How to promote my Next Big Idea - Thousand Partners for Entrepreneurs

I love the enthusiasm behind the idea, yes, it would be cool to be a part of something where a couple hundred thousand was being invested, but somebody would need to be put in place to manage that investment with the investor's interest in mind, or the company that is invested in could simply blow the $200,000 on "business" trips to Vegas. You'd love to think that a young company with an opportunity of a lifetime would use the money wisely, but that impulsive side is too strong for many who haven't learned the discipline that is necessary to run a business efficiently and use investment capital like it was their own hard earned money.

You show me a way to solve that problem, and I'm in!

By the way, this sounds a tad bit like a venture capital equivilant of http://www.prosper.com/ , a "person to person" lending site where people invest X amount of money into various loans. If you haven't seen that site I recommend checking it out.

 

Excellent point but let me clarify them for you and get you on board. Since we are going forward with a corporate face, Thousand Partners Inc (TP), we will have a project manager of some sort for each project or for multiple projects. TP will deal with this kind of issues. Plus this will be a case by case situation too for all of the investment opportunities. We will have to work out strict terms and conditions in our funding approvals for proposals.

Since we are all located in different parts of the world, we can nominate a partner to be a project manager for an investment proposal close to his/her home. This was we have our own partners watching and doing the work along with the corporation. This partner can be paid from the corporate share of that investment or ask the company who wants the $200K to pay his time. However to my understanding these payment details has to be worked out on a case by case basis as we move proposals forward.

Basically what I am saying here is that we will not give someone $200K and wait for them to burn through without any progress. Just like any VC/Investment firm would do business, we will be on their back!

Seen prosper but they are for people to people. Here almost similar idea but we are forming one of the largest network of people under one corporation, Thousand Partners Inc. Totally a different approach when it comes to funding. What happens within our company with our partners may be similar to how prosper pools up the money to a borrower.

 

Thank you for all the feedback so far. I have done some due diligence on this concept and got many positive feedback from some investors. They had similar concerns or said to watch out for same things like many of you mentioned above.

I have decided to go forward with this concept and to start slowly in small investments and then pick up as time goes.

I've started a mailing list and many have already signed up from the website. If you haven't and is interested to learn more, please leave your name and email address. I will notify you when I launch it. Go to http://www.thousandpartners.com and the main page will give you a pop up to send your information.

In the mean time, lets keep talking about the ideas and the concerns that have been pointed out. Would love to hear what others have to say.

Any marketing ideas? Looks like many of you are just talking about the concept, which is great but I like to get some marketing idea to get some traction for this concept.

Thank you.

 

See if you can get in touch with the student body of business schools. Those kids could have $250 but not enough to start their own VC firm, so this could be an opportunity for them. I would contact some business professors asking for their opinions and then who knows, if they like the idea they may spread the word.

Or look for investment clubs, the people who pool their money and then invest in the stock market as a group. This would be similar but more hands on.