More information about Ignition Alley (the hot spot) is below at this link:

http://www.meetup.com/atlantacoworking/calendar/10784390/

While advertising in itself is not a bad move, one must be watchful of the market conditions, recognize changes and be wary of placing all your eggs in one basket. While there are certainly sites out there that make it big and pull in thousands of dollars a month, there are at least 10,000 failed webmasters working for spare change every month for every success story out there.

What can you do to better the odds? Diversify your portfolio. Test different affiliate and marketing solutions and try and add other services and revenue models to your website.

Before you implement your next big idea, here are some other places to check out in supplement your AdSense income.

Chitika - This is a search results based ad network that you can put on your website in conjunction with Google AdSense. As long as you are not doing contextual search, the two services do play pretty nicely. One benefit I’ve found showing Chitika ads instead of AdSense ads for search referral traffic - it actually help boosts the CTR of your AdSense ads by showing less impressions.

Amazon Affiliates - If your website can help promote consumer products, this is a good program to join. Amazon spends a lot of money on research making sure people convert on Amazon.com. If you place affiliate links on relevant review or blog sites, chances are you’ll be making more per sale than you would referring clicks to other sites that sell the same products.

Commission Junction - CJ has been around for a long while now. They have all sorts of affiliate programs promoting all kinds of products and services. I can’t say I’ve been thrilled with the results from CJ but if you play around with the referral links, banners and test different placements, you may be able to get money that is incremental to your AdSense earnings.

eBay Partner Network - If referring people to relevant websites makes you money, referring them to eBay’s marketplace should be a no brainer. I’m sure the tweaked services out there can squeeze a lot of money out of eBay. I’ve seen moderate successes with this myself program myself but nothing spectacular.

Text-Link-Ads - If you blog and write interesting content, then chances are you can make money selling links. Even though selling links is frowned upon by the search engines, if you’re a casual blogger who’s just looking to make some extra bucks for your time, I don’t see why you should/would care about the ethics of paid vs. unpaid linking.

In the end, Google AdSense is still our best performer due to sheer volume. But if you aren’t happy with your results and want to see incremental income from other sources, then I would definitely go check some of these other services out. Are there any affiliate programs you guys use that’s not listed here that have just blown you away?

You can change where you are in life by (1) being honest where you are and (2) getting the knowledge to get you in a position to take the actions of successful people. Each one of the categories below are impacted ONLY by KNOWLEDGE! So are you mostly column one or column two?

Successful	Unsuccessful
Can Do Attitude	Can’t Do Attitude
I Will Figure it Out	See’s Solutions as Impossible
Opportunity Focused	Problem Focused
Loves Challenges	Hates Challenges
Seeks to Solve Problems	Wants to Avoid Problems
Persist until Successful	Quits When Challenged
Willing to Take Risk	Actions are Conservative
Unreasonable	Reasonable
Willing to be Dangerous	Must Be Careful
Interested in the Creation of Money	Interested in Conserving Money
Takes Action	Talks about Action
Says Yes	Says No
Commits	Never Fully Commits
Goes All the Way	Half Attempts at Everything
Now (immediate)	Later – (procrastinates)
Courage	Fear
Change	Stay the Same
Right Approach	Hard Work
Interested in Change	Not Willing to Change
Breaks Traditional Ideas	Adopts Traditional Ideas
Goal Oriented	Work Oriented
On a Mission	On a Job
High Motivation	Low Motivation
Career Focused	Job Focused
Interested in Results	Interested in Work
Big Goals and Dreams	Realistic Goals
Creates Reality	Deals with Reality
Commit First - Figure Later	Figure First - Commit Never
Highly Ethical	Unethical
Interested in the Group	Interested in Self
Dedicates Time to Learning	Dedicates No Time to Learning
Seeks and Values Knowledge	Denies the Value of Knowledge
Willing to be Uncomfortable	Must Stay Comfortable
Reaches Up	Reaches Sideways and Down

“THE BEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE DURING TIMES LIKE THESE ARE IN YOURSELF.” - Warren Buffett, April 2009

This excerpt was borrowed from Grant Cardone who has studied successful people for over 30 years. Grant Cardone is a speaker, author, sales trainer and CEO of Cardone Training Technologies. Author of Sell To Survive and other Audio, Video, and training programs.

