What are the best practices in obtaining seed money for a for-profit venture?

I'm a single founder who was raised angel and venture capital. If your business is compelling enough, you could raise angel funding. But there is little chance you can raise venture funding without a team in-place. It's a negative signal to institutional investors that you haven't been able to lock down a committed team. That said, depending on the nature of your product and traction, it sounds like you might be past the stage of recruiting a cofounder and more into hiring a great team of employees. The differentiation being less title and more the amount of equity. It sounds like you are selling a physical product so the question is whether you have built the capacity to scale. If not, the importance of having someone on your team who has done that at scale, even at the angel level of funding, could be helpful if not required. Happy to do a quick call and give you more contextual advice.

100M+ in revenues in 5 years or less does not happen very often. As an example of one sector, here is an interesting data visualization (circa 2008) of the 100 largest publically traded software companies at that time that shows their actual revenue ramp-ups from SEC filings (only 4 out of these 100 successful companies managed this feat, which themselves are an extremely small percentage of all of the VC-funded software companies): How Long Does it Take to Build a Technology Empire? http://ipo-dashboards.com/wordpress/2009/08/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-technology-empire/ Key findings excerpted from the link above: "Only 28% of the nation’s most successful public software empires were rocketships. I’ve defined a rocket ship as a company that reached $50 million in annual sales in 6 years or less (this is the type of growth that typically appears in VC-funded business plans). A hot shot reaches $50m in 7 to 12 years. A slow burner takes 13 years or more. Interestingly, 50% of these companies took 9 or more years to reach $50m in revenue."

Here is a link to a basic model - http://monetizepros.com/tools/template-library/subscription-revenue-model-spreadsheet/ Depending on the purpose of the model you could get much much more elaborate or simpler. This base model will help you to understand size of the prize. But if you want to develop an end to end profitability model (Revenue, Gross Margin, Selling & General Administrative Costs, Taxes) I would suggest working with financial analyst. You biggest drivers (inputs) on a SaaS model will be CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost, Average Selling Price / Monthly Plan Cost, Customer Churn(How many people cancel their plans month to month), & Cost to serve If you can nail down them with solid backup data on your assumption that will make thing a lot simpler. Let me know if you need any help. I spent 7 years at a Fortune 100 company as a Sr. Financial Analyst.

Convertible notes are by no means "earned." They are often easier to raise for early-stage companies who don't want to or can't raise an equity round. Equity rounds almost always require a simultaneous close of either the whole round or a defined "first close" representing a significant share of the raised amount. Where there are many participants in the round comprised mostly of small seed funds and/or angel investors, shepherding everyone to a closing date can be very difficult. If a company raises money on a note and the company fails, the investors are creditors, getting money back prior to any shareholder and any creditor that doesn't have security or statutory preference. In almost every case, convertible note holders in these situations would be lucky to get pennies back on the dollar. It would be highly unusual of / unheard of for a convertible note to come with personal guarantees. Happy to talk to you about the particulars of your situation and explain more to you based on what you're wanting to know.

From my experience I would not advise you to go with Venture Capital when you're a start-up as in the end they will most likely end up screwing you. A much better source for funding would be angel investors or friends/family. The question of how much equity should I give away differs for every start-up. I remember with my first company I gave away 30% because I wanted to get it off the ground. This was the best decision I ever made. Don't over valuate your company as having 70% of something is big is a whole lot better than having 100% of something small. You have to decide your companies value based on Assets/I.P(Intellectual Property)/Projections. I assume you have some follow up questions and I would love to help you so if you need any help feel free to call me. Kind Regards, Giuliano