Ask HN: Raising Angel Money is Hard To Do without Good Contacts. Help?

It's hard! My partner and I have been running someone else's startup (as CEO and CTO) for the past couple years. It's a quite successful company now and we've done quite well running it (though we've made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of course). We thought we had a solid agreement to get Bigger Rewards once we'd proven ourselves. Now that acquisition interest has started to become real the greed has set in and we're probably not going to end up getting very much money at all. We're pretty tired of working on someone else's dream anyway. We're both very entrepreneurial and have been itching to work on something we deeply believe in. We have the technical chops, product design experience, and enough business knowledge to do everything ourselves for the first year at least. We've already created a mostly-functional prototype in nights and weekends at home (which we documented to keep IP issues clear). The main problem we have is that neither of us are college students that can live on $1500/mo anymore. We both need about $80k/yr minimum to avoid going negative every month. Ideally we'd also like to hire a couple people to help us move faster in the next few months, and they'll need salaries too. So we figure we would really like to raise $500k - $1000k at $2.5M - $3M pre-money. We really believe this is the last money we would ever have to take, even though I know that's what many people falsely think. Monetization for our idea is the easiest part, and it's a very high margin business. The problem is that we simply do not know very many people who are, or know, angel investors. We've tried sending email to a few and haven't even gotten a response back. It seems very much like we're the ideal of what an angel investor wants: We've ran a startup for a few years, so we're not going to make too many newbie mistakes. We're a business and technical co-founder. We have a basic prototype. Our business model is simple and real. Our market is huge and profitable. Maybe I'm delusional and angel investors talk to 100 teams as good or better than us every day. I'm sure they talk to a lot. I know everyone thinks they're above average... It seems like it's so much work going after an angel investor that it's almost not even worth trying. Our backup plan is to just keep moving on the project and once it gets to the point that it pays our living expenses (which are pretty high) we'll go full-time and never take funding. From our perspective that sucks because it's slower and harder. It also seems like from an investor's perspective it's a loss too, they'll never have a chance to invest in us merely because we can't connect with them. So for example these are some of the people that seem interesting to me: Matt Coffin, Paige Craig, Joel Yarmon, Shaun Collopy, Ryan Spoon, Ryan McIntyre, Alexander Lloyd, Brian Garrett, Tony Conrad, Nova Spivack, Phineas Barnes, Rob Hayes, Eric Wiesen, Christine Herron, Aaron Patzer, Brad Feld, Andy Sack, Andy Weissman, Bryce Roberts, Mike Hirshland, Jeff Clavier, James Hong, Auren Hoffman, Jon Callaghan, Michael Dearing I don't really know anyone well that knows any of these people well. I'm not sure how to bridge that gap. This is mostly a rant now I suppose, but I really would like constructive advice too. Thanks HN.