Through the sheer ingenuity of their Internet-based promotional
and sweepstakes management service, RealTime Media Inc. co-founder
Chuck Seidman and his partners, Bruce S. Allen, Bob Auxier, Peter
Jensen and Charles Ruderman, have persuaded some of America's
most admired companies to hire them.
The Haverford, Pennsylvania, firm has a lock on the technology
for creating scratch-and-win promotions on the Internet (patent
pending). Rather than scraping faux gold leaf off of a paper
ticket, Internet surfers scratch away with their mice to reveal
whether they've won prizes.
As it turns out, the lure of winning $1 million instantly--or,
as with the current Beat the Street promotion, $20 million for
correctly guessing the close of the Dow Jones and NYSE average on a
particular day--is an extremely effective technique for directing
Internet surfers to a particular site. "It's all about
driving traffic," says Seidman, 47. "Being on the
Internet means nothing unless you can get traffic to your site and
convert [surfers] into members or give them incentive to take a
desired action." Apparently the heavyweights agree, because
the likes of Microsoft, Lycos, Ford, Yahoo!, the NFL and CDnow have
hired RealTime to create custom instant-win promotions to drive
traffic to their Web sites.
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All this has been accomplished with the kind of entrepreneurial
panache successful companies are made of. Still, Seidman
understands that Internet promotion is big business--and his
competition is well-funded. "To compete and take this company
where we know it can go, we need more capital," he says.
Seidman figures his company needs $3 million, which has him
beating the bushes for angel investors. Unlike the promotions
he's creating, bringing angels to the table is no game.
For companies like RealTime, raising money from angels, or any
kind of investor for that matter, generally is done in four steps:
identifying prospects, preparing to contact them, contacting them
and closing them. But as with falling dominoes, everything depends
on that first critical action. And in this case, entrepreneurs
can't possibly hope to finalize deals with angel investors
until they succeed in locating prospects.
So where do angels hover? There are a number of predictable
haunts, ranging from Internet and chamber of commerce cliques to
universities, business incubators and your professional advisors.
Here's a rundown on how to get started. (And remember, none of
this will be easy, so be prepared to dig hard.)