Hacking AngelList (or “social proof”)
Stormpulse first appeared on AngelList on 8/24/10. We got no interest whatsoever and didn’t even make it past the gatekeepers for any kind of introductions. It stung, bad. We had lots of traction, some revenue, and millions of visitors. And the best product in its class. We pretty much swore off AngelList completely.
13 months later we have 46 introductions and 149 followers, and the gatekeepers are saying it’s one of the hottest listings on AL.
How did we do this?
* I applied to StartupRiot in Atlanta. I got accepted and pitched my heart out for 180 seconds. Didn’t win, but met a guy from IBM.
* Guy from IBM invites us to Austin, TX to IBM SmartCamp. We pass through each of their interviews and become an Austin finalist. I pitch to a room full of investors for 5 minutes (video). We didn’t win, but we met a lot of interesting folks in Austin, including Joshua Baer.
* Things were going pretty well for us earlier this year; we moved completely to B2B and the market was responding. We decide to try fundraising again. I email Joshua Baer. Joshua Baer invites us to Capital Factory Demo Day 2011 in Austin. I pitch for 180 seconds (video, I’m at 59 minutes) to a room full of investors.
Shortly after the presentation, investors start handing us their cards and other entrepreneurs start offering to introduce us to anyone they can.
* While at Demo Day, I meet Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm. She writes and publishes a very nice profile of our business in GigaOm.
* We re-apply to AngelList, voila.
Another thing I learned from all this … if you watch the video of my pitch at Demo Day, you’ll notice that the slide behind me is entirely filled with the logos of our customers and inbound leads. Market, market, market. If you show people market, they will ask about the product. If you show people the product, they will doubt about the market and probably won’t even ask you about it.
So if you want to raise money, there’s no substitute for working hard on your reputation. I’m a nobody from Florida. Seriously. If I can do it, maybe you can too. It’s worth a try. (Also, please understand I’m not saying that working hard is the key to success—you may work just as hard or much much harder than I did and still fail. But that’s for another blog post).
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