Letter to Governor Charlie Crist

I sent this letter to the Governor today:

Governor:

I read in the Sun Sentinel on almost a daily basis how more funding is needed for the public school system and believe that I have an “outside the box” solution. I have always been an entrepreneur of sorts and as such look for alternative ways to make money. When I look at government anywhere in the world then the mentality is pretty one of “taking money” – read: tax. I would love somebody in Government to look at the other side of the equation: make money. All government institutions have opportunities to make money, some in more obvious ways than others and deploying such new ideas combined with more efficiency could result in lower taxes, better schools and happier people.

You notice how this email is “wrapped” in an interactive letterhead which consist of images with embedded links to various portions of our website. WrapMail currently performs this service for Broward College and every email sent from faculty or staff brands the college, promotes the many different educational programs, the foundation etc and links back to various portions of BC’s website. The basic principle behind WrapMail (which has been developed in-house in our Fort Lauderdale headquarter) is to connect two obvious dots: organizations have websites and employees that send emails. WrapMail turns every email into a branding tool for the organization, drives people to the website AND turns into a research tool as the system matches up sender and receiver when a link is clicked (telling our clients who is interested in what and when). WrapMail is server based so nothing is installed on any desktop or cell phone, i.e. senders have no new routines to learn.

Here’s where I’d like to connect the opening statement and the quick overview of WrapMail and Broward College:

BC has about 2,000 faculty and staff, in addition they have close to 150,000 student email accounts.

The NEW idea: Solicit advertising from major corporations to be in the BC wrap. Imagine what it would be worth to say, Apple, to be featured in every external email sent from broward.edu. We believe it is worth about $5.00 per click or 5 cents per impression. The reason these ads are worth much more than banner ads is the fact that they appear in an email between people that know each other. WrapMail is not a mass email system, it is all about using the emails employees send every day anyway – why not use these to promote your own organization. Another potential advertiser in the BC wrap is also very obvious: The State of Florida.

The numbers:

BC sends about 200,000 emails daily
5 cents per impression of one advertisement: $10,000 daily “revenue” or $2.5M per year (and that’s only for one advertisement).
Even with some hefty discounts this could become a major funding source for Broward College.

Imagine rolling this program out to all public educational institutions in Florida.

WrapMail would be willing to provide the technology for free against sharing the advertising revenue.

There’s more: you will notice on the bottom of this email that there’s an amber alert for a Florida missing child. We feed these alerts automatically into all of our emails to increase the impressions of missing kids in the hope that more visibility increases the chances of finding them.

The bottom line is that I wanted to make you aware of our little technology company down here in Fort Lauderdale and how this technology combined with some outside the box thinking could provide great opportunities for the entire State.

I would love to discuss this in more detail so feel free to contact me at any time.

Thank you

________________
Rolv E. Heggenhougen, CEO
305 S. Andrews Ave., Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
US Office: (954)-376-4750

Classic startup dilemma - when to ask for the umbrella?

There's an old saying that you should ask to borrow an umbrella when it is not raining because when it is indeed raining nobody will lend you one. Having started north of a dozen companies on 3 continents I can verify that this is true. My latest venture, WrapMail, is looking to raise some money and it is not raining so to speak. In this effort (which we yet have to put focus on as building the business takes just about all available time) I've come across some interesting responses:

Bank: If you deposit $1M with us in an escrow account (that you can't touch) then we would consider lending you $1M. Does this make sense to anyone? Assuming I have the million why do I need the bank for this exercise?

VC: Why don't you build the Sales Team and get to cash-flow positive and then we'll talk. Duh - this is exactly what we would use most of the funding for.

I have many times been on the other side of the table and I view it as one party has an idea and people to execute a part of the way, the investor has money. The risk is always high at these levels where there's zero liquidity in the investment so one tries to balance that risk looking at the validity of the idea, the potential, the team and the potential exit strategies (liquid event). Then, in my case, I jump or I don't.

There's always the old fashioned way of building the business with blood,sweat and ones own money (which I am doing currently), it is less dilutive and a great feeling when success is established. However, it is normally a slower process and being in the viral internet advertising space SPEED is Job 1.

I guess we plug on, the more no's we get means we get that much closer to a yes OR better yet success without sharing.