Day 2 Video:

Day 3 Video:

Related posts:

1. Startup Funding Help
2. How to get cheap money for your startup
3. How to Get Cheap Money for Your Startup (Part 2)

So here’s the deal – I’m asking YOU and want YOUR opinion.

I would like to answer your Top 3 Questions on Funding. Anything…no question too small or too large.

If there is a question you have on getting your business funded either add it as a comment below or shoot me an email via the contact us page.

What will happen then?

Then I’ll pull the questions together and create a video answering the most popular questions. Might be fun to see how many I can answer if ten minutes or some such challenge and when I don’t have a good answer (and that happens often ‘cos no one has all the answers right?)…I’ll loop in some buddies who have deeper expertise in certain areas.  So one way or another – you should get an answer…

All you have to do is to wake up from your lethargic state – sit up a little straighter in your chair, lean forward, take action and hit that comment box below with your pearls of questioning wisdom.  And you will probably get a good answer back. Free consulting – can’t say fairer than that…

So either add your questions below or shoot me an email and lets get your biggest questions answered…

No related posts.

Hi Folks 

I spent the whole of last week on vacation and it was my first times doing absolutely nothing work related in more than ten years.  I am ashamed to admit that I even took my laptop on my Honeymoon…(and yes, my wife still mentions it ten years later…)

Well, not last week…last week the laptop was left gathering dust at home while I spent the week in Cape Cod, MA, sailing, sunning on the beach and by the pool and hanging out with my wife and young daughter. And do you know what was amazing?

Well, yes, the 90 degree heat, the crystal clear water and the fantastic meals were all amazing….but aside from those things… 

..the amazing thing was I got more real thinking done about my businesses and the evolution of my business model sitting by that pool and hanging out with my family than I would have done by turning up to the office every day. I guarantee it! And please don’t roll your eyes – that wasn’t the intention, it just…sort of…happened, as I had my eyes closed, listening to the sea wash back and forth up the sandy beach.

So last week felt like a vacation and it was – but it gave me the ability to step back from the trees and see the wood or to be more accurate, the multiple forests that surround me and what I do. Being an entrepreneur and involved in working with entrepreneurs is a gift – and it’s a vocation but I just realized that even the truly committed need some time off sometimes and when you do, that can be the best thing that has ever happened for your business, your health, your sanity and your family life.

So what does this mean to The Funding Guru site and what we do here?

Well, in short – I will be focusing on what people ask me to do more than anything and that is to help them prepare for fund raising.  If you are an entrepreneur then I’ll work with you on your positioning, your investor tools, your executive summary, business plan, financials, elevator pitch and so on – as well as guiding you through the hurdles and obstacles you’ll encounter. My goal is to get your great new or young business the money you need to create a world changing business.

I believe a big part of that process can be shown through a set of tools, courses and products too. I’m going to be working with my current group of entrepreneurs to create those tools throughout 2010. And if you are an entrepreneur looking for help – reach out and I’ll see if I have bandwidth. No promises but I may have some bandwidth to help. 

And in the meantime, even if you are the most passionate entrepreneur on the planet – why not take an afternoon off and do something completely different – and maybe you too will see the woods instead of the trees. And it could be the most productive afternoon you’ve had in years.

If you do take the afternoon off – come back and leave a comment or send me an email. I’d like to hear if taking a step back helped you too…

Andrew

PS – here’s a few quick questions so you can tell me how I can help you…should take 20 seconds MAX!

Click here to take survey

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Here’s a quick poll….

Now I was going to set up a nice and easy to use poll and create links etc on this post…

But you know what, if you can’t add your choice as a comment or send me an email via the ‘Contact’ page, then you probably don’t care enough…

…and those people that don’t care enough…

I don’t really want their opinion…

…would you?

