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Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoThe form submits here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2NtVE5WcS1jdHVMWGN6OVNWV2c&hl=en https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2N...
- cookiecaper 17y agoThis seems like something better off with private results, right?
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoIt's for the HN community. Plenty of investors hang out here. Of course, I don't know all of them. Hence, public. I kept the fields to a minimum so serious conversations could happen off-spreadsheet.
- wesley 17y agoI see you've made the spreadsheet uneditable. A wise choice! (Users that have seen the previous posting will agree)
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoYeah, I was very disappointed with that posting, which I ended up deleting after 15min. Every cell I wrote was deleted, and at least one person put up porn on it.
- TrevorJ 17y agoIs that coming from HN users or is there some sort of public search for public documents on Google that funnels trolls to it?
- chime 17y agoI've always seen posts like this here on HN and was always too shy to share this early-on in development. I keep hoping for the day when I can do "Review my app: Blah" but the difficulty for me is actually getting to that stage because of time/motivation reasons. So I'm hoping that by sharing my idea early on, I can work more on it if others like the concept and feel it could be worthwhile. Even if you think it isn't practical/fund-worthy, feel free to let me know.
- aditya 17y agoYou should do an Ask HN post anyway, especially since it might land you a co-founder or other motivation from interested users. Once that happens, you'll automatically want to work on it!
- keefe 17y agoI've thought about doing that myself. I've been thinking about what it means to bring in users 0-100,100-500,500-1000 and so forth... I guess I would like to try bringing in non-technical people as users first.
- maxklein 17y agoSo far, of the 6, the only one I would invest in is skribit. But I don't have that kind of money. Let me add my idea in there, in case anyone has an extra 300k to throw at it.
- aditya 17y agoSkribit didn't say what kinda money they were looking at though... From what I know, most angel rounds get funded by multiple angels each putting in between 25-50k, so if you wanted to get in on that, you should :-)
- PStamatiou 17y agoStill not sure what kind of money we're looking for but talking to other startup friends (and assuming the money is in SV and have to relocate) it's about 175k-200k for 1 year of 2 full-time coders. I can personally live rather cheaply (heck $15k seed lasted over a year and I'm still running with it) but it depends on the going rate for rails coders and such. Not many coders I've come across care about equity these days and are all "fuck you, pay me" haha. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097188 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097188 So increase that amount depending on what we want to do - 3 full-time devs and a business/sales guy for 18 months, or 3 full-time devs, a biz guy and part-time designer? Then I have to think about if I want to take the Venture Hacks route of "raise as much as you can, when you can" or the Om/Fred Wilson route of "milestone funding".. enough to get to X, then raise again. What do I know about funding I'm just a coder. :)
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoAnother interesting spreadsheet would be: Are you looking to fund stuff / have you funded stuff? Not sure how you go about the contact info being placed there. Then again, venture hacks has the contact info on their list.
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoMake it :). Contact info could be the same through HN username; people can decide what to put in their HN profile.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoI went ahead and created a form for this and posted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104674 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104674
- webwright 17y agoI think this survey/spreadsheet misses the almost all of the things that motivate angels (check out http://venturehacks.com/startuplist http://venturehacks.com/startuplist ). Your survey is entirely idea-focused. What it should ask (IMO) is: "Who are you and what have you pulled off in the past?" (with links) "Who vouches for you (investors, preferably)?" "What's the market/idea?" (very short- most investors realize that the idea changing is VERY likely) "Describe your traction?" "Could this be a $100m company?" If you aren't shooting for a big market opportunity ($100m+) you just crossed 95% of angels off your list. If you have no traction/growth, you just crossed 95% of angels off your list-- UNLESS you've clearly kicked ass in the past (note: kicked ass does NOT mean "did really good at your job")
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoI updated the form: --I had figured traction would be included in status, but I just explicitly added help text to that effect. --Added team question with your help text. --Added 'How big is it?' as help text to idea question. I didn't want to scare off any people, however, so left off who vouches for you for now.
- webwright 17y agoYeah, I think the frustrating thing about angel fundraising is that it isn't really fair. You're smart, you've got a good idea, but no one really wants to invest in you unless you've already succeeded with a previous idea/company OR your current idea is already succeeding. In other words, they are looking for a small-but-growing fire in a huge/dry forest they can throw gasoline on. Most people on that list are a little pile of wood that needs a spark. And they are in a foggy stand of trees that MIGHT be a forest, but might just be a few trees on a hillside. Vast majority of investors aren't in the spark business, they are in the gasoline business. http://twitter.com/joshk/statuses/8034018934 http://twitter.com/joshk/statuses/8034018934
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoYou're right, but perhaps it is slowly changing. YC et al. have shown funding sparks in small amounts makes sense. That should trickle down eventually. For me personally, I could see investing in sparks if the teams were right. At that level, you need to really believe in the people. It's hard when they have no history, but I think connections are possible. In particular, as a hacker entrepreneur, I think I can decently spot other people with that mentality.
- ashishk 17y agoWould this be considered a public stock offering? I remember learning in class that this sort of stuff (seeking funding publicly on the web) may result in some legal trouble. I may be wrong though.
- alain94040 17y agoWhat you can't do is take money from non accredited investors (ie., the public). But announcing in public that you'll be looking to raise money from professional angels (who are accredited) is ok.
- thorax 17y agoIANAL, but I would be careful making such a public post, due to SEC regulations disallowing public notice of equity investment opportunities of private companies. I've seen people point to Section 5: http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33Act/sec5.html http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33Act/sec5.html
- jasonmcalacanis 17y agoIf you do, I suggest checking out the Open Angel Forum. We just had the boulder event on Wednesday night and it went really well. We are going to expand to 10 cities this year, including SF, Palo Alto, NY, Boston, Shanghai, Seattle and Atlanta. -- 100 folks apply for five slots. -- 20 uber-angels in the room (at least four investments in the past year) -- no fees to startups or angels best jason www.twitter.com/openangelforum
- epi0Bauqu 17y agoPlease include Philly. I can help organize if needed.
- smanek 17y agoI attended the last OAF in LA, and highly recommend it. I got to meet lots of interesting entrepreneurs and angels - several of whom had great ideas for our company that we'd never considered. One of the startups (not mine, unfortunately ;-)) almost ignited a bidding war on the presentation floor! It's the best way to meet a lot of highly qualified angels quickly. We probably met as many angels that night as we did the month before. Even with the 'post hoc ergo proctor hoc' fallacy in mind, I don't think it's a coincidence we signed a term sheet at a great valuation the next week either ;-)
- nivi 17y agoDefinitely check out Jason's OAF: http://openangelforum.com http://openangelforum.com We're also glad to intro good startups to angels: http://venturehacks.com/startuplist http://venturehacks.com/startuplist
- mg1313 17y agoPlease come to Phoenix, Arizona also...
- icey 17y agoWhile I'd love to see that happen, I'd also be amazed if it happened. The startup scene around here seems pretty poor from what I can tell.
- Cyndre 17y agoI can at least say its working. Within the past hour of my post my cable monitoring site has been checked out by comcast and cox cable. Thanks for making it easy to post what I have done so far.
- peteforde 17y ago"If we capture only 1% of this market... we'll be rich!"
- suzyperplexus 17y agoI know StartupList is on here, but Venture Hacks just started an AngelList http://venturehacks.com/angellist http://venturehacks.com/angellist . It's a good way to see what types of startups specific Angels are interested in.
- matt1 17y agoReading these gives you somewhat of an idea of what it must be like for pg and team to read through YC applications. it's amazing how similar many of them are, which I imagine is part of the reason why YC started doing Requests for Startups. The number of ways to describe innovation is also a bit amusing: knocking down the barriers freaking huge etc I wonder if investors are numb to this?
- jayair 17y agoApplied with http://thecadmus.com http://thecadmus.com. Thanks for setting it up!
- Brushfire 17y agoPlease add a city/state or location column. Many angel investors around the country will only look at deals they are physically near, since the value is in mentoring and connections, not just $$.