Our current state of play is that our advertising is going really well, but it requires us to be able to go negative for about 5 or 6 months (sometimes less, depending on the ad) - in both Welsh and Spanish - so we can’t grow as fast as we’d like to because we’re under-capitalised.
We’ve taken on £100k in investment this year, and have just agreed another £100k - we’re also talking to two different potential institutional investors (one of which has said that they intend to come on board), and have a strong bid in place for the Wales Development Bank (just waiting to get our historical P&L in a format that is familiar for them before we push on with that).
We’ve decided that the best way forward now is to aim for a round of about £500k so that we can move faster with growth and also invest more in our core tech (to be able to produce more languages, faster). The organisations we’re talking to can get us there, whether as part of a portfolio or with a lead offer.
But…
We’ve had two internal investors from within our team/community this year - Jesse and Jeff - and we’ve discovered that the skill sets and connections and ideas they bring with them are at least as valuable as the actual investment.
So we’d like to see if there are another 2 (or absolute maximum 3) people out there who can afford to invest at £100k or above, and would like to play a part in helping to shape the future of the SaySomethingin project (and our aim to revitalise Welsh as a community language AND provide a course for every language humanity has left).
Our intention is to make an equity offer of up to 5% (divided between the investors if there’s more than one) - and we’re planning to set dividends as a % of turnover, because we want to stay in private ownership rather than exit at any stage (so this is likely to be a strong consistent income for you rather than a lottery ticket).
If you’re interested, please drop @Stine a private message or email admin@saysomethingin.com - Stine will be able to give you all the crunchy details about our advertising and business plans and so on, and then you and I can have a chat if you’d still like to after you’ve waded through the details… 
Our absolute ideal here would be 2 people at a little higher than 100k - it’s important to me that you really become part of the ideas team, so the fewer people the better that focus will be - we’ll be keen to close up on this as soon as we have a couple of people who are a good fit - but if we get 3 at about the same time, we’ll make that work.
(Beyond 3 right now would mean we’d struggle to give you the attention/involvement we want, so if that happens we’ll put you on a private list to keep you in touch with the numbers around what goes on in 2020, just in case it makes sense to open up to a few more investors later on - although for transparency’s sake, I’ve got to say that we don’t currently think that’s likely - we think this round is probably going to be the last we need ).
I’m really looking forward to seeing if we have anyone who’s a good fit for this. Jesse and Jeff have made a transformational difference to what we’re doing, so I’m pretty excited at the thought of finding another couple of people who can have that kind of impact.