So here’s the poll…

Would you rather see articles on:
1) How to get angel investor funding?
2) How to get venture capital funding
3) How to find angel investors?
4) How to close an investor deal?
5) What are thetypical steps to engaging and closing an investor for your business?
6) Other (Please throw out a few suggestions and we may add them to the poll list)
7) So what is frustrating, bothering or worrying you about starting a business, growing a business or getting funding?

Just trying to get ‘into’ those areas that are really important to YOU!

YES, YOU! Not Me but You…so, over to YOU now…

Anything…go CRAZY!

Comment or send an email… (andrew (at) thefundingguru dot com)

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1. How to Close an Angel Investor
2. Three Reasons Why You Haven’t Closed Your Angel Investor Yet
3. Angel Investor Mind Control?

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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The Dragon Slayer - Slaying the Investor Dragons

Received some questions today from readers so thought I would answer them via a post – just in case other readers wondered the same thing.

What is the Funding Guru all about?
The Funding Guru is all about helping entrepreneurs and startups go through the process of fund raising through either angel or venture capital investors. We do that through writing posts on subjects that relate to the process of fund raising, on the dos and don’ts; the tools (such as executive summaries http://www.thefundingguru.com/how-do-i-write-an-executive-summary/ ); business plans; pitch presentations and covers more peripheral elements such as the psychology of the process – i.e. helping entrepreneurs to get into the motivations of the investors and we also include podcasts and videos with investors and other entrepreneurs.

Talking to a reader this morning – he mentioned at first glance the site could be about us at The Funding Guru making the investments ourselves – almost like a Dragon in the Dragons Den giving cash to startups after some analysis. That is not the case.  We invest our time (a much more precious resource than cash – wouldn’t you agree?) on helping entrepreneurs get ready to meet and go through the fund raising process and negotiate the deal with investors – so we don’t made investments ourselves – we’re more Dragon Slayers than then Dragons themselves. I would love to take credit for that line about us but cannot so full credit to Erik Luhrs (http://guruselling.com/blog/)

The funding guru is not about making financial investments in startups or young companies or even about hooking them up with investors – there are legal restrictions that would not allow us to broker deals between startups and investors. These dealer / broker relationships are closely monitored and regulated by the SEC – we do not do deals and we are not middlemen between two interested parties.

How can you help me find an Investor?
Now its true we have some great relationships with angels and the venture capital community and occasionally may introduce a particularly exciting startup to an angel or VC but never for financial or equity gain or because of any ‘deal’.  I do it when I am very excited by a company and see a fit between the different investors I know and I never ever gain from either the referral or the deal. Hope that clears that one up.

Here’s another way I’d like to help – if you are looking for an investor – consider reaching out to me via the contact page above and telling me about your business with a few well written paragraphs – if they are exciting, perhaps I’ll put them up on the blog and encourage interested people to reach out to you directly.

What’s it like being The Funding Guru?
Ah – a great question! A steady stream of fantastic entrepreneurs send me their executive summaries and their business plans pretty much every day. The opportunity to help entrepreneurs is a gift and I appreciate it. So – keep sending me your executive summaries and your business plans – I’ll gladly look through them and do my best to give you feedback on how they can be improved so you can increase your chances of getting angel or venture capital investors.  I was on a plane yesterday thinking about the various entrepreneurs who had reached out recently and thought it may be useful to them and the other readers if I took some elements of these plans and summaries, scrubbed them for data that would be propriety and leverage them to show what entrepreneurs are doing well and perhaps not so well. Real world case studies instead of the usual higher level stuff you usually get from blogs in this space. LET ME KNOW IF THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL!?!? and if you would like to even be one of the first Funding Guru lab rats.

