Thanks Jason. That's pretty much the plan, though I'm focusing on "b" until Tuesday, "c" for the rest of my life at SetJam, and going to work overtime to make sure "a" happens in spite of putting it behind "b" and "c".
Believe me, this is what really scares me. I feel like a lot of the startup game has turned into a popularity contest, and I've never won a popularity contest in my life. If you look at my twitter stats or blog traffic, you can see that I just write about geeky things that no one cares about. Promoting myself just doesn't come naturally.
My hope is that by listening to our users and focusing 100% on them, we can build a better product and that will be enough. In the end though, I'm the CEO and I've promised my team to get the word out so our efforts aren't in vain. I've set myself to tackling the PR problem with all the intensity I bring to our product. I hope it's enough.
Yes. It is unfair. They raised the money based on Jim's experience as a CEO of a publicly traded company. Still, it's not really how the startup game has been played in quite a while.
We aggregated about every VC and Angel Group in the country, built profiles for them containing key metrics, and made a "Kayak" like search engine for them. I think it's the best single resource for entrepreneurs seeking funding on the web now. And as I mentioned at the top, it costs nothing to use.
As the COO of Angelsoft and the creator of the Open Deals/The Investor Community, I can shed some statistical light on this question.
First let me clarify that since 2004 Angelsoft has been building tools that help Startups and Investors communicate more effectively. That's what we talk about every day. That's what keeps me up at night. Open Deals is one of those tools.
We originally released Open Deals as a way for Angel Groups to post deals that they wanted to do, but didn't have enough cash to do alone (This is a surprisingly common problem for these groups).
As Open Deals gained traction with our groups, we thought we could use it to solve another problem: Unknown entrepreneurs applying to groups and getting rejected because they were unknown. Most guys who are unknown are unknown for a reason, but obviously if you can never get an investment unless you've been successful before, we've got a problem.
We figured we'd encourage these new entrepreneurs to apply to Open Deals, let the investors crowd source them, and if a guy was legit, he'd get voted up and referred into some groups. Since he was referred, we figured the group might pay attention to him.
So has it been successful?
1. First, our marketing around it has sucked (and still does). We're more of software company and marketing hasn't come naturally to us. We're working on a complete site redesign coming out early in March we think will fix this.
2. Since we began we've had 243 companies referred from Open Deals to groups. That's about 25% who applied.
3. Companies that are referred from Open Deals are 225% more likely to get a meeting with a group than a direct submission to that group.
In short, Open Deals is doing okay. You guys are smart enough to figure out if it's worth $250 for you, but I can say, that for most entrepreneurs its more than worth the money. And I'm not talking about those that get meetings. A lot of entrepreneurs get dinged or ignored when they apply. We take some heat for that, but the truth is, these guys paid $250 to find out they're not ready for prime-time. And speaking as an entrepreneur who has spent thousands of dollars and years of his life pursuing ideas that were not ready, I can say that $250 is a bargain.