Investment Diary: CircleBuilder closes first round

Posted Sep 9th 2008 1:40PM by Sheldon Liber
Filed under: Other Issues, Products and Services, Internet, Competitive Strategy, Entrepreneurs

It has taken about ten months longer then we had planned, but CircleBuilder.com has finally closed its seed round of funding. The convertible debt has become equity priced at a dollar a share and it's gone up in value, at least on paper. However, that value is not liquid, so is not worth discussing.

Before I go further, I should disclose that I am on the Advisory Board of the company and was one of the early investors. Many of my posts are written as an "adventure in investorland" relating my own experiences. For those who feel this is too promotional, you can turn away. My purpose is to share the journey of an insider as this company builds.

There was little certainty that CircleBuilder would be a success when we started. Along the way, I have had some reservations about the financial and time commitment; I do not need one more thing to do, or a way to lose money.

When we started, MySpace was all the rage and Facebook was gaining momentum rapidly. The founders, Howard Brown and Brent Cohen, came to me with an idea to develop a social networking site catering to religious communities that were not well served by the free-for-all, anything-goes nature of existing alternatives.

The site has evolved in concept from being open to all communities and integrated across all faiths and denominations to communities separated by individual faith and denomination. We were very naive to think that the different faiths would have any interest in being tied too closely together. The impact of this revelation was that we had to take down our original beta site, re-think the business plan with the advice and counsel of our target customers, retool our software platform and relaunch our beta site. It is now up and running, again -- finally!

This exercise cost us time and money, but we had to recognize and focus on our customers' needs regardless of the pain of redirecting our efforts. This is not uncommon in business or on the internet. It also can knock the wind out of your sails. So far, so good. CircleBuilder.com is back up and running and people of faith are slowly migrating to the site.

CircleBuilder Software, LLC is no longer about social networking as much as community building, and we are now more of a walled garden of sorts, providing an online platform of valuable technology tools designed to improve the ways in which faith-based organizations strengthen their missions and serve their constituencies.

In the next few days we will be launching several new URLs among the hundreds we own. These include the following:

CatholicBuilder.com
ChristianBuilder.com
JewishBuilder.com
MissionaryBuilder.com

The journey for us as we move from pre-revenue to finally bringing in small amounts of cash this quarter is to improve our product, watch our "burn rate" (how fast money goes out the door) like hawks, and continue to raise new money to expand further without having to go hat in hand to venture capitalists. This is quite a balancing act and if we make it to an initial public offering some day, remember, you heard about us here first.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of CircleBuildrer.

Tags: circlebuilder, Faith, Internet, Sheldon Liber, SheldonLiber, social networks, SocialNetworks, start-ups