Perhaps the most common question I get asked is “How do I find an Angel Investor?”
Unfortunately they’re is no easy answer like…”Go to this site, sign up and voila, choose an Angel Investor…”
Actually – that’s not exactly accurate, there are two sites that come to mind – The Go Big Network and Funding Post - you should check them out…
I seem to recall some data from somewhere that the majority of Angel Investors invest with a 60 mile radius of where they live – perhaps its an urban myth but that sounds about right to me because, after all, many angels like to be close to their investments so they can get involved to some degree.
In my experience, Angel Investing tends to be on a regional rather than an national or international basis – take that into consideration before you stump up your hard earned cash to sign up to a broad brush internet service that promises to deliver handfuls of Angel Investors like an endless beauty parade – probably not going to happen unless you live in a few areas where they have high concentrations of angels…i.e. New York, San Francisco and perhaps Boston. And if you do live in such an place, why do you need to use a website service anyway – just go hang out at your local coffee roastery…
One point to make is Angel investors (or accredited investors) are defined as:
“a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase;
a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year;”
For the full SEC Definition which includes all definitions – go here
…but one point I’d like to make is you can see from the two key definitions above that angels are not that rarified a set of individuals – you could actually be living next door to one right now or perhaps have spoken to a few over the last few weeks or months during some social event. That’s a critical point – in my not so humble opinion, one of the best ways to find an angel investor is literally through networking – so where would I hunt for angel investors?
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You can get almost everything you need for free on the web…
So much so that I spent months looking through different sites, subscribing to different email lists and following certain bloggers. I thought I could get everything I needed from multiple sources and save myself some cash. After all, you can get nearly everything you need for free online right?
But then I realized something. Yes, I probably could…if I was looking for a recipe for chocolate brownies or the ten steps to teach my dog to sit and roll over, then you can probably find everything you need for free online. But I realized, after spending months pulling different strands of information together, that I was going to have to take a risk and trust that the person who was offering me a product that I’d have to pay for, was not a shark and the product would be worth more than I paid for it…
I had to, in short, suspend my disbelief that this person was going to screw me…tough when it was more than $100 and how much about this guy did I really know? I guess the reason I took the step and bought the product was because what I wanted to know was not as unimportant as a chocolate brownie recipe – I wanted the information and a) didn’t want to wait and spend the hours or days pulling the information together and b) I wanted to make sure the information was good information…I made the decision to trust that person and thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed…
So – I recently launched (in a very quiet manner…) two products / services….the first was offering ten entrepreneurs one on one time to help them prepare for angel or venture capital funding….I called that program “1 of 10″ and details are here.
Most of the ten slots sold out quite quickly – so some people suspended their disbelief and were committed enough to their new businesses, that piecing together information from multiple sources and ‘winging it’ wasn’t good enough. I guess that when something is as important as fulfilling your lifetime dream of starting a business, investing in improving your chances of success is a smart thing to do…
The other quiet launch was of an audio product which was designed to help people supercharge their fund raising from angel investors in particular. Details of that product are here.
This audio product is a pre-launch of a more comprehensive (but probably more expensive) product with video, pdfs and audio.
So after writing multiple posts to help people I finally dipped my toe in the water and create some products. The goal of those products is to bring together years of experience and help people who want to increase their chances of raising money to fund their new or young businesses. Some readers have asked why? And even thought (or implied…) that it was somehow wrong of me to do so…the short answer is, there are plenty of free resources online but I’m a firm believer that you get what you pay for…if something is worthwhile, then there is usually a cost involved – like any business, the customer needs to decide if the item they wish to buy is worth the price tag attached. I can honestly say that making a few hundred bucks for a product is not a real motivator – but, and here’s why there’s a price tag at all, knowing people appreciate the content enough to purchase them and based on that purchase will likely take the content and use it to start or supercharge their business IS a huge motivator.
Could I give it all away for free? Sure. Would people value the content as much…you know, somehow I doubt it and anyway, what is the price tag for saving yourself months and increasing your chances of getting the money you need to fulfill your dream?
Last question of the post – what help do you need? or What question do you have? If you could get help with anything related to your startup – what would that be? Anything goes related to bootstrapping, angel investors, Venture capitalist or even broader.
Add a comment or send me an email via the contact page.
Best
Andrew
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