For more information on Mr. Cardone visit grantcardone.com

The web is a big BIG place. Simply building something and expecting traffic these days is like setting up a deluxe lemonade stand in the middle of the Sahara desert and expecting people to just stroll in. Sure, it’s the desert and people LOVE lemonade. It’s the PERFECT marriage of problem and solution - so why is it failing?

The missing ingredient is promotion and sales.

Even if you make the best lemonade in the world, if you cannot wrap your head around how to promote and sell your product, chances are you will fail. On the other hand, if you know how to sell, you can get away with cheap-o lemonade and still make a killing. This is why in startups you want a rockstar hacker, but you NEED predator sales guys.

Case in point: Recently a new automotive startup has popped into the scene and onto our radar. Their niche targets a certain demographic and provides car listings for under $1,000. After careful analysis, it’s pretty apparent that the technology behind this solution is pretty basic and the number of listings they carry is nowhere near an AutoTrader or Craigslist. In fact, I would even go as far as saying this is now one of the biggest and best advertised “BANS” type store ever. (If you’re familiar with how BANS works.)

So how are they getting 100k visitors a month only after 3 months?

Instead of putting all their energy into building a complex solution, they decided to put their focus in marketing and PR. The owners bought a car for under $1,000 and drove it across the country. As they are doing this, local press from various areas picked up their story and ran it on local TV stations and newspapers.

The takeaway? Your life as an entrepreneur doesn’t end when you finish building your product. To be rewarded, you need to gloat, show it off to the world, and talk about it constantly like you just had a baby. You can sell pretty much ANYTHING and get people to talk about you as long as you actually make some effort to do marketing. Even if you’re driving without a map or a destination, it would be better than not driving at all.

Imagine if you had Superman’s ability to hear everything that goes on on planet Earth. No, not just the headlines that gets printed on today’s newspaper nor the more frequently updated news and blog websites - but actual chatter, from everyone; about every important and mundane thing in real time. Pretty awesome huh?

One would think with these new-found powers, we’d be SUPER! But the truth is, we don’t have Superman’s ability to fly, to travel at the speed of light or his ability to multitask. As much as we’d like to be kept up with on-demand gossip, we can’t tackle the entire beast. Even Superman needs sleep sometimes.

So how should someone or some company handle Twitter? How can we use it to our advantage?

Twitter for some time has been a more evolved and efficient way of communicating for tech geeks. After all, the world is getting smaller and it is getting harder to keep a full schedule of work, play, family and to maintain relationships with friends that are around the world.

At the base of this craze lies a communications tool. For the life of me, I still can not figure out why most people don’t get that. In the world of newspapers, magazines and blogs, you subscribe to them cause you find them interesting. Including them in your life made you better in one way or another. The same is true for Twitter - you follow interesting people or friends because you want to engage them and you have interest in what they have to say.

For the people who are touting their ability to garner 5,000 or 10,000 followers in 30 days… why? Your one time achievement doesn’t make you a social media expert and working that hard to clutter up your life with meaningless chatter is just a pathetic cry for attention in an otherwise apathetic Twitter world where everyone has their own agendas. #FAIL tag all around.

Seeing companies trying to make Twitter work for them has also been interesting in the last few months as various companies try out different techniques to tackle the collective. While some companies get it and engage customers at their time of need, others are again, too involved in the race for numbers without a good reason for building that base.

If you sell vacuum cleaners and you have a website. Shouldn’t your purpose be helping those who have an immediate vacuuming needs to learn more about your products vs. trying to get anyone and everyone to make your website their browsers’ homepage? For the companies who are building a large following on Twitter w/o a real clear motive, that’s exactly what their doing - climbing the wrong ladder.

So how should you or companies use Twitter to enhance your lives?

1. Recognize it’s a communications tool. Similar to the phone, text messaging, emails, etc. People use it to vent, to inform/broadcast and to get help from the platform. If your contributions can fulfill those needs, by all means lend a hand and jump in the conversation.

2. Recognize that tweets are from real people with evolving lives. People need different things for a short period of time in their daily lives. If you can help by sending a short tweet, great! But if your goal is to help, there’s no need to expect a BFF status after the short exchange.

