Many lessons have been learned and many will be taken away.  Until we meet again in another digital life called another startup, I say, “Thanks for the ride.”

~ Miguel Feliciano
Founder | Fuel My Life, LLC.
Follow me:
http://www.miguelfeliciano.com
http://www.twitter.com/miguelfeliciano
http://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelfeliciano

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.

We are happy to see that someone has been motivated enough to blog about alternative fuels, which helps the ecology of our planet and in a way help eco-friendly vehicle owners to save money while saving the planet.  This is what we are doing with FuelMyRide.com, but in a different way as we leave the really hard work of finding alternative sources of fuel to the scientists and engineers.

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.

If you’re a LinkedIn member, check out the group and join instantly by searching for Fuel My Ride in the Groups search.  We have opened up the enrollment so that there is no waiting for approval.

We have also posted a discussion for investors where we will hopefully find the right investors for our company.

We hope you enjoy this new feature to the Fuel My Life website like we do.

As a business, you are no longer tied to Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Sale, Pay-Per-Lead, Affiliate Marketing, or any kind of obligations.  That’s right, no obligations!  This means that you are not required to advertise on Fuel My Ride for a minimum amount of time; you don’t have a monthly contract; and you don’t pay unless the system works for you.  We are so confident that the system will work for you and that’s why we are offering the type of pay/fee structure listed on the website.

In fact, if you call or sign up for an account by the end of October, we will cut our prices 50% until the end of the year.

What does this mean to you?  Here’s an example:

You sell a product for $20 and you offer a cash back reward of $2 (that’s 10% back).  We will be charging 10% on the cash back reward starting in January, but taking advantage of the promotion you’ll pay 5% on the cash back reward ($0.10).

When do you pay?

We generate a code tied to your ad that you place with Fuel My Ride and the customer receives that code at the point of sale.  The code has an expiration date on it and the customer must redeem the code through Fuel My Ride in order to receive the cash back reward.  Once the code is redeemed we will charge you the cash back reward and the fee.  The best part of this is if the code is not redeemed by the time it expires you pay nothing.  In plainer terms, if you don’t make money, we don’t make money.

How do you pay?

You can pre-pay or deposit money into your account and we will use that before we send you an invoice.  You can also pay with Pay-Pal, credit cards, checks, and money orders.  We will be using a simple billing system to make paying your invoices and reporting on past invoices easy.

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.

Now there are some requirements to meet, which are that your company has to be less than 3 years old and have less than $1 Million in revenue. To learn more about it go to http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark.

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.