in one year? Use the profits from your first to roll out to a 2nd, then use the profits from 1+2 to roll out #3, etc. BTW, for each new city you roll out to you should be trying to figure out how to do it better.

When you've proved you have a repeatable, scalable model, you can take on investors to accelerate the growth.

This is more or less what FB did.

[sthielen]

Our roll-out process involves having people getting and maintaining the property listings (a fundamental component of our business involves vetting properties to make sure they will take students, as about 60% will not), then building traffic at the school, and then securing advertising placements. We've successfully rolled out to three separate, unique campuses, and yeah, we've definitely learned a lot from each one.

But it's a lot of work for three people, in addition to the rest of the business development and sales and all that. As we add more campuses it's going to become impossible. It makes far more sense to hire a campus rep at a school to go around getting students to use the site, putting up posters, talking with administration, sharing on facebook, etc. than it does to have the CEO and CTO of the company driving down there once a week and spending the whole day doing that. And even though we have revenue it's still not enough to start doing that while simultaneously keeping the lights on.

We're looking to raise money to streamline this whole expansion process and keep our business alive long enough to see that expansion through. We've validated our product and revenue model, but we need some initial capital in order to, for lack of a better phrase, do things right.

[webmaven]

If your current cost structure doesn't allow you to fund the addition of a single campus rep for the fourth campus out of the revenues from the first three, you may need to rethink things, as that doesn't sound like you've found a scalable growth engine yet.

[late2part]

Agreed. Get 1 campus profitable, prove the model. Then expand to your closest 5 campuses. Prove the model there. Find a way to make a lean profitable business. Then, the world is yours.