3. Use Twitter as your personal resource, not as a popularity contest. When you ask for help, it’s much more useful to ask your friends rather than to shout your question in the middle of Times Square where no one hears you. The same is true for Twitter. The platform is MUCH more useful when you garner people of similar interests.

4. Utilize the tools. Twitter.com sucks! However, their open API has allowed an insane amount of useful tools to be created around the platform. Just like you wouldn’t be caught dead using a rotary phone, check out some of the available Twitter apps that are more suited to your mobile or working life.

5. For companies, research the chatter on the platform about you and then define a Twitter strategy to match. You can’t jump into other peoples’ conversations and then tell them what to talk about. If you listen though… there could be more gold there than any of the old school product registration cards.

6. Finally, take a break once in awhile. You’re not God or Superman or Skynet. Monitoring chatter can be fun but it really does help your productivity to turn it all off once in awhile.

In the same way that Ludacris didn’t come onto the scene trying to be the best rapper, best hip-hop artist, best heavy metal rock star and best entrepreneur at the same time; the successful start-ups pick something they can excel at and focus on that attribute like a laser until it punches through the noise and becomes a brand.

So whether your new venture is a copy-cat business of another idea or a brand new idea of its own, does it offer something unique that people won’t find elsewhere? More importantly, can you excel at improving and selling that feature to the point of making it a barrier to entry for other new or existing competitors to follow suit?

This is something we’re working on refining and defining now… a free or freemium service is great and all but if it lacks an edge or unique offering, it will be hard to get the general public interested in it.

First up, our new Community section. One of key things people are looking for when researching cars online is peer reviews about reliability. (They do this even before they do price comparison shopping!) While the car you originally wanted may be more luxurious or may be cheaper, chances are peer reviews will be able to change your mind if you found out it was unreliable or expensive to maintain. We developed the Community section to combine these discussions alongside car listings so that shoppers will get the whole picture when shopping online at EasyAutoSales.com.

An easy way to gauge buzz on our vehicle details page is to click on the Discussions tab which will pull up relevant discussions for the particular type of vehicle you are looking for. If it’s mostly praise and excitement, then you know you’re on the right track. If it’s mostly complaints and recalls… well, you may want to proceed with caution or ask more specific follow-up questions yourself.

…but it doesn’t end there!

We’ve taken our Community section a step further by allowing users to embed pictures and videos so they can share more with our community than just questions and complaints. If you want to show off a car, talk about aftermarket stuff or post a video - you are welcome to do all those things too!

Next is our new integration with Facebook Connect. We’re not blind to the presence that AutoTrader, Cars.com and Craigslist have in the market. In fact, if a seller can consistently produce great ROI from these resources, we would love to get some tips from you guys.

We wanted to help car sellers get comprehensive coverage on the web in addition to the resources above. This means doing something different and helping sellers reach places like Facebook, Twitter and local classifieds - networks where larger players may not bother to show up or know how. As of today, we have now integrated our classifieds service with Facebook Connect so that you can now reach over 175 million and growing users on their network.

What does that mean exactly? Well…

1. As a car buyer, you can now save your searches by signing up with EasyAutoSales with one click of a button using your Facebook account.
2. Using the wisdom of your existing social network, you can get your friends to weigh in on deals you’ve found on EasyAutoSales by committing your bookmarked vehicles into your mini feed on Facebook.
   
3. You can also ask questions in our Community section and post those questions in your Facebook profile. Not only will you benefit from having car experts and enthusiasts help you in our forums, you can also benefit from your friends’ help via comments on Facebook.
4. Last but not least, you can sell your car on EasyAutoSales.com and have the vehicle be syndicated across the web and include a mini broadcast in your Facebook feed. The purpose of this feature isn’t to necessarily sell your used car to your friends but to let them know that you have one for sale in case they know anyone that is looking. That’s the power of networking at work for you.

For the people who are subscribed to this blog, please check out our new integrations and let us know what you think. To start, simply go to http://www.easyautosales.com/login and sign up via the Facebook login button.

The biz dev and hacker dichotomy is important and like our government, the two serves as a check-and-balance system for each other to make sure neither one is going off doing stupid things. When the roles are not split up… well… things tend to go in haywire with there’s no direction or momentum.

