Angel investor network website

[cqueen]

My advert for investment was posted about 30mins ago, already Ive been notified that someone is interested. Bu they want £100 for me to join, before I can read their message.

For me £100 is a lot of money, if not actaully a rip off. Does anyone have any experience with this site? is it likely that someone is interested? or is that just a scam to get me to fork out £100?

Cheers

Chris.

[Niteflyer]

I don't personally have experience but my ex-boss joined when they had a "Special Offer" of £69, he joined and got about £15 worth of business in the whole year! They told him that someone was inetersted and when he joined, they said that the party had changed their mind.

Just his story thogh, you might be luckier!

Matt

[Support Britain]

Dont even think about it!

I would suggest 100% that this is rubbish. No investor would contact you through such means. And no investor network company would charge YOU for joining. Only the investor for a finders fee if a deal goes ahead.

Don't go there.

Simon W
www.supportbritain.com


(This is my personal opinion and not one of Support Britain.)

[davenny]

I completely agree, no investors work this way. And I dont see it happening anytime in the near future. I have working with investment banking, venture capital, and Angels and this sound like complete BS to me.

Erik
http://www.usspin.com
SPiN - Super Powerful Networking has decided to Open Source its system; it is complete free to anyone who wants to start their own mastermind group. (Manuals, Materials, Website, Web-links etc.)

[cqueen]

Hmm just had another email saying someone else is interested.

I've replied telling them their fee is unjustified.

[cqueen]

and another...

They're dangling a carrot on a fishing line, it's not fair!

[Cornish Steve]

Would your bank manager charge you for an initial loan consultation? Then why is it valid for anyone else to do so? No professional investor behaves in this manner.

[ewo]

I'll let you read all of my messages for £99.99

[cqueen]

It's not the investor charging, its the website. It's how they make their money.
They havn't replied to my email.

[ewo]

You drive a hard bargain. OK, £99.50

[Faith28]

Did they not say beforehand that if they introduce you to potential investors that they will charge you. If not then I agree that it is a ripp off.

[cqueen]

Yeah they did, but I wasnt really expecting anyone to be interested.

[DuaneJackson]

HAve you looked into profitengine.co.uk ?

I don't know much about it, but it sounds like the kind of place you are looking for. They are also memebrs of this forums although I don't think they have ever posted.

[theMBA]

Duane,
Profitengine.co.uk looks interesting, although I wouldn't take much comfort from anonymous testimonials.

[The Resolver]

HAve you looked into profitengine.co.uk ?

I don't know much about it.....

If so, then can you please explain why your business is listed in the links section of profitengine.co.uk and your website has the page http://www.kashflow.co.uk/profitengine/

Profitengine looks a neat piece of software but there are many 'issues':-

* PE are not financial/business advisers such as you would expect to assist with finding an angel investor.... but a software company.

* The website makes clear that confidential information about your busiess, its plans, finances how much you are prepared to give away in shares etc, that you upload on to the site is read by them.

* Nowhere on the site,or indeed on their web development site, does it give any information as to the names and background of the people who own and run the business!

* The Forum has only 5 messages posted since August 2005. What does that say as to how many entrepreneurs/investors are on boad. If the numbers of entpreneurs is very low then angels will not pay the £500 to join. They risk throwing away their money -not something good investors/angels commonly do.

* You really have no means of knowing who gets to read your highly confidential information. The site says angels have to agree to confidentialty but its VERY slight in ist wording (far short of a proper Non Disclosure Agreement) and anyway an entreprenur would not only have a very tough time legally enforcing a contract entered into by the angel with a third party (profitengine) but ,as enteprenurs do not know who are the angels until they identify themselves they will never know who reads their info and uses it for their own purposes (copying business ideas/models). It would be a great idea for false 'angels' to pay the £500 angel fee ,read all the business plans and then offer the info to competitors of each entrepreneur! Yes they would breach the T&Cs but why on earth would profitengine pay lawyers to sue them even IF (unlikely) they found out. Anyway 'mischievous' angels can protect themselves by being offshore.