Where are your ads?
Another great question. As you can see, there are no ads on this blog. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, there are ads for a few free reports which I’m offering as ‘ethical bribes’ to encourage you to join my list. Why? Because I’d like to build a relationship with those people who like to read this blog and the best way to do that is to meet you all – face to face…obviously that’s not going to happen as much as I’d like so comments on the blogs and emails are a close second to actually meeting. So – no ads for other people’s stuff – just my own free stuff and this allows me to focus on creating value and helping you and other entrepreneurs who come to the site – maybe at some point I’ll put an ad or two. We’ll see. One idea I’m mulling over is if there is the opportunity to help early stage companies more systematically and directly – i.e. rather than writing a twenty minute blog – perhaps spend a two or three hours going through the executive summaries and business plans directly and unearthing the hidden veins of gold that run through them to improve the speed and likelihood of getting those coy and hard to get investors locked in.

Would this be a service anyone would need? Hum….

Do you have guest bloggers / writers?
Well I haven’t so far but would its actually a great idea providing the guests have some value to add to the readers. So – if you are an entrepreneur, an angel or a venture capitalist and would like to write a guest post – email me before writing anything and lets chat about what you’d like to contribute – no promises but if its good and if it will help entrepreneurs raise cash then I’m all for it.

Who is the Funding Guru again and what makes you think you can help?
I could spend the next 500 words trying to impress you but take a look around, watch this ( Who is the Funding Guru?) and if you still have questions – contact me through the ‘contact’ page above – I respond to all my emails and comments.

So – I’m not a broker or a dealer but I do often connect entrepreneurs with angels and venture capitalists if they are ready for those conversations. I am open to work directly with entrepreneurs to get them ready for that investor conversation. It would be great to get some high value add contributors to the site, we don’t advertise anyone else’s stuff and I truly appreciate all the emails I get and the ability to help exciting entrepreneurs start and grow great new businesses.

Any more questions?  Reach out via the contact page above and join my mailing list by adding your name and email in the box to the right. I’ll also send you some valuable downloads to help…and if you want to get started raising money today…this will help save you months…(Supercharger)

Andrew

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The Secret to Achieving Your Dreams

This is perhaps the weirdest post I’ve posted…all I can say is I was flying home from California having spent time with some friends and my brain just went in a ‘different’ direction – no idea why – something in the airline’s shrink wrapped brownie perhaps?

I’d welcome your thoughts and comments at the end!

++

The Simple Secret for Achieving All Your Lifetime’s Dreams and Desires

Have you ever had an ‘Ah-ha’ moment in your life? A split second when all the different pieces that had been floating around almost ignored in your mind, suddenly and irrevocably ‘click’ into place with a burst of bright shiny realization? A moment when darkness, a darkness you didn’t even know existed, falls from your eyes and in that moment of realization it…all…makes…sense?

If you are one of the lucky ones, the paragraph above is making you nod your head, you are remembering just such a moment and, without knowing quite why, you are smiling.  Yes, smiling…lucky you.

Or, maybe, when you read that first paragraph it seemed familiar, but hauntingly so…hints of those moments which had almost been yours but had always just been a little out of reach. Close but not quite close enough, tantalizing you.

We’ll I want to share with you my simple ‘Ah-ha’ moment.  I call it simple because it really is – the secret of achieving all your dreams is so simple that it has paraded itself in front of you many many times. So many times that you don’t even see it for what it is… ‘the Simple Secret for achieving all your lifetimes dreams and desires.”

But and doesn’t there always seem to be a ‘but’ – just because it’s a simple secret doesn’t mean its easy to accomplish. I can’t guarantee that just know this simple secret you will actually achieve all your lifetimes desires. Like all things in your life, that is in your hands not mine or anyone else’s.

So – do you want to know what this simple secret is? The one that has been right in front of you all this time? And the only way you will achieving all of your lifetime’s desires?

I almost hesitate from putting it down on paper (or on screen anyway…) because I know there are people who will read this and discount it – even though it is perhaps the most important thing they will ever read….

Are you ready?

…I’m swallowing over here as I write this, a little afraid that it will get missed, a thunderclap in the wilderness where no one can hear it shake the earth….

