How I found $335,000 worth of investment for my startup without any prior fundraising experience.

BERANDA    ABOUT US    ADS : 1 USD FOREVER     ASMARA    BIOGRAFI     BUKU     BUKU PINTAR 

CHRISTIAN FAITH     DISCLAIMER     DUNIA KERJA     ENTREPRENEURS     GO PUBLIC (IPO)     

KESEHATAN     LIST OF ALL ARTICLES     MARKETING     MY STARTUP     OTHERS     

TIP SUKSES DAN KAYA     TIPS BLOGGER     TIP SEO

03/26/2015, By Lauren Sauser

Featured in Ask An Entrepreneur

Answer provided by: Brad Sams, CEO of Tracour.

Past Employment: Consultant at Clark Schaefer Consulting, Staff Auditor at Kendle International

Featured Recently in: TechCrunch — “Tracour Locks Up $335K To Help Uncover The Best Financial Analysts”

_____

Do you like bashing your head on the table, being told ‘this wont work’ and having to consistently sell yourself, your idea, and how you will execute this plan 100 times a week? If you answered yes to all of those questions, then you are ready to try and raise money for your idea.

My startup, Tracour, is a project that has been in the works for roughly two years and has taken a considerable amount of time to perfect the model and to get our pitch ready for prime time.

There are few people in this world who can walk into a VC office with an idea and get a check for $10,000,000 to kick start their endeavor…the qualifying statement on that is if you can answer yes to “I sold my previous startup and returned a 10x multiple to our investors”, then you are a special breed.

How we pitched Tracour

Here is the funny thing about Tracour, when we went out pitching, we did not show off Tracour, we showed off Sorsed, a project that we had previously built. Sorsed tracks tech rumors and vets journalists to see who is reliable and is crowd-sourced. We built Sorsed out of fun and it’s a lightweight product from developers’ point of view since it is all crowd sourced.

Tracour ranks financial analysts in real time to see who is generating quality investment advice using automated procedures. Hopefully you can see the comparable here and this began our journey to start pitching.

We got our foot in the door with our one-line pitch, “We rate financial equity advice in real time”, at least, that was our goal at the time of the initial pitch.

When we got face time, we showed off Sorsed and this accomplished two things. 1) It showed that we could build a product 2) It offered talking points about how we can turn Sorsed into our new platform and had easy comparable that investors could see at the time.

Here is what you have to understand; when I finally met with our angel investor and got him to invest he told me something to the degree of:

“I am investing more in you and your ability to execute ideas than I am in concept of Tracour. I like what Tracour will do and I believe you can build a product to deliver on these promises. “

When we pitched to VCs, we had a functioning prototype of Tracour thanks to our angel investment, this made it much easier to show that we were capable of building the platform but required additional funds to reach our goals. At this point, it was “we love the idea and know that you can execute on your promises”.

What it is like to pitch

If you are not willing to be a persistent jerk, you will not survive. You don’t have to be a jerk to the investors (I don’t recommend that) but you have to follow-up, get used to having your calls not answered and most of all, you better be persistent.

Here’s a fun fact for you, Tracour does not have a pitch slide deck; nothing, not a single completed PowerPoint. We always pitched demos, a demo goes so much further than static slides. Our entire pitch was a demo of either Sorsed (angel level) or of the prototype (VC level).

Granted, our financials at that time were pretty simple so we didn’t have customer growth charts so slides would have been boring.

What I learned from this process

1) Be ready to be turned down, a ‘no’ is only part of the process and it only takes one ‘yes’ to complete a deal.1

2) If this is your first startup, be prepared to talk about how you are able to be ‘that guy’ who can build this product; They are investing in your ability to execute.

3) You cannot do it all, surround yourself with go-getters and divest the work as needed. Focus on what you are good at (hopefully pitching) and drive that home.

4) Prove that you can build something…Sorsed for us proved that we could build a product and got us our first bit of cash.

Not sure if this will help, but it was our journey to raising money. Build something (anything) to show off that is related to your end goal…let them see what you can do, it helped us out quite a bit.

Follow along with Tracour: Twitter and Facebook

resource : http://blog.up.co/2015/03/26/ask-entrepreneur-really-like-raise-capital-early-stage-startup/

MY STARTUP :

A story with millions of choices in it.

Try to imagine this. When you're reading a story on the web or blog, you are given two choices. You can choose the next story based on your own choice. After selecting then you can continue reading the story. Shortly afterwards you will be presented back to the 2 other options. The next choice is up to you. Then you continue the story you are reading. After that you will be faced again with 2 choices. So onwards.

If you feel curious then you can re-read the story by changing your selection. Then you will see a different story with the story that you have read previously. The question now is why is this so? Because the storyline will be varying according to your choice. 

Based on the above, then you are faced with two choices. Are you interested in reading my story is? Or you are not interested at all. The choice is in your hands.

If you are interested then spread widely disseminated this article to your family, friends, neighbors, and relatives. You can also distribute it on facebook, twitter, goggle +, or other social media that this article be viral in the world. By doing so it is a new entertainment industry has been created.

Its creator named Richard Nata.

The full articles that talks about this: 

1. A Story That Surprised The World.  http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-story-that-surprised-world.html

2. Set yourself the next story.  http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/01/tentukan-sendiri-jalan-cerita.html

3. a story with so many choices.  http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-story-with-so-many-choices.html

4. A story with tens of thousands of articles.  http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-story-with-tens-of-thousands-of.html

5. A story with millions of choices in it. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-story-with-millions-of-choices-in-it.html

6. You are the main character in the story you are reading. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/you-are-main-character-in-story-you-are.html

7. life and death, blessing and cursing, from the main character in the hands of readers. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/life-and-death-blessing-and-cursing.html

8. Preparing a story carefully. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/preparing-story-carefully.html

9. How to make a story with tens of thousands of articles? http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-to-make-story-with-tens-of.html

10. Read a story with a lot of choices on the web or blog is far more interesting than reading a book or books. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/read-story-with-lot-of-choices-on-web.html

11. In 10-20 years into the future to read the story in a book will be abandoned. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/in-10-20-years-into-future-to-read.html

12. Startup with earning millions - tens of millions of dollars annually. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/startup-with-earning-millions-tens-of.html

13. Start-up strategy in order to earn millions to tens of millions of dollars annually. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/start-up-strategy-in-order-to-earn.html

  

14. Looking for investors for startup that produces millions to tens of millions of dollars annually. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/looking-for-investors-for-startup-that.html

15. Open offer letter to investors. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/04/open-offer-letter-to-investors.html

16. Why should you invest in my startup? http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-should-you-invest-in-my-startup.html

17. If a story can generate tens of millions of US dollars, then what if made many stories? http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/if-story-can-generate-tens-of-millions.html

18. Conclusion: In theory, in 10-20 years into the future, my startup income, amounting to hundreds of million USD annually can be obtained easily. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/02/conclusion-in-theory-in-10-20-years.html

19. Summary of my startup. http://richardnata.blogspot.com/2015/03/summary-of-my-startup_48.html

Are you interested in my offer?

Do you want to be an investor in my startup?

If yes, don't hesitate to contact me as soon as possible.

Thank you.

Lord Jesus bless you.

Amen

P.S. The offer letter I gave also to the hedge funds and venture capital and other major companies in the entire world. So who is fast then he will get it.

P.P.S. If you are not interested in my offer, it is a good idea to periodically review my blog to see the development of my blog.  http://richardnata.blogspot.com

If I've made a story on my blog and get a multiplication of clicks then you should know that the readers liked my story.