Startup Looks to Rock Funding World

A New York startup that combines social networking for business with crowdfunding has landed a little bit of funding of its own.

Rock the Post, launched in November, has pulled in $700,000 from an international cast of angel investors and plans to use that money conservatively to fund its operations, cofounder and chief technology officer Tanya Prive told Portfolio.com.

“Just because we’ve raised $700,000 doesn’t mean we’re making that,” Prive, 27, said. “We’re going to be very, very conservative. Ideally, we’re here for the long run, so that’s what we’re going to plan to do.”

Prive sees the funding, announced January 31, as just the first step in a plan to build Rock the Post into a social network that “erases the intermediary figure in business interactions around the world.”

To do that, Prive, her cofounder—whom she said couldn’t be named until the summer—and their team in New York have created a platform that allows entrepreneurs to reach outside their close networks of friends and family to connect with strangers who can help them in their businesses, with money, advice, or all of the above.

“It is like dating for entrepreneurs,” Prive said.

Prive’s company fits into a trend that includes such startups as Kick Starter, Rockthehub, and Startup Addict—all of which are looking to make it easier for other startups to find funding for their projects by tapping into online social networks. Congress is considering legislation to make it still easier for such crowdfunding networks to get rolling.

Prive’s network is just at its beginning, having gone live in November and attracted 18,000 unique users per month, though she and her anonymous partner have been brainstorming it for quite a while.

“We had been cooking this baby up for almost a year before we launched,” said Prive, a native of the Montreal area who spent her teenage years in the San Francisco Bay area and moved to New York to work in the online publishing industry.

She loved her job in ad sales at Investopedia, but caught that entrepreneurial bug.

“I still was missing something, and that something for me was to have my job have a significant purpose,” she said.

She’s found that purpose in trying to put together investors and entrepreneurs online.

And now that she has the funding to keep the site open, she needs to find a way to make the purpose pay. So far, Rock the Post doesn’t have revenue and hasn’t developed a moneymaking model.

“We have several business models that we’re looking at,” she said. “First and foremost, our intention is to make a difference. If we make a difference…money will come.”

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com