The simple secret for achieving all your lifetime’s dreams and desires is….

to decide….

Yes, the secret to achieving your lifetime’s dreams and desires is YOU have to decide that you WILL achieve them.  You can’t achieve them by wanting them, by desiring them, by thinking about achieving them, preparing to achieve them, learning to achieve them, waiting to achieve them soon or later…no…

…to achieve your lifetime’s dreams and desires, you have to decide that you will achieve them. And you have to decide every day, constantly, with every fiber and with every act you take – when you next meet a person who has not achieved what they wanted in life, ask them why not?

And I would bet you a comment on this post (which I’d like you to write by the way…), that they’ll tell you a thousand different stories why they did not manage to achieve their lifetime’s dreams and desires – but when you sift through the words, the excuses and the dried up husks of hope – the one common thread running through their words, excuses and alibis for why they failed to achieve their lifetime’s dreams and desires was because they didn’t truly decide that they were going to achieve them. They let other things get in the way of making that definitive and resolute decision and before they knew it, life had happened and the time had passed.  Now you know what’s interesting? They may still have had an amazing life…life is funny like that but still…

So, is it a bet? Will you leave a comment on this blog as, if you really think about it, I may have won this wager?

If you want to achieve your lifetime’s dreams and desires – make the decision that you will, then make it every day just as you are falling asleep and every morning as you wake, as you open your eyes and look up at the ceiling and consider what this day will bring and having really, truly made the decision (which, after all is simple right)…follow through and do it. Believe it or not, making the decision was the hardest part! And I will not guarantee it, but I am certain that when you do, opportunities in your life will appear and perhaps for the first time, you will have the eyes and the right frame of mind to see them all. Life likes people who decide what they want from it – Make the decision for your own life or life will make the decisions for you.

Which would you prefer?

All you have to do is decide.

I appreciate all your comments.

Andrew

Ps: Any more questions?  Reach out via the contact page above and join my mailing list by adding your name and email in the box to the right. I’ll also send you some valuable downloads to help…

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Venture Capital checklist

Earlier this week I set out with the goal of creating a Venture Capital Checklist i.e. a comprehensive one pager that outlines the key questions you need to be ready to answer when talking to Venture Capital companies….

…as I got into it I discovered a few things…

…it’s actually tougher than it looks to keep it simple and to the point and more important, even though the questions are simple, answering them isn’t easy…don’t make that mistake as you read through them please….

Let when show you what I mean…

“How large is the market?”

Well, let’s suppose you have created a product which cuts lawns automatically without any human intervention and doesn’t risk decapitating the dog when left to do its job….

So how big is your market?

The first and most obvious answer is X times the number of houses with lawns in your country…

Great answer!

…But Venture Capitalists are interested in how your business can become dominant in its field, how it can be worth a significant amount of money from where you are today…in other words, how their investment could multiple tenfold, a hundred fold, a thousand fold….so when looking at your market size….consider….

All the houses with lawns in your country, in your continent, in the world…

Consider all the commercial lawns….the public ballparks & sports fields, the professional sport facilities…

Consider how the product can be adapted…what about to harvesting without human input based on weather conditions?

Think creatively, think expansively, and think about how your market can be expanded through additional uses and product or service evolutions….

…Get visionary and show them how your small little product or company can literally be worth an absolute fortune…

I created this tool to help – normally I’d ask that you sign up to get my emails so I can start to build a relationship with you….

