DuaneJackson said:
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.
