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Hacker News, shut up and take my money
Recently I made a couple of attempts to offer early-stage startups on HN both money (small to medium check sizes) and advice... All attempts yielded pretty much zero responses so far.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515303
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487830
I've successfully raised capital for my startups in the past (https://medium.com/questmate/how-we-raised-a-us-1-5m-seed-round-at-us-13-5m-using-nothing-but-our-product-ca5215d40a98) and also have a good portfolio of investments into startups either directly or via other people's funds (read: VC) as an LP.
My hypothesis is that, despite economic turndown, investment money is still available in abundance.
So what's yours? Does it sound too good to be true, maybe?
- tailspin2019 4y agoI mean, if you're desperate, I've got a few side projects I could show you. I probably need advice more than money, but I'll happily take the latter :) Edit: Also more seriously, would recommend adding some contact details (at least) to your HN profile. If you're doing outreach here, that would probably help (not everyone wants to Tweet about this sort of thing!)
- sergiotapia 4y agoI'd love to speak with you, how can I get in touch? My email is in my HN profile.
- cheerioty 4y agoI'll ping you but have also just updated my profile with my email and Twitter handle.
- cheerioty 4y agoDone :)
- lazyant 4y agoI must be blind, can't see email or twitter handle in https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cheerioty https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cheerioty
- cheerioty 4y agoApologies, it seems like I accidentally removed my email (now re-added) when I updated my profile with a bit more background on myself. I've already dropped you an email though :)
- chrisdalke 4y agoDo you have a particular investment thesis/focus? I think many early-stage startups are hesitant to take investment vs. bootstrapping unless that investment also comes with some significant domain experience, scaling advice, connections, etc. and is from an investor who's well-aligned with their vision. For HN specifically: maybe helpful to write up a high-level summary: Who are you, what's your focus, what kind of startups are you interested in helping? In this forum the anonymity-factor is higher (vs. twitter or other venues) so that information is probably more important here.
- cheerioty 4y agoI've updated my profile to give a bit more background on myself. For some reason, I assumed interested people would just quickly do a quick background check themselves instead of me selling myself to them. In retrospect, I see how this might have been a bad assumption.
- solarmist 4y agoI skimmed your bio, and "yes" it makes all the difference. You now come across as someone that it's at least worth talking to.
- throwaway2037 4y agoAgree. Double thumbs up for this profile. Many times I read someone's profile and it is almost nothing. If you are looking for support/funding, please spend some time to create a good profile!
- cheerioty 4y agoMy general investment focus is quite simple: I either invest in stuff I'm already a happy customer of (mostly stocks), things I wish would exist but doesn't, and/or stuff that's just stupidly ambitious but could change the world as a whole (for the better) if successful.
- shyn3 4y agoThere is a post about a 100k userbase without the runway money. You may be a good fit.
- cheerioty 4y agoCheers! I actually already left a comment there a few hours ago, but still struggle to figure out what that person is actually working on.
- lostgame 4y agoHey! I’m working for a small mobile gaming startup with a working product and I’d love to talk. Email is in my profile! :)
- darkhorse13 4y agoI have a pretty interesting/weird idea of making apps from docs (as in you write a doc to create an app). Would you be interested? I have my email listed on my HN profile. Would love to discuss this idea with someone.
- cheerioty 4y agoLet's do it! Mind emailing me if you haven't already? My email is in the profile now.
