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.<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515303
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487830<p>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.<p>My hypothesis is that, despite economic turndown, investment money is still available in abundance.<p>So what's yours? Does it sound too good to be true, maybe?
This 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Do 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.<p>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.
“If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.”<p>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?" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847941" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847941</a><p>He's now an investor and is supporting us with great advice :) Founders helping founders, that's how it should be!
I've been thinking about raising a seed round. Do you think we're seed ready?<p>- HR SaaS<p>- Public launch in March 2022<p>- 400ish free trials<p>- 68 paid customers<p>- 90% on annual plans<p>- 1 churn<p>- Growing 22% MoM over last 3 months & 18% MoM last 6 months<p>- 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<p>- ~$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.
Fine. Here: <a href="https://qbix.com/invest" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/invest</a><p>We are doing test the waters for a crowdfund: <a href="https://wefunder.com/Qbix" rel="nofollow">https://wefunder.com/Qbix</a><p>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.<p>Our apps attracted 10 million users in 95+ countries etc etc.<p>If interested contact me at greg at the domain qbix.com and happy to answer any questions. Or calendly.com/Qbix/meeting
I 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.
I mean, if you're desperate, I've got a few side projects I could show you.<p>I probably need advice more than money, but I'll happily take the latter :)<p>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!)
well, 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 <i>think</i> they want to fund something strange and disruptive. get in touch if you want to write a small to medium check demonpore.com