About Help for Getting Your Venture Off the Ground

As we’ve told you throughout the process, IdeaWF isn’t about business plans but rather about getting businesses off the ground.  Part of that process is getting support for your business, whether it’s investors, advisors, or just some free publicity.  To do those things, however, we need to provide the investors and interested parties enough information to get them interested in your business proposals.

What we intend to do is to circulate to interested individuals an information sheet with a paragraph on each firm that wants to be introduced to this interested group.  Of course, this information will be public—a fact you want to keep in mind as you decide how much about your idea to reveal.  The paragraph should be no more than 5 lines in length and should end with your name and contact information so these interested individuals can contact you directly.  We can help you write this paragraph if you’d like.  If you’d like to be included in the information sheet mailing you must submit the paragraph by Friday, December 18^th, 2009.  Emailing it to jeff.stambaugh@mwsu.edu is fine.  We’re also considering whether to host a get together one evening in January between contestants and interested individuals. 

There is a lot of media interest in the teams that are competing in IdeaWF.  That means your new venture could get some free publicity.  When you signed the application form you agreed to provide publicly releasable information about your proposal if you were selected as a finalist.  We’re confident that the media will be very interested in the finalists as soon as they are announced.  Finalists that get us their “public paragraph” sooner rather than later will allow them maximum benefit from this media attention.  Even if you aren’t a finalist we think you can generate some media interest in your venture.  Therefore, if “non-finalists” send us their paragraph and clearly state that we can share this information with the media we’ll do so.