When you have a team with just programmers, things move at a tremendous pace but for many startups, these teams are just doing donuts in a parking lot without a clear direction of where they should be heading. As a hacker, it’s your job to keep your head down and worry about the details and often this means that programmers who work without business development counterparts will start to tackle obscure “programmer problems” that come up instead of solving “business problems” that are critical for achieving the mission. Solving the former is challenging and fun, but more often than not, pointless. While it can be really cool to learn how to drift a car, if your next race is a quarter-mile drag between start and profitability, you are just wasting your time trying to master drifting which won’t help you win.

When you have a team of just business development people, the opposite is true. They see the end goal and the path to get there but they just don’t have the drivers or the vehicles to take them, which can also make for a frustrating experience.

The best teams I’ve observed and worked with have both parts and the two work together like GPS systems. The hacker in charge does the driving and worrying about details such as red lights, stop signs and turns while 50,000 feet up, the business development keep track of where development is, and where it is in relations to its final destination.

Is it possible for a team to succeed with only one person doing both jobs? Sure, anything is possible but even during the yesteryears of paper maps, it was still more preferable to have a navigator sitting in the passenger seat than having the driver pull double duty of watching the road and reading the map. If you can achieve your goals faster by having the right people and tools with you, why wouldn’t you want that?

If you’re in the south east and would like to get your idea out to the entrepreneurial / angel / VC crowd, you should apply for Startup Riot 2009.  This year, the event promises to be bigger, badder and be packed with more investors from all over.  For more information, check out the event’s FAQ.   The event will be on February 18 and it will be held at the chic Twelve Atlantic Station ballroom again this year.

“A good entrepreneur resolution is to set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timeline).”

There are undoubtably many challenges and opportunities that entrepreneurs face every day but one of the main challenges is knowing what opportunities are worth your time to pursue while dropping the other 15 great ideas that may sound great, but won’t make sense or money today.

I see it a lot, including our own team meetings where good hypothesis just run rampant.  I guess that’s one of the benefits and drawbacks of having a smart team that are good at brainstorming.  However, I think by following the SMART rule above, it should be easy for us to stay focused, trim and to the point.

For 2009, we have a number of goals we’d like to achieve within the calendar year.  The most important being an increase in the number of cars up to 3 million+ and an increase in our monthly unique visitors to over 1/2 million. (There are obviously more details associated with each goal, but none I feel too comfortable sharing on this blog.)

Being that we’re still in the advertising game, one of the obsticles we would like to over come is increasing the number of page views per session to about 10x what they are today.

As we grow vertically in traffic numbers, we would like to grow horizontally by partnering up with similar websites and services as well so that will also be one of our goals in 2009.  If web 2.0 has taught us anything it’s that the web is connected and no site stands alone.

What are some of your goals for 2009 that you can share?  If they’re good, manybe we’ll borrow some. =)

Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day.

Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course?

Each of us has such a bank. It’s name is TIME.

Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds.  Every night it writes off as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to a good purpose.  It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day.  If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against “tomorrow.”  You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success!

The clock is running!! Make the most of today.

To realize the value of one year, ask a student who failed a grade.
To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby.
To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of one hour, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
To realize the value of one minute, ask a person who just missed a train.
To realize the value of one second, ask someone who just avoided an accident.
To realize the value of one millisecond, ask the person who won a silver medal at the Olympics.

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time with. And remember time waits for no one.

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why its called the present.

For those of you who run an established WordPress blog, all you have to do is overwrite every file and skip the items /wp-content and wp-config-sample.php. A quick trip to the admin page will prompt a DB upgrade and after that it’s smooth sailing.

I remember as short as 7 or 8 months ago when I saw one of the plugin writers use an automated way to upgrade updated plugins and I thought - man, this should be the standard way of doing things. It’s great to see that just a few months later, it came true, even though I never followed through with suggesting the idea. (It also makes me wonder if sites like EasyAutoSales will also benefit from going open source at some point.)

Anyway, as many other bloggers have mentioned, most of the upgrade is in the admin console. In addition to it being more UI friendly, it’s also feels as if there’s been a significant speed boost since the ole 2.4 days.

