Fun with Funding

So we (mVisible) just announced our Series A financing round, in which we raised $3M to advance the company’s goals of making mobile content and service delivery as easy as possible. I don’t want to get into all of the details of how this came about; let’s just say that raising institutional money is an extremely long and often frustrating process. But now that it’s finally “in the bank” so to speak, what’s to be done?

Basically what this funding round has given us is the ability scale out the Myxer platform and MyxerTones website by bringing in more people in product development, marketing, and business development. Adding a few more carefully chosen people to our existing team is going to significantly increase the amount of stuff we can get done. We have a big backlog of planned product and service features, and partnering opportunities, that we’re going to start making a big dent in and quickly.

It also gives us the flexibility to make really aggressive moves on the product front to support the continued rapid adoption of MyxerTones. When you read the announcement we’ll make in a couple of days with regard to the pricing structure of our MyxerTones services, you’ll understand what I mean. Well, OK, I’ll just tell you, because that’s the kind of company we are. We’re making the use of make your own ringtones completely free. No more pay-as-you-go, or credits, or anything – it’s just free. We’re really going to blow the lid off this thing, because we want to make sure we establish MyxerTones as the undisputed best place to make and share mobile content.

It’s been funny to read some of the commentary that analysts and others have written regarding the Series A press release. Red Herring suggests we would be more interesting if we did targeted advertisements and charged $1 per ringtone delivery. They didn’t know that we removed these things very intentionally because they are inhibitors to growth. The reason we’re raising money is so that we can grow our user base, and add value to our products and services that we will ultimately monetize far more effectively than we could by, e.g., squeezing more money out of our existing traffic.  Advertising is certainly a valid revenue model these days, but it is dependent on large volumes of high quality traffic.  We’re focused on creating that traffic.
And as to RH’s thoughts that support for full-track audio would be interersting, well.  I think someone would have to be rather naive to think that a company successfully raising money to advance their mobile delivery platform wouldn’t have a pretty developed plan for full-track downloads, video mobisodes, etc.  Trust me, continuous innovation in product and technology is part of our DNA, and bite-sized personalization content (ringtones and wallpapers) have just whet our appetite for what’s possible in this space.

And it’s funny to see how differently the same press release was interpreted by people. Like, I did a quick interview with John Letzing of Dow Jones VentureWire in support of the press release (cool, right?), and was surprised to see how the story was subsequently spun when it went across the wire:

• Citrix CEO, Others Back Mobile Content Co. MVisible
By John Letzing 10/20/2006
MVisible Technologies Inc. has raised $3 million in Series A funding to reach out to more potential users of its mobile phone content service. [...] The connection to [...] Citrix is not random, as both Willis and mVisible Chief Executive Scott Kinnear are former Citrix executives, Willis said.

So, our Citrix connection – which plays almost no part in either our day-to-day or strategic operations – somehow came out as being the most interesting part of the story for Mr. Letzing (“Citrix” is the first word in the story title!).  Oh, and for the record, I was never a Citrix executive (though ScottK was) – I was a developer.

I don’t blame the author for highlighting the connection, but I think we (mVisible) need to work to make sure people understand there are newsworthy aspects of our company and products that don’t have anyting to do with CTXS.

It’s been a long but interesting experience, but now I’m looking forward to spending all that money!