Help us start our hippy gift store and get a free place to live!

Want to move out of the big city and live in a small town without the hassles of utilities or rent? We need financial help to purchase a large historic building in an up and coming downtown located in one of Pennsylvania’s largest National Historic Districts. Help with the upfront for purchase and start-up of our hippy gift shop complete with custom tye-dyes, art, posters, CD’s, tapes and other gifts and we’ll pay the mortgage and utilities letting you live there free of charge. You’re in charge of any additional renovation in your living area. If interested, e-mail us here.

Help us establish a printing press for community newspapers

Help us establish a printing facility for community newspapers and get your publication printed free. This would be a great opportunity, especially for several small newspaper publishers who could pool financial resources. Our goal is to create a small community newspaper printing company which would also provide a service of selling bulk advertising for our clients. We would make our money on printing, but also on a percentage of the advertising we sell. The benefit to publishers would be freeing them of the headaches of maintaining a large advertising staff allowing them to concentrate on editorial content and distribution. Our edge would be our ability to offer advertisers space in a variety of small community newspapers at a flat cost. As anyone involved in the newspaper business knows, printing is one of the greatest costs with which any fledgling or established paper must deal. However, for helping us with the initial investment to start up our facility, we would wave our printing fee adding additional costs only for substantial increases in paper and other costs. If you share our passion for creating a specialized printing facility to help community newspapers thrive, contact us.

Free advertising to America’s Southern Baptists

Help establish an independent weekly newspaper covering issues of concern to America’s estimated 16 million Southern Baptists representing the largest protestant denomination of Christians in North America. For a monetary investment to get our newspaper up and running, we’ll give you a weekly full page color ad for your product or service or a similarly negotiated advertising value in our publication at no cost indefinitely. If you’re interested in discussing this opportunity further, e-mail us here.

Help launch new Pennsylvania Dutch website

Sell everything from software to sauerkraut on our new unique website aimed at an estimated 250,000 Pennsylvania Germans in North America and those interested in the language, culture and heritage of this unique group. The site will function as a portal to links across the Internet and a source of news, information and eventually merchandise. Help us get the site up and running with a monetary investment and negotiate for free advertising or a share of the ad profits. If interested, e-mail here.

Farm Fresh

Help start a new whole and organic food farmer’s market and small grocery store in up and coming rural northeastern Pennsylvania and get $50 weekly off your shopping bill! We need an investment to help secure a location along a heavily traveled state highway between two of the state’s largest population centers. We expect the farmer’s market will draw participants from throughout the region with the grocery store filling in any gaps including the possibility of a full nutritional supplements section. According to the Organic Consumers Association, a group representing over 600,000 interested members, volunteers and hundreds of companies in the natural food marketplace, the organic food industry constitutes the fastest growing sector of American agriculture with an estimated 10 million consumers nationwide. As with other opportunities on this page, initial return on investment may be low, but for those committed to the growth in availability of organic and whole foods in the area we will offer $50 or a reasonable negotiated credit arrangement per week worth of produce and food from our vendors and store indefinitely, a considerable value to anyone aware of the cost of organic produce these days. If interested, e-mail here for further discussion.

French Press

Trusting that the brief unpleasant era of Freedom Fries and French wine boycotts is finally behind us, I believe it may be time to again extol what may well be the greatest technical achievement in human history for the brewing of coffee and tea. In a world of Starbucks and its clones where specialty expresso mixtures are increasingly served in containers that more closely resemble a supersized Coca-Cola from the drive-thru, the press pot may be an idea whose time has come—again. The revelation first struck me while visiting a small tea room NOT known for its coffee, when I was brought a freshly brewed pot of Tanzania and spent a pleasant hour savoring its contents. It was then that I realized a specialized café built around the press pot rather than the pre-programmed expresso machine might well revolutionize the specialty coffee industry—especially with fancy scones, DSL access and regular exhibits of cutting edge art to build atmosphere. Have an idea for an ancillary business and want to help me get set up in a quaint touristy downtown where we can start out small? Help me buy and rennovate a building for the new venture and you can get some extra space rent free. I’ll even pay taxes and utilities. E-mail me and in the meantime read more about the wonderous French press from Wikipedia here.

Warm Tone: The analog experience

Yes, we live in a digital age, but increasingly an interest among musicians has grown for doing all or part of their sound recording projects the old fashioned way. So much is this the case that it prompted David Simons to write this book on the subject. Vintage studios like this one thrive in Europe so much so that the White Stripes, the Detroit garage rock duo known for their penchant for analog purism, traveled to England just to find a studio to record their massively successful “Elephant” album. Help us build Northeastern Pennsylvania’s premier analog studio complete with ribbon microphones, two custom designed echoe chambers and vintage analog tape decks for delay, flange and a variety of distinctive custom made effects that don’t sound like the same thing that came out of everybody else’s out-of-the-box effects pedal. For your financial assistance we will give you 500 hours of free recording time in the new studio for all or part of your own sound recording project, plus a reduced rate on all future sessions. If this is music to your ears, e-mail me.

Broad Street Commons

Help us buy and rennovate a vintage building in a burgeoning National Historic District in northeastern Pennsylvania and get a prime retail space rent free!!!! Vast three story stone and brick historic buildings, some dating back to the late 19th century, have sold for between $125,000 and $200,000 in the area, but just 15 miles to the east toward New York and New Jersey property values are creeping upward with some similar real estate fetching in the $700,000 and $800,000 range. Regular traffic from two of the state’s larger population centers along a heavily used state highway makes location excellent. Other retail tenants planned for the building will eventually include a used book store, a used and vintage record shop, a vintage clothing store and more. Contact us if this sounds interesting.

The Upstart Entrepreneur

This is a blog dedicated to bootstrapping, a new business term coined by software entrepreneur Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow Technologies Inc. and Brightwork Development Inc. I found the story of Giaforte’s starting with nothing approach in Inc.com Magazine. You can read the entire article here. Now, I’m no software developer, but using the power of the Internet to join ideas with capital seemed like a good spin-off of Gianforte’s concept and compensates for the other thing none of us seem to have much of these days—time. The concept is to browse the entries presented here, see if one strikes your fancy and e-mail in for more details. In most cases this site is for the not completely monetary minded investor who wants to trade something they consider of value for the cash needed to start up the small (or not so small) business, but maybe we could work out a standard investor arrangement if you find an idea that trully inspires you. Those with ideas of their own are certainly welcome to add them in the comment section as well, but I can personally vouch for no such ideas. Enjoy.