Category : Business

Funding Part Deux

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 7:52 am

Over the past two months I have been working on Fuel My Ride full-time and am excited to have the beta released.  I continue to work on adding new features as fast as I possibly can and at the same time attempt to perform other jobs that are, I believe, a huge requirement for me such as signing up new advertisers and getting funding.

Base on my last post Funding, Funding, Funding, I have since then signed up on the South East Investment Network and have received 6 investor interest.  I have also been submitting my request to investors found on Go Big Network and have gotten a few of them asking for my business plan.  I have received a few offers from investors, but some of them seemed or still seem to be to good to be true and this is why I’m posting about my experience.

Due diligence is something that every entrepreneur must do when doing business with someone else.  You need to know who they are, where they are from, their history, the success rate, and hopefully some information from their clients and vendors, if any.  Without checking out who you are getting into business with, you may be getting yourself and your business into trouble and it will cost you.  You may be paying huge amounts of dollars or wasting a lot of your and your business’s time trying to strike a deal, make a sale, partner with someone, or even get funding for your business.

One of the best ways to protect yourself is to use a corporate attorney to look over the details, review the agreements, and even do some of the due diligence for you.  Often times you can find such legal consult with a small retainer fee that can help you get that legal consultation you need right away.  One of the resources I use in my businesses is Amerilawyer.com where I went to setup my first business and also retained their services for about $139 the first 13 months.  They have offices all over the U.S. and even have an office in the U.K.  They are worth the money and piece of mind.

End of Pay-Per-Click

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 1:36 pm

Pay-Per-Click advertising and its equivalent technologies are dying technologies that cause you to bleed out unnecessary money.  We believe this so much that we have written a small ebook that tells why these technologies are dying and what you can do to save money and ultimately save your business.  We are basically trying to help businesses with their success by acquiring new customers and maintaining their existing loyal customers.

Here is the link to the PDF that you can download by right-clicking and selecting “Save as”.

End Of Pay-Per-Click

We hope you enjoy it and pass it on to other people that may benefit from this ebook.

Funding, Funding, Funding

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 10:46 am

I have been working part-time on Fuel My Ride and making some progress as you will be able to tell by the new layout at FuelMyRide.com.  One of my main concerns over the past few weeks was to raise some money to work on the business full-time and be able to crank out the software faster.  I started signing up for funding websites or updating my existing accounts on sites like GoBigNetwork.com, FundingUniverse.com, and AngelSoft.net.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to follow through on Funding Universe to pay a $350 application fee so that they can run my credit and give me a list of banks and credit card companies to apply to for business lines of credit.  There are several reasons for labeling this a big mistake and one I will definitely learn from for future business ventures; here’s the list of reasons:

1. $350 Application Fee - This alone should have signaled that something was wrong, but I let my ambition and a slick sales guy con me into the deal.  With a promise of only one credit check and that this Unsecured Loans company would find the money for me, I should have done some research into the company.
2. Upsale of Expedited Credit Cleanup - This should have been my second signal and I was catching onto there scheme.  I declined this $3500 scam as I knew exactly what they would be doing to try and clean up any recent inquiries.  I have a credit score well over 750 and had a small handful of inquiries/changes for 2009 due to Circuit City shutting down and Washington Mutual becoming Chase; my credit cards with them were affected and thus my credit was affected.
3. List of Banks & Loan Companies - This was definitely the point at which I knew I had made a mistake in going with this program.  I know of several websites, banks, and loan resources that I can go to at no cost and would not have so many inquiries on my credit.  I was forced my “UL” (Unsecured Loans company) to apply to the 6 resources and upload the approval/decline letters to their website by a certain date so that I would not incur a fee.  The majority of the resources they supplied declined my applications and two of them require either a huge amount to cover the loan or they were just not approving any new business lines of credit.

I used a credit card list website where I can apply for business accounts and the only catch, which is obvious, is that for each credit card I apply for is another inquiry on my credit.  The site is Index Credit Cards and not only do they have business class credit cards, but personal and gas credit cards.

I hope that you learn from this and research your options and the businesses that you will be dealing with if they are going to be finding you the funding or they will be ones funding you.

FuelMyRide Splash Page

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 1:07 pm

FuelMyRide.com now has a nice looking splash page with the help of LaunchSplash.com.  This is definitely better looking than have my hosting company present their own “Coming Soon” page that doesn’t even provide me with a way of letting people know when the site will go live through alerts such as that from my new splash page.  Go ahead check it out and signup for the alerts.

I will be looking to add a sales person to the company to help with the pre-sell process and hopefully the investors will like the fact that I’m trying to make some profit before FuelMyRide.com goes live in beta form.

Building Blocks of Any Business

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 6:27 pm

Every business is created from an idea.  Whether it be to solve a problem, to compete with other businesses with a better service or product, or just to make money; every entrepreneur faces the question of what business do I want to start and why.

Well for me it started about 2 years ago for this company.  Gas prices were rising almost every day and I, like millions of others, drove a long way to get to work.  I had to fill up my Toyota Echo every 4 days.  An idea kept popping into my head, “Free Gas.”  This was, still is, and will be a problem for everyone.  How do you pay for the one thing that helps you get from point A to point B and still keep your sanity; especially something that continues to be expensive?

I learned to keep a notebook of ideas for business from Cameron Johnson’s You Call The Shots.  So, on a business trip to Texas I was taking for a startup company I was working for, I wrote down “Free Gas” in the middle of a page and started brainstorming how to make the idea a reality.  Using what I knew about internet technology and marketing, the page started filling up and a business model started to develop.  Actually, several business models came out of what I wrote down in that book.

Now that I am getting my head out of my ass and using a GTD system with my iPod Touch and a moleskine, I have decided to pursue this business model and start a company; my second company to be exact.  I took the pages out of my book, got them notarized and mailed them to myself never to be opened unless for legal issues.

The next thing I did was to fill out the “Articles of Organization” for a Florida Limited Liability Company.  I sent that in last Monday and checked the Florida Department of Divisions website.  I saw that the company’s “Articles of Organization” were accepted on the 15th, so I was on to the next step.  I applied for an Employer Identification Number (Tax ID) on the IRS website and was able to get my Tax ID within a few minutes.  I really like that the IRS has digitized that process.

Now that I’ve done that I’m starting to look for the financing to get the company off the ground.  I may not get the financing and I’m prepared for that.  I’ve learned that any business can be started with little or no money at all.  After watching the Young Entrepreneur Society movie (the YES movie), I’ve learned that one of the best ways to start a business is to pre-sell.  I’ve already started thinking of how to pre-sell the service.  I’ll leave the financing for another post.  To wrap this up, here are the basic building blocks for your business:

1. Keep a business idea book.
2. Notarize your business idea.
   1. Copy the pages for the idea.
   2. Tear them out and notarize them.
   3. Mail the originals to yourself.
   4. Don’t open the envelope.
3. Incorporate your business.
4. Get your tax ID.
5. Pre-sell and build the business.

Fueling Your Curiosity

Posted by Miguel Feliciano at 10:57 am

Today this blog site goes live.

I plan, as the founder of the Fuel My Life company to give you, the community, a look at what it takes to build a business from concept to profits.  Along the way I will most likely make mistakes and I will not hold back on letting you know what those mistakes are so that you may learn from them to make your business a success.

Stay tuned as I will detail in the next few posts what I have already done to get here.  You’ll learn about the steps I took to organize/incorporate the business, secure the names online, start searching for the financing, and how I’m taking advantage of online technology to make people aware of this business.