…but instead of requiring that – how about it if give you the Venture Capital Checklist right now and if you find it helpful – you add yourself to receive the occasional email from me…and by the way, I never share my email list with anyone…

Here’s the Venture Capital checklist for you to download – click here:

http://www.thefundingguru.com/VentureCapitalChecklist.pdf

It’s a PDF file so you’ll need the ability to open pdf files (http://www.adobe.com for a free Adobe reader)

Andrew

Ps: Any more questions?  Reach out via the contact page above and join my mailing list by adding your name and email in the box to the right. I’ll also send you some valuable downloads to help…

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Berlin Wall

If you have come to this site you are probably interested in raising money for your startup or growing venture – thanks for stopping by…

I also appreciate all those people who reach out via the contact page or twitter – always happy to help whenever I can…

Now there are hundreds if not thousands of blogs out there written about the Venture Capital community – if this were just another one of those sites I’d pack up and go do something more useful…lets face it, anything would be more useful than yet another one of ‘those’ sites.

So, rather than write yet one more article which you could read somewhere else – I thought I’d add a slightly different take on what makes today ‘special’.

As you all know, today is the 20^th year Anniversary of the bringing down of the Berlin Wall. Yep, twenty years since the physical divide between Eastern and Western Germany was torn down the people of Germany were allowed to move freely.

Throughout the day, a few ideas have been bubbling up – why did the wall get brought down then? And why, perhaps as important, why did it stand for so long? Why was it allowed to stand, dividing a country, for thirty years as people died trying to escape from one side to the other?

Doesn’t it strike you as odd?

Hundreds of thousands of people walked along the graffiti ridden walls for decades, allowing soldiers with rusting guns to stop them from going where they wanted to go. But, on November 4^th,  nearly half a million people gathered together and demanded to be allowed to cross the border without hindrance – five days later they got their way.

Why am I bringing this up?

Well, the Berlin Wall was only effective as long as everyone believed that it would always be there. Thousands of people walked along it, brushing their fingertips along the deteriorating concrete and dreamt of what life would be like on the other side – but most of them never truly believed that the wall would ever come down, that they could ever break through to a better life, a life of freedom and economic abundance. But one day, as the thought that maybe, maybe the wall really could be smashed through – that thought grew and spread, until enough people started to believe it and to come together with enough passion to face down the threats and allow the burning heat in their hearts to rule their heads and overcome their fears.

That thought became a belief, a conviction and its what allows people to smash through their own walls and push through to the freedom of creating a life of which the had only previously dreamt.

Just as the Berlin Wall signified the divide between two ideologies – we each of us has walls inside of ourselves – walls where we tell ourselves to “play it safe”, “Keep doing what we’re doing and not risk it…” to in effect, keep walking along that divide between the life we have and the life we could and perhaps should have. We walk along, our fingertips brushing along the barriers and wondering what our lives would be like on the other side.

I have spent the last few months creating a set of tools to help entrepreneurs learn the steps to raise the money they need for their new businesses from investors – but in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself hesitating – slowing down as I get closer and closer to finishing and I haven’t been able to understand why. But seeing that wall come down toay, has made me wonder…perhaps I have my own walls.

…its true that I have started different businesses, have helped entrepreneurs start businesses and get ready for investment – I’ve always taken to heart that ‘the only constant is change’ – but I am realizing that I have become used to helping individual entrepreneurs….I am comfortable working with each of them to create the pitch and the plans to help an investor see the potential of their business…

…but a set of tools, a course that gives entrepreneurs an easy to follow process and tools they can use over and over again throughout their careers to raise investor funds….well, that’s on a whole new level…and it makes me nervous…why? I have no idea – perhaps just because it’s different, perhaps I’m concerned that the tools won’t be any good…or even that they’ll be too good…can you image what being able to tap into a flow of investor funds whenever you need it for your businesses as you succeed in your business career? Whew! Scary stuff!

Looking at images of the Berlin Wall coming down on the various news stations today, there is one thing that is certain – even though the future may be unclear and just a little nerve-wracking, you can only truly change your life if you are prepared to break down those walls, whenever and wherever you find them…

So – let’s break down those walls together and make the life of our dreams.

As always, I appreciate any comments you may have or feel free to send me a note directly – I respond to them all (well, all except the crazy one and the spam….a guys gotta have standards you know….)

To your entrepreneurial success…

Andrew

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