The project has so far been self-financed, but it will need external money to proceed. This is a rough overview of financing stages in relation to the product development process:
http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/biz/financing.pdf The funds will be mainly used for - compensations, i.e., what's needed to keep key people in the project fed, - lab, office equipment, and any other infrastructure (servers, etc.), - materials for prototypes, - external services, such as prototype manufacturing, accounting, certification (FCC, CE, ...), etc., and - pre-financing of production. The idea is to have multiple fundraisers, some of which would be crowdfunding. Ideally, the crowdfunding would not be attempted before the product looks reasonably nice and the of number potential surprises and delays is low. Therefore, we'd like to try to make a first fundraiser based solely on donations and possibly investment. This may sound complicated, and it is. The reason for this lies in no small part in very tricky legislation that impedes a lot of "simple" solutions. Some definitions: - Donation: you like the project and give it money, expecting nothing in return. Almost as if giving money to a charity, except that Anelok is not a charity. - Loan: a loan would be a contract where you give the company money and the company promises to pay it back. Unfortunately, regulations seem very unfriendly when it comes to loans. In particular, it appears that, under UK law, the company would have to have at any time (!) assets that are at least as valuable as the total debt, lest it be declared bankrupt even if it hasn't missed a single payment. So for now it seem that taking loans would be too risky. - Investment: the company can and will emit shares, which can then pay dividends, and so on. However, being a private company, it can't sell shares to anyone who isn't already affiliated with the company. A publicly traded company would not have such restrictions, but there would be an enormous overhead for reporting and compliance. It seems however that anyone who is interested in becoming a founding member of the company could do so, just as long as the company hasn't been created just yet. We're investigating this possibility. - Pre-orders: this is basically what crowdfunding is. That can be done, but if we accept pre-orders very early, there may not be all that many, and any marketing campaign aimed at attracting crowdfunders would be inefficient or dishonest (or both) if development is still far from defining the actual product. Another disadvantage of pre-orders is that one has to involve a large number of people is significant funds are to be raised with a product of moderate cost. So we would like to start with donations or (if this works out) additional founders now, and then make a crowdfunding campaign later on. The exact timing and the number of fundraisers depends on how much we could get on each round. - Werner _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
