Does my co-founder pitch convince you?
Ask & Summary:
I'm starting to look for a technical co-founder after building and validating an MVP.
Can you provide feedback on my pitch?
What am I missing to attract the right person?
If you want to know more, just shoot me an email: marcus@venturemark.co
The Idea
What
- Venturemark is a communication tool that makes it easy for startups to engage investors and advisors.
- It functions a bit like a private, B2B version of twitter
Problem
- On the startup side, it's time consuming to build up a track record, manage important relationships, and get the right tactical help at the right time from advisors and investors.
- Investors suffer from communication overload and often are unable to efficiently get up to date signal on current and potential investments.
Solution
- Startups can accelerate their startup through tweet-like updates structured to engage and build credibility with investors and advisors
Vision
- My personal goal is to accelerate human progress.
- I believe Venturemark will help get us there by making it easier to understand ventures, build founder credibility, and engage the people best able to move progress forward.
Current Status
Validation
- Managing Director of the largest venture capital fund in southeast asia is an angel investor.
- Recently committed first paying startup (angel+accelerator funded) at $40/month subscription
- Verbal agreement from one of the world's top accelerators to participate in 1 year paid beta.
- 100s of investors from > 14 countries on waitlist
- 100s of startups on waitlist.
- MVP built and now dog-fooding
Tech
- 90% coded and designed by me
- React frontend
- Node.js, Google Cloud + database as a service (similar to firebase)
About You
- product-minded
- deep technical depth
-- primarily server-side but down to go full stack. - You see the next step in your life as co-founding a highly impactful, enduring company
About Me
- Living in San Francisco
- Experience founding startups:
-- some were investment-backed, some were bootstrapped, one engaged ~ 1 million users/month, one approached six figures in annual income after 3 months. - This startup is about improving the world (and making some money along the way)
Skills in order of proficiency
- Product, Business Development, UX, Fundraising, Marketing, Management
- Frontend Development, UI Design
Next?
- Send me an email with follow-up questions: marcus@venturemark.co
- If there's a fit, we'll jump on a video chat and dive deeper.
Thanks for reading!
@marcojelli I don't know this is not what you are looking for. But I thought to give it a shot to check if you are open it.
Here it is - I run www.tractionmate.com and work with developers and early startup founders to build early traction. And, I also run another productized service to build an email list using lead magnets and a few other tactics. It's @ https://www.listbuildify.com
Let me know if you want to talk more about these lines.
besides cutting a dedicated channel, what makes this special over any chat/.. service?
The Validation points are way better than the problem statement, that's a bit fluffy and non specific
(90% coded and designed by me, why not 90% reused by exiting solutions and 10 percent yours in like customisation, this sounds mostly like a marketing play segment of common things..)
So your technical and your looking for another technical co-founder?
Thanks for the feedback.
yeah - I'm not great a describing the problem yet. After spending a lot of time building a validating, I think it's very nuanced. Most existing solutions, in my opinion, use the wrong framework.
re: special:
for an investor all existing communication mediums don't archive well. So it means a lot of time/cost with CRM solutions. So Venturemark removes that headache. Materially established investors are spending 10s of thousands of dollars to ducktape custom solutions. The problem here is not that CRMs don't exist, it's that CRMs require too much 'busy work' to keep up to date. It shouldn't take work to understand the current status
for founders there's a lot of nuance depending on stage. Monitoring how relationships evolve over time is pretty time-consuming (as anyone that's engaged in a fundraising process can attest) and not actually the 'work' of building a company. It's just an enabler of solving problems.
But the most concrete ways in which Venturemark is immediately better than say writing a chat is that the founder can 1. create a private group of contacts 2. review this history of updates sent to those contacts 3. store 'updates' in a single place by group. A tangible example here is one of the startups on our waitlist is a seed funded startup. They have 23 investors (some angel, some institutional) and they have both a fiduciary responsibility to keep these folks updated to varying degrees as well as a desire for the folks that are best able to accelerate their startup to add the most value. Here there's a connection with the benefit to investors -> make it easier for them to sift through their commitments with appropriate context and provide value (like making an intro, or fulfilling an ask)
I'm looking for a more technical person :-)
I'm best at non-tech, but I'm technical enough to build the first version. I'm running into a wall on the tech side where I have to spend more and more time learning appropriate technologies. Recently it has been diving into nuances of authentication and authorization - so building is slow because I have to context switch between product, design, development - and the development stuff is not where I'm most effective.
So basically a niche communication tool that a combination of like CMR+slack kinda.
Like I get the value in a niche specific system. And they are an easier sell. And if you find a finance rich niche like this, you can monetize nicely.
But I think it's wrong to code it from scratch in terms of ROI.
Your users don't care what's under the engine.
If you take some white brand-able customisable CRM setup with a chat tool lets say, and tweak it to perfectly fit the niche..
Than you have just the same business with less effort, cost, ongoing work
And you can charge just the same, and put work work on the rest of the biz rather than the dev.
And you actually get to add new features for "free"/cheap
No every business needs to be 100% custom code is what I'm saying and I think you have one of these, if you be smart to use it.
Have a 100% custom UI - sure. Plugin everything you need so it be seamless - cool. But don't code auth and permissions and.. yet again :D.