Please help if you love meatballs! Or free enterprise!
Okay, all...I rarely do this, but right now I want to make a request for aid, not for me, but for some people I love. My very dear friends Sabrina and Joe, after years of planning, are moving forward with their dream of opening a restaurant. The place will be called Joey Z's, and it's a meatball-sandwich shop featuring a wide variety of homemade meatballs and sauces...not just your usual Italian meatball subs, but such creative offerings as chicken meatballs with Alfredo sauce and bacon and General Tso's pork meatballs. I've tried Joe's meatballs, and they're amazing...if this restaurant successfully gets off the ground, it's going to be fantastic.
Now here's where you come in. To raise money for startup, Sabrina and Joe are using an awesome website called Kickstarter that allows anyone trying to fund a project- business, artistic, whatever- to solicit the Internet as a whole for startup capital rather than enriching a bank or binding themselves to a venture capitalist. The way it works is that you (as in, "you, the prospective funder") go to their Kickstarter page, and pledge any amount of money you want to help them out. It can be as little as a dollar or as high as your generosity runs; even tiny gifts help, because the more backers they have, the more visible they become on Kickstarter's main page, and therefore the more likely they are to attract more backers. You don't actually pay the money unless they meet their fundraising goal within the specified time (in this case, $10,000 within 30 days; they're hoping for a March opening). Here's the link to Sabrina and Joe's Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyzs/joey-zs-meatballs
The page has a cool video they made talking about their project and tantalizing you with pictures of Joe's yummy meatball sandwiches. Pledging has its rewards, too: Sabrina and Joe have set up a tiered system of rewards for pledgees, ranging from a thank-you-for-supporting-us placemat in your name at the restaurant to free sandwiches and t-shirts to having a meatball sandwich party catered by them in your home anywhere in the US, based on how much you give to the cause.
As of today, they've raised just over 10% of what they need in 3 days of funding; they've got 27 days to go to hit the 10K mark. It can be done, but they need more people to back them.
So if you love meatball sandwiches, or like the idea of grassroots support for budding businesses, or if you want to help great people realize their dreams, or just as a favor to me if none of the above apply, go check out the Kickstarter for Joey Z's Meatballs and offer them some support, even if it's just a dollar or five. And please share word with any friends you think would be interested in helping a project like this come to life; the only way to advertise this right now is by word-of-mouth (or word-of-internet). Thanks so much!
Now here's where you come in. To raise money for startup, Sabrina and Joe are using an awesome website called Kickstarter that allows anyone trying to fund a project- business, artistic, whatever- to solicit the Internet as a whole for startup capital rather than enriching a bank or binding themselves to a venture capitalist. The way it works is that you (as in, "you, the prospective funder") go to their Kickstarter page, and pledge any amount of money you want to help them out. It can be as little as a dollar or as high as your generosity runs; even tiny gifts help, because the more backers they have, the more visible they become on Kickstarter's main page, and therefore the more likely they are to attract more backers. You don't actually pay the money unless they meet their fundraising goal within the specified time (in this case, $10,000 within 30 days; they're hoping for a March opening). Here's the link to Sabrina and Joe's Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyzs/joey-zs-meatballs
The page has a cool video they made talking about their project and tantalizing you with pictures of Joe's yummy meatball sandwiches. Pledging has its rewards, too: Sabrina and Joe have set up a tiered system of rewards for pledgees, ranging from a thank-you-for-supporting-us placemat in your name at the restaurant to free sandwiches and t-shirts to having a meatball sandwich party catered by them in your home anywhere in the US, based on how much you give to the cause.
As of today, they've raised just over 10% of what they need in 3 days of funding; they've got 27 days to go to hit the 10K mark. It can be done, but they need more people to back them.
So if you love meatball sandwiches, or like the idea of grassroots support for budding businesses, or if you want to help great people realize their dreams, or just as a favor to me if none of the above apply, go check out the Kickstarter for Joey Z's Meatballs and offer them some support, even if it's just a dollar or five. And please share word with any friends you think would be interested in helping a project like this come to life; the only way to advertise this right now is by word-of-mouth (or word-of-internet). Thanks so much!