Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

BS"D

Greetings to all! I am Itzhak Schier, an American cyberentrepreneur living in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and I thought my latest creation would be of interest to the StartupNation community:

Pplinvest.com (in pre-beta) is a p2p investment exchange, a "virtual stock exchange" where entrepreneurs can obtain investment by listing shares or other ways of investing in their businesses. When I came up with the idea I was thinking of it mostly for small businesses in seed capital stage but it can also be used for any stage of business financing or even sale of all or the controlling share of an existing business.

My goal is to turn small business investment into a more common grass roots financial decision, and market it the way CD`s and stock brokerage accounts are marketed. I aim to achieve this by providing a neutral but safe community platform where participants and their ventures will be both expert and peer reviewed. The site will be fee based, both so as to immediately generate the revenue needed to keep it going forward and to weed out scammers and schemers. (The only advertisements I would seek are full site overall sponsors as opposed to a lot of banner ads that will distract site users and create mixed messages and a poor image, although one of the features of membership is that certain level members can list their own related services and make them available to the community).

I used Drupal open-source CMS to come up with a workable prototype (I still have to add the finishing touches which I will do over the next couple of days). I started to market it and did get a few hits but no real usage yet.

I`d like to know what people think of the idea and how I could make sure the site really attracts both entrepreneurs and people who want to invest in new businesses (or in essence to get people with spare cash around to really get into the idea of investing in grass roots small business). I`d also be interested in hearing from web developers who would help me take this to the next step in exchange for a share of it.