Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGtnQ2NtVE5WcS1jdHVMWGN6OVNWV2c6MA

by epi0Bauqu • 16 years ago

125 50 16 years ago

spreadsheets.google.com

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

The form submits here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvP564P3eSROdGtnQ2N...

aditya4• 16 years ago

Who'se asking? :-)

Just wondering if this is for info purposes only? or, are you actually going to promote it somewhere?

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

No, it's for funding purposes. Lots of angel investors are on HN. If it's on top for a while, people will see it.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

This seems like something better off with private results, right?

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

It'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• 16 years ago

I see you've made the spreadsheet uneditable. A wise choice! (Users that have seen the previous posting will agree)

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

Yeah, 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.

TrevorJ2• 16 years ago

Is that coming from HN users or is there some sort of public search for public documents on Google that funnels trolls to it?

chime• 16 years ago

I'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.

aditya4• 16 years ago

You 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• 16 years ago

I'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.

maxklein2• 16 years ago

So 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.

aditya4• 16 years ago

Skribit 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 :-)

PStamatiou3• 16 years ago

Still 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

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. :)

aditya4• 16 years ago

BTW, RE: your iPad idea - the X10 wireless nodes would make it all trivial!

http://www.activehomepro.com/activehome-pro.html (audio alert!)

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

Another 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.

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

Make it :). Contact info could be the same through HN username; people can decide what to put in their HN profile.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

I went ahead and created a form for this and posted to HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104674

webwright2• 16 years ago

I think this survey/spreadsheet misses the almost all of the things that motivate angels (check out 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")

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

I 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.

webwright2• 16 years ago

Yeah, 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

ashishk• 16 years ago

Would 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• 16 years ago

What 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• 16 years ago

IANAL, 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

jasonmcalacanis• 16 years ago

If 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

epi0Bauqu9• 16 years ago

Please include Philly. I can help organize if needed.

smanek• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

Definitely check out Jason's OAF: http://openangelforum.com

We're also glad to intro good startups to angels: http://venturehacks.com/startuplist

mg1313• 16 years ago

Please come to Phoenix, Arizona also...

icey• 16 years ago

While 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.

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

I think the startup scene here is just...wait there isn't one.

dgallagher• 16 years ago

Robert May favorably mentioned this on his blog here: http://coconutheadsets.com/2010/01/27/the-first-hand-experie...

They received some funding for http://www.backupify.com/, which allows you to backup/restore data from social websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc...).

mrduncan• 16 years ago

Jason, I know you don't post here all that often but please don't sign your comments. The guidelines ask users not to, and more importantly it takes emphasis away from your (very useful) comment and places it on your signature instead.

From the guidelines - Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

mhartl• 16 years ago

I agree with this, and I'd add that it's fine to include links, just not as part of a signature. Moreover, by prepending the http part you can make them clickable, e.g., http://twitter.com/openangelforum.

Cyndre• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

"If we capture only 1% of this market... we'll be rich!"

suzyperplexus• 16 years ago

I know StartupList is on here, but Venture Hacks just started an AngelList http://venturehacks.com/angellist . It's a good way to see what types of startups specific Angels are interested in.

matt1• 16 years ago

Reading 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• 16 years ago

Applied with http://thecadmus.com. Thanks for setting it up!

Brushfire• 16 years ago

Please 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 $$.

Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?

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