The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don't try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don't make God-jokes in Utah and you don't get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you're looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here's a list of five to get you started. Sponsor 1. 11 part series on what makes an entrepreneur successful and it's a great primer for first time startup founders. 2. PAULGRAHAM.COM : Best known as the co-founder of YCombinator , Graham and his partners revolutionized the investment model. The entrepreneur popularized both the incubator-style program model and the term ramen profitable to describe lean startups. To look at what Graham is interested in, YCombinator publishes Requests for Startups on an ongoing basis. 3. A VC , @fredwilson : Perhaps one of the most well-known blogger/VCs, Fred Wilson is a principal with NYC-based Union Square Ventures . He has a 15-year track record and some of his investments include Twitter , Disqus and Etsy . Wilson is an avid blogger and offers insightful commentary on emerging tech trends as they happen. 4.
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5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice
In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles . They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers. Then they voted, and the top vote-getter - Mingly - was born, and has since been invited to Twiistup, a showcase for hot upcoming startups in Los Angeles at the end of January. Sponsor Mingly, a self-proclaimed "social CRM," is a universal address book for your various networks of contacts the helps your prioritize and follow up on important relationships. It works with Facebook , Twitter , Google Contacts , and LinkedIn and allows you to create groups and set up alerts. The idea was the side project of founder Tyler Koblasa before he decided to pitch the idea to the crowd of entrepreneurs and coders at Startup Weekend. Their response? "I need that, I love it, let's build it," says Koblasa. "I had no expectations," Koblasa tells ReadWriteWeb. "I did think that in a perfect world, we would end up with a working, more advanced product - which we did." After the event, he not only had a product, he had a company name and a team of developers to go with it. Now, two months later, the small company forged in 48 hours has been chosen to participate in the upcoming Twiistup event, a much coveted invitation to startups because of the event's exposure to media and investors. Twiistup organizer Francisco Dao was one of the guest judges at Startup Weekend Los Angeles and rewarded Mingly with a free application to his event, and he's not surprised the judges accepted it. "It blew me away! I just love that these guys built a prototype in two days," Dao tells ReadWriteWeb. "And now they'll be on stage with these larger groups that have funding." Mingly is a great example for entrepreneurs-to-be that starting a business doesn't always mean quitting your job and spending lots of money. In this case, the Mingly founders spent $75 to attend the Startup Weekend event, and soon they will be "in front of a lot of media and a lot of money," as Dao puts it. Discuss
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From Concept to Company in 2 Days: Mingly Invited to Twiistup
While maybe not the most visually compelling product, Healthful Apps represents an interesting new trend for 2010. Created by Apps for All , the product recommends customer-reviewed iPhone health applications in a variety of categories including autism, relaxation and memory. Although the company's first effort is focused on health, the larger industry-wide question remains - will this year's branded iPhone app be a recommendation app? Sponsor Last year ReadWriteWeb covered Appsfire as one service that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite iPhone apps. While it's certainly a useful tool, recommendations are made by individuals rather than influential groups. As seen with Healthful Apps, there's opportunity to extend these recommendation-based applications to special-interest and location-based communities. Imagine investment communities trading and reviewing stock and news apps, or Oprah Winfrey's community recommending shopