Friends, family and fools

Family and Friends is a term used to identify a collective group that an individual is closely associated with socially. Family and Friends are the core interdependencies between an individual and/or the organization that individual belongs to within a social structure. Entrepreneurs seek capital to create Business Structures. When large gaps between what resources are available amongst family and friends and what is needed to create a startup company exists, other sources are included beneath the collective term fools. This is often refereed to as The Three F's' and abbreviated in texts as (FFF) or FFF and has. Since the bursting of the Internet Bubble 'The Three F's' has been used in a variety of sociocultural contexts and meanings.

Social Networks

In a social network family and friends are the natural relationships and the emotional foundations from which the individuals other areas of interest can be pursued forming connections with more nodes of individuals, thus to narrower niches of interest.

Start-Ups

In business the use of Family and Friends as initial sources of funding is a practice used by Entrepreneurs when seeking seed funding for new businesses when other forms of funding are not easily available. Sometimes limited in its ability to be a viable source of funding in the long run new business ventures reach beyond their family and friends to include Angel Investors either by direct association or by way of venture capital firms and funds. Angel investors secure financial resource requirements for the business to reach an operational Breakeven point.

Video Games

In Video game development for certain types of games Alpha Testing is usually conducted by the software development company and their own employees. Family and Friends Alpha is a phase of the software testing methodology used by businesses in the software development industry as a form of light crowdsourcing to prelude public Beta Testing stages For less CASUAL games and games with massively multiplayer environments Alpha stage testing may expand to include Family and Friends (F&F) of employees as testers by way of invitations. Invitations include non-disclosure agreements to protect the release of content still under development during Alpha Stage testing.

See also

Friends and family funding, as Seed Money for an individuals business.