Today was just a day of finding VCs and angel investing companies. Spent a lot of time on Signal (big thank you to NFX) which is an awesome FREE source of finding investors. Spent a couple hours just logging company names, then going back and looking up each site.
So, I ended up with a list of about 650 companies from Signal. There was probably more but I gave up at that point. There was 3500 or so individuals on the list but some companies have multiple people on the list. I’m guessing there is over 1000 companies on the list. So the idea was to get through the 3500 individuals, quickly screen them based on their investing location and then build my list of potentials. Again, got 650 unique companies or so. I didn’t do the greatest job though as some of the companies on my list are not US based companies. Oh well.
So combing through these sites, I check their philosophy which generally shows what they are interested in investing in and what they bring to the table. Some of these segregate marketplaces as an investing category which is super insightful for me as that what we are building. Some companies have marketplaces under consumer companies. So first check what they seem to like and what they offer, then look over their portfolio to see who they invest in. Honestly, I dont know 99% of the companies on these lists. I don’t know if I’m just out of the look or none of these companies simply apply to my everyday life. Makes me wonder if in the future people will feel the same about us.
So I learned from a couple sites that they will not invest in companies that may compete with an existing investment. Great to know. I automatically rule out any investor that has invested in Thumbtack. I ran into one that invested into Service Titan which is not a direct competitor now, but could be in the future. Found another with Housecall Pro on there…another one to avoid.
I built the list and made it through the first 200 companies on the list. Some are easy with a “Pitch Us” button or in their contact info, they leave a way to send them your business info. Super thankful for these though I’m not sure if they will be fruitful or not. I feel like it is the smaller companies that do this. I’m ok with that. If they will give us the time of day and believe in what we are building, they will likely know people from the companies we need warm intros to. Im hopeful.
Last but not least, I think we need to up our raise amount to $2 million. Seems like a crazy number but so many of these companies don’t invest in companies less than $1 million. We could use the runway and who knows how much marketing is really going to cost us. Need to do more research about SAFEs vs Priced rounds. I think a SAFE is a better investment tool as we don’t have a clue what the company is worth.
