Look for a partner that can add value, reach out to prospective merger and acquisition officers or raise a seed round?

In my experience, every step you take to complicate your company's structure and ownership rights reduces the likelihood of investors providing your venture with seed funding. To attract seed funding, investors expect a single-minded laser focus on the entrepreneurs' assessment of his or her best path to validating their business and growing it into a very large business as quickly as possible. So the very idea that you are reliant or considering taking multiple paths to success is likely to act as a red flag for most experienced early-stage tech investors. Also, until there is significant traction achieved, an investor is expecting to own everything generated by the business. There are rare occasions where a particular asset, brand, domain or other component of the business can be spun-out (usually in the case where it's a distraction from the core business but there's inbound demand from a buyer), but when I say rare, I mean this happens so infrequently that it's not anything that should be reasonably expected in the course of planning. Speaking candidly, this entire strategy creates a perception (accurate or unfair) that you are undecided on a number of the key questions you need to be sure of before you have a good chance of raising seed funding. I'd be happy to talk to you about what you're doing and help provide some clarity based on what I hear. I encourage you to review my references as I have been helpful to many other Clarity members on these types of issues.

To answer your questions: 1) Mobile companies at your stage usually raise angel funding at a valuation equivalent of $5,000,000 for US based companies and $4,000,000 to $4,500,000 for Canadian companies. 2) The valuation is a function of how much you raise against that valuation. For instance, selling $50,000 at $5,000,000 means you are selling debt that will convert into shares equal to roughly 1% of your company. 3) I would encourage you to check out my other answers that I've recently written that talk in detail about what to raise and when to raise. Given that you've now launched and your launch is "quiet", most seed investors are going to want to see substantial traction before investing. It's best for you to raise this money on a convertible note instead of actually selling equity, especially if you are intending on raising $50,000 - $100,000. Happy to schedule a call with you to provide more specifics and encourage you to read through the answers I've provided re fundraising advice to early-stage companies as well.

Use Mattermark.com to find them. They have a 14 days free trial. The tool will let you filter by founding and type of company, so it will probably give you what you need.

Reed Hoffman and Sydney Armani

I'm a small-time investor and have been working for and with startups for 13 years. The time to take seed capital is: - When you've proven demand for your product by making sales. - When you have at least one repeatable, predictable, and profitable system in place for selling your product. - When taking an equity investment would let you grow the company faster than the other means that might be at your disposal: bootstrapping, debt financing, organic growth, joint ventures, etc. There's a trade-off. You want to get the idea validated up-front and get as far as possible as you can on your own, but not spend so much time doing this with meager resources that the opportunity passes you by. You don't want to give away the whole company to your investor, but you also don't want to stunt your growth and give up huge potential profits just because you were holding out for slightly better terms. The better your sales, and sales growth, the better the valuation you'll be able to negotiate. A great idea and a proof-of-concept alone are worth basically nothing. A company with sales is worth more. A company with sales growth is worth even more. A company with month-over-month sales growth, ongoing relationships with customers who repurchase, and steady-state profitability is worth *much, much* more. (Steady-state profitability means that if the company's number of customers stays the same, the business operations turn a profit. Often, early-stage companies that have a recurring-revenue business model will spend more to acquire a new customer than they earn from the first sale; the cost of acquisition is amortized over the lifetime of the customer. This is because they want to grow their recurring-revenue base and increase future profits at the expense of short-term negative cash-flow.) All that being said, if you think you will need venture capital funding in the future, you should start looking for it long before you're going to need it. Have a "Plan B" in place, too. Don't get stuck with your back up against a wall, hoping and praying that your seed round will close before you start bouncing checks. If your investor knows you're going to go bankrupt without the investment, they have a lot of leverage for getting very favorable terms!