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You have an absolutely gorgeous product. I say that as someone who contributed on a contract basis to a similar system for a couple of guys in Arizona trying to do the same thing. I think that your local advertising model is going to be extremely difficult to execute and is going to scale poorly, so I would recommend moving that to a secondary revenue model. There are lots of ways to make money in this market that does not involve inefficiently calling up shops and asking them to part with advertising dollars. My feeling is that you are technically savvy enough to create a more complete property management solution that landlords would pay for. One other revenue stream that I thought was interesting for the guys I worked with was pre-approving tenants with a background check, credit report, etc. That way, the tenant would pay an application fee once to you, and then that application could be used at different properties during the tenant's search process (think of it as The Common Application for housing). Additionally, your advertising prices are obscenely low. Your largest package tips the scales at $1,200/year. To be perfectly honest, selling five of those packages is not especially impressive. Assuming that you sell your largest package to every advertiser, you will need 83 advertisers to clear $100k revenue, assuming no turnover and nobody ever calls you to complain or whatever (and believe me, they will). Furthermore, your UI can probably only support fifteen or so advertisements per university without becoming utterly saturated, so you are constrained there as well. Suppose that you sold fifteen placements per college and had no turnover, your max revenue is $2,700,000 and now you have 2,250 advertising customers to coddle and keep happy. Granted, that is a huge pile of money and anyone would be absolutely thrilled to make it, but now you have to back out your expenses. Assume that each of the three of you are going to draw $100k salary, now you are talking $2.4M, and now you need to pay account managers, sales people, customer representatives, not to mention all of your technical staff and infrastructure. You have a phenomenal product, but find out how to sell it for money to people that use it instead of advertisers. Advertisers should be the gravy! Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further. Email is my username [at] the gmail. |