* On the non-disclosure point, no angel would agree anyway not to disclose the info to third parties since the first thing they will want to do is discuss with their own financial/legal advisers. OK latter are 'safe' but to do so breaches the T&Cs so doesn't say much for such T&Cs.

* There is a worrying statement on the site:-

"Any financial agreements you may enter into with an investor will be by negotiation beyond the services of profitengine and could incur charges. "

Entrepreneurs may be asked to pay charges to the 'angels'. Huh???? No good genuine angels charge a fee. That suggest the 'angels' may just be other people offering to put entrepreneurs in touch with angels..and so it goes on!

* The lack of certain information puts the site in breach of the Electronic Commerce(EC Directive) Regulations 2002 -eg regs 6 and 9.

* Although PE is a software house, the system crashes when entering an invalid email address to recover your login with this message:-

"Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Invalid column name 'us_clientid'."

I am sure the people behind PE are genuine guys/guyesses who think they have a great business idea of their own. Its a pity that it does not really seem to have been sufficiently thought through.

[DuaneJackson]

HAve you looked into profitengine.co.uk ?

I don't know much about it.....

If so, then can you please explain why your business is listed in the links section of profitengine.co.uk and your website has the page http://www.kashflow.co.uk/profitengine/


For the same reason I have a banner to the right of this page - it's a fairly new concept - we call it "advertising"

[The Resolver]

OK. Fair enough. If you mean that you bought advertising/offered an affiliation deal without making any enquiries about the site and how they do their business, then fine. Just not the way I would advise people to go about placing adverts. Certainly not by having the ad for your service with PE html design with an address on your server.

[DuaneJackson]

Have you looked into profitengine.co.uk ?

I don't know much about it.....

As I said, I don't know much about it. At the time I took out the advert I knew enough about it from a potential advertisers point of view to go ahead and advertise.

If you mean that you bought advertising/offered an affiliation deal without making any enquiries about the site and how they do their business, then fine.

No, that isn't what I meant which is why I said I don't know 'much' as opposed to I don't know 'anything'. The rate was fairly cheap - spending any extra time investigating them would have cost me more money than it cost to advertise.

Just not the way I would advise people to go about placing adverts. Certainly not by having the ad for your service with PE html design with an address on your server.
I appreciate your concern about the way I advertise my business.

[The Resolver]

Understood and thanks for the clarification.

[MyNI]

I think it is fair enough, it is a business, that is what this website does. There is no point in them giving you contact with all these people and then saying, by the way can you pay us now? Because you wouldnt.

Although there are plenty of government and ngo business angel networks out there that won't charge you.

[offer1001]

There are many B2B site like this. Don' t trust them. Maybe the inquire email was sent by themselves. That is actually possible.

[cqueen]

Yeah but £100 is a joke, if it was £20 I'd be much more inclined to pay it because it's no big loss when it turns out to be a big scam.
If I also had some kind of proof that I had genuine investors interested that would help.
But as is stands, it's probably the moderator!

[MyNI]

Well most business angels won't be investing anything less than £10k and more likely above £100k so to ask for a meer 0.1% of the value of the investment isn't really asking too much. I wouldn't personally run such a site in this way, I would keep it free and rely on advertising revenue.

[cqueen]

so to ask for a meer 0.1% of the value of the investment isn't really asking too much.

It is considering they want it up front and you probably wont get the investment.

If I was to get the investment then yeah, they can have £100, sod it they can even have £150.

[datahound]

I can get you an introduction to a modelling agency, just need £99.25 to register your portfolio?

[Niteflyer]

Sorry but my sister is amodel and any modelling agency worth anything will NOT charge a penny to register ANYTHING!

;)

[datahound]

Sorry my tongue was not obviously enough in my cheek there.

By the way, my sister is so ugly my mum would tie pork chops round her neck so the dog would play with her.