At the startup, we don’t usually waste time on stuff that doesn’t provide financial value, but this is definitely a worthy upgrade and at 30 seconds to get it all done, it’s certainly a no brainer.

While I’m not sure what Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams is going to do to make Twitter profitable, but I’m quite sure it’s not licensing their logo for hair product. Considering I see no relationship branding between the two, it might be more like profit via litigation. Either way, it was an odd find in the middle of a Saturday amongst the Christmas crowds.

Luckily, it’s now easier than ever to translate your thoughts using advanced tools or web based services.  If you are graphically challenged, you can now get some help.

Balsamiq

I had the pleasure of designing some mockups using Balsamiq as part of START Atlanta’s team.  This software makes it SOOOOO easy to design new pages its not even funny.  It’s basically as good as designing rough wireframes on paper or in Photoshop except you won’t have to scan the paper afterwards or waste hours in photoshop to get everything layered and pixeled correctly.  The tool is also simple enough to use that even an non-graphical idiot CEO can piece together some elements to get the page close to what he envisions.  If you need a tool to jump start you from concept to rough sketch, I’d highly recommend this tool.

99 Designs

99 Designs is a service I just learned about that I haven’t had the chance to use.  However, from the design of the website and the sample work I’ve seen by their community, you definitely have a lot of potential to get some great work for bargin prices.

The site basically allows you to create contests where you specify your design needs and a bounty and designers get to work based on your descriptions and feedback.  The best thing about this service is you get to see your work before you pay for it so ultimately, you win.

As a graphically challenged person, if you combine the wireframe tool and submitting the wireframes to designers at 99 Designs, you should be able to get a great mockup of your new website for under $500.  This is a lot cheaper and faster than paying a professional designer thousands only to get the work after a few weeks. Your mileage may very…

While many entrepreneurs prefer to skip to the beat of their own tunes, the best way to stay on track is to make sure you have a destination and a pre-defined track to get there.

Marathon training is a great example of breaking up a large task into short term, measurable goals and forcing yourself to push forward based on a set schedule.  Since most people don’t have the agility to run 26+ miles without some intense training, breaking the task up into smaller, managable chunks forces you to do what matters and ignore the fluff.

Earlier this year, we decided we needed to get the website out there sooner than later so we set a date for launch and stuck to it. Even days right before the launch, we were still not ready and many items were still broken but when launch day came, we put together what worked and threw it out there.  Our reasoning was once the website is public, we would have to start developing against a public time line whereas if we hid in pre-launch mode, then no one would be pushing us to go forward.  In the end, it worked out really well.  By having the website out there, we were approached by many potential partners and we knew we had done the right thing.

So what’s next?

Now that the website is launched, our next steps are to set measurable growth goals and put it against a time line.  For us, this means setting short term traffic and registration goals for 2009 and 2010 and working from the top down to figure out what we need to do each month to hit those numbers.  Again, we are hoping the goals will help us push out the fluff and help us focus our spending and efforts on what will get us to our milestones.  The alternative would be to sit around and hope that people find us by ???? then PROFIT!

With that said, do you have short term goals for your company for development or traffic - one that’s placed against a time line?  If so, what are some of the things you’re looking to achieve?

Due to increasingly busy schedules and to-do items, we haven’t updated this blog too much over the last few months.  While I would love to say that a lot of crazy things have gone on, the truth is we developed a simple playbook and have been hammering it like annoying telemarketers with a huge list of numbers.

So the pay stinks, the job can be boring, why do this at all?  Why not join a large corporation with a nice salary, huge benefits, and a chance to travel?  Well, at the end of the day, its the love that keeps us going.  We’re not doing this to get on to Mashable or TechCrunch though being recognized would help our ultimate goal.  What keeps us going is the fact that we know we have a better mousetrap and when its complete, we want to make sure the world realizes it too.

It’s funny - of all the people I’ve networked with in the past year who were dedicated to their ideas, many of those startups no longer exist.  Maybe the pay cut is too deep, maybe they learned quick their idea won’t fly or maybe the lack of passion killed it before it ever had a chance.  Whatever it is, it’s amazing to see what a difference a year can make.

Someone once asked me if you found something you loved doing, would you really do it for free? I guess the answer is yes - with some contingencies of course.  But one year later, I’m really glad to see the progress we’ve made and to experience everything we have learned.  Despite the struggles, sleepless nights and developing a habit of talking to my dogs to get their opinions, I probably wouldn’t trade it at all.

It will be interesting to see where we are another year from now.

Since our operations for the most part is still pretty compact, I’ve been pushing the team to focus on trimming the fat in our technology.  When you face a scaling issue with your website, there are a couple of options available to help relieve the issues:

1. You can simply buy more machines to scale up if you can afford the cost.
2. You can tweak your code and squeeze more out of your existing infrastructure.  This one costs money and time as well but the improvements will help you exponentially as you scale up buying more machines.

Of course, both are really valid ways to grow - but if you do 1 without at least attempting 2, then you’re setting yourself up for bloat and wasted expenses.

In the case of EasyAutoSales - our monthly AWS costs for processing and storing images are getting close to  $1,000 a month. For a service that is supposed to the cheaper solution, it either means we’re growing well beyond our initial expectations or that we need to tweak the setup to work faster so we can save some dough.  Luckily for us, our problems are a combination of both growth and some bloat, the latter which we can fix.

In addition to tweaking some processes to make sure everything runs smoother and faster, we also found that Amazon now offers a cheaper mid-sized EC2 where it offers more computing power at half the price.  I guess Amazon realized that many are using EC2 for computing and not necessarily storage for a website and have decided to offer this new service to respond to the usage patterns.  By making code changes and instance changes, we expect to save a significant amount of money, possibly up to 25-30% of our monthly bill with Amazon.

With that said, what have you done with your startup this month to curb expenses?

One of the more important concepts in the article deals with the concept of watching your competitors (for a few laps) to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are. If you go in with your hair on fire trying to make passes without knowing your competitor, you might inadvertently subject yourself to risk that might be avoided by a lap or two of research. Watching, listening and planning is key. Obviously at some point you have to take the leap to make the pass, but learning your opponent’s weaknesses is key to minimizing risk.

Another form of this research comes through race engineers. They work with you before and during the race (over the radio) to tell you what opponent will do or is doing during the race. They are knowledgeable about other races on the track with you. They know who’s fast, who’s a hot-head, which cars are prone to breaking and which cars are going to be the main competition. They are complimentary to an advisory board, people in the industry who have been through the early stages of where you are and have “made it”. They are benevolent souls who aren’t in the “driver’s seat” anymore, but want to help the next generation make their mark and, again, minimize their risk by directing them towards actions that will maximize their goals and minimize their failures.

Though it may seem cliche, running a business is akin to driving a race car. Every week is another race and constantly finishing well will put your business high in the rankings. Making impatient, rash moves may put you ahead one week and behind the next. A few weeks of poor finishes can lead to frustration that snowballs. Planning and thinking ahead is an ongoing and evolving process while racing or in business. You have to constantly reassess yourself to make sure you’re decisions are taking you to your goal. As Randy ends the article, “To continue pounding this into your head, planning means planning to finish. All the crying and blaming and finger-pointing in the world will not unbend that suspension and get you back on track. Planning means using your head, not just your heart, or your hormones.”

After all… We are the change we’re looking for.

If you’re interested in helping to change, grow and foster the Atlanta startup community, you should register for the START Atlanta kickoff event.  More information below…

START Atlanta, a non-profit organization started by local Atlanta entrepreneurs is holding a kickoff event the weekend of September 19-21 to bring together Atlanta-based angel investors, VC’s and Atlanta entrepreneurs to help connect the Atlanta Startup Community.

The vision of START Atlanta is to provide the Atlanta early-stage technology startup community access to knowledge and capital necessary to launch new businesses. START Atlanta focuses on very early-stage companies in Atlanta that are typically below the radar of the angel and VC community. The funding needed for these companies to reach their first milestone is usually between $15k to $50k. START Atlanta plans to help companies network within the Atlanta startup community and to help raise the needed capital to build these companies to a level where they can seek additional rounds from angels or higher.  START Atlanta’s technology platform will also make it easy to allow investors to invest in smaller amounts and help bring transparency to the local technology companies.

For more information, check out the START Atlanta website.