With the greatest respect I don't think now is the time to be doing this. Why not wait until the community has built up a bit? Then perhaps we could chip in some more incentives for potential investors.
You are entitled to ask for funds to push the project forward, don't get me wrong. But what is my incentive to invest say $170. I get a t-shirt and that's it. Why would I invest $170 for a t-shirt? With more time perhaps the community can donate coins to a fund so that the low level investors get some coins for their investment too. Seriously, who will invest $170 for a t-shirt? If I had $170 spare and I wanted to invest in SLG and believed in the coin I'd just go onto an exchange and buy some.
Who is going to invest $880 for a t-shirt and the membership to the SLG API? What does that even offer? $880 is a lot of money for a t-shirt and unlimited SLG addresses. What is my incentive to invest?
You have to offer people more to get them to part with their money especially at this early stage in the project. Do you really think you're going to raise all the funds in the timeframe?
I agree that its perhaps an ambitious funding target for the StartJOIN platform currently, although not entirely unrealistic from an equity funding perspective.
Max Keiser has mentioned investing in both StartCOIN and StartJOIN on several episodes of the Keiser Report on RT in the UK in the last few weeks. Its good to have some equity level funding projects on the platform to help attract the more serious VC people.
If you breakdown the funding amount then £80k for a year divided by the 4 developers, less server costs and all of the operational extras - then its not much over the UK minimum wage per. year I'd imagine, if that.
A single Venture Capitalist or Equity Crowd Funder could quite easily buy up that level of Sterlingcoin in one go and also crowd fund the project to help ensure the return on their investment.
Most of the current projects on StartJOIN are at the Indiegogo or KickStarter type of crowd funding level. You have to look at the potential and think bigger. Take a look at one of the UK's largest Equity Funding platforms like CrowdCube
http://www.crowdcube.com/ as an example.
Good luck though to the Sterlingcoin Team - nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Here is the breakdown. 3 full-time developers. Michael Harkess is our software and systems tester.
£25,000 per year for myself, Matthew and Steven to work full-time on Sterlingcoin (like we are now and have been since June) which is $120000 total.
$120000 FOR TEAM WAGES FOR ONE YEAR (3 DEVELOPERS)
$5000 FOR MERCHANT SERVICE PLATFORM
$1400 FOR SERVER COSTS, UPGRADES AND SSL
$1000 FOR MOBILE WALLET DEVELOPMENT AND LICENSES
$1000 FOR PROFESSIONAL VIDEO