- darkhorse13 4y agoAwesome, just sent an email with the subject prefixed with "[Hacker News]". Looking forward to it! Forgot to mention, I have a rough working prototype.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 4y agoThis seems arrogant. Your two previous posts offer no detail, basically just “Who’s Raising?” as if everyone is going to beat a path to your door. Your medium post talks about raising $1.5M, which is fundamentally not impressive at all, and I don’t mean that pejoratively or dismissively. The company where I was employee #5 and helped build from Day 1 recently raised 100x that much and I wouldn’t in my wildest dreams talk about that unprompted or think anyone cares what I think about fundraising in the least. Your conclusion is essentially sour grapes. “People aren’t taking my money so there must be a lot of money because no one is interested,” which ignores other reasons they’re not interested. The reason I’m not interested: Taking an honest read of your linked posts and this one I see no compelling reason to even DM you should I be fundraising because you don’t seem to bring anything compelling or useful to the table except a small check. Hope this doesn’t come across badly, just trying to be candid. You come across as super arrogant to me despite having essentially no successes, or at least you’re so hand-wavey and abstract that they don’t come across. At this seeming early stage of your “VC Journey” or whatever it’s likely that the shoe is on the other foot and you should be selling yourself hard rather than the other way around.
- atian 4y agoHe/she lives in Australia. As a one-time visitor, seems they are not exposed to the air that you and I share and may explain their experiences with them putting capital where there is little (comparatively) industry.
- pickitupsnake 4y agoMaybe a little arrogant but as someone looking for a 'small check' to rundown an idea, that doesn't bother me.
- cheerioty 4y agoI'm sorry to hear it was perceived this way, this was obviously not my intention. I've updated my profile with a little bit more background on me. I'm a bit worried though, seeing your comment here, that actually talking more about my background and, what I consider my personal achievements, will come off as even more arrogant again.
- sharemywin 4y agoI know it's off topic: I assume your part of questmate? Seems interesting but your "what is questmate" should be a quest.
- cheerioty 4y agoYou're damn right, it's actually in the works and will likely launch next week. The onboarding itself will also be a Quest very soon, while the onboarding to setting up some Quests (like this: https://www.questmate.com/questmate-for-standups https://www.questmate.com/questmate-for-standups) already is!
- epicquest 4y agowell, we're raising a seed round, and frankly, what we're doing is too strange and disruptive for the vast majority of angel investors, even the ones who think they want to fund something strange and disruptive. get in touch if you want to write a small to medium check demonpore.com
- cheerioty 4y agoBonus points for having the word "Quest" in your name btw, and "64" in your product's one ;)
- cheerioty 4y agoI have no idea what I've just looked at, wow. I got to run this by a friend of mine, one you might potentially know :) Would you mind dropping me an email (address in the profile) and we take it from here?
- nickfromseattle 4y agoI've been thinking about raising a seed round. Do you think we're seed ready? - HR SaaS - Public launch in March 2022 - 400ish free trials - 68 paid customers - 90% on annual plans - 1 churn - Growing 22% MoM over last 3 months & 18% MoM last 6 months - Founding team has worked together for 3 years, built a 45 person team for an A16 portfolio company, and shipped (a different) small B2B SaaS together to 4,000 users & $150k in revenue - ~$500k gives us two years of runway for founders, money for devs create a more mature product, move up-market and invest into building the biggest HR community on the internet.
- cheerioty 4y agoSounds pretty damn ready to me, mind dropping me a message (sascha [at] tape.io) and we take it from there?
- hubraumhugo 4y ago“If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.” The best way to build relationships with potential investors is to ask for advice, and that's exactly how I got in touch with OP after posting "Ask HN: How to raise a seed round in a down market?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847941 He's now an investor and is supporting us with great advice :) Founders helping founders, that's how it should be!
- EGreg 4y agoFine. Here: https://qbix.com/invest https://qbix.com/invest We are doing test the waters for a crowdfund: https://wefunder.com/Qbix https://wefunder.com/Qbix The offer: come in with $50K-200K to be the lead investor and get the earlybird terms. Then we raise $1.07M behind you, and continue to carry out our plan to make an open source Wordpress for Social Networks. Our apps attracted 10 million users in 95+ countries etc etc. If interested contact me at greg at the domain qbix.com and happy to answer any questions. Or calendly.com/Qbix/meeting
- ffhhj 4y agoI'm building a next-gen search engine, are you interested?
- cheerioty 4y agoSure thing, please drop me an email if you haven’t yet!