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Ready Or Not? Before you start shaking the trees for investors, make sure you're prepared to catch them.

By Art Beroff

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

If the purest excitement in business is that rare, big-sky idea,then *CD (pronounced "star CD") has enough firepower tolight up even the most skeptical investor. The premise is simple:Allow consumers to immediately buy the music that's playing ontheir radio by dialing *CD on their cell phone. With one phonecall, the service identifies the song, artist's name and CDtitle--it even plays samples of other songs from the same CD. Ifyou like what you hear, you can buy it immediately by charging itto your cell phone bill or credit card.

It's this big idea that has George Searle, 35, and HumphreyChen, 31, working 14 hours a day building Berwyn,Pennsylvania-based ConneXus Corp., the developer of *CD. The ideaitself is more than enough to excite investors. But thepartners' pedigree adds even more appeal: Both have HarvardMBAs and wrote their business plan while in B-School.

Even so, the pair's initial pitch fell short with angelinvestors. On graduation day, 1996, the partners watched asclassmates left Harvard for six-figure jobs. Without funding,Searle returned with his wife and children to his family's farmin Indiana. Chen stayed on the East Coast, in West Orange, NewJersey, closer to the money that would eventually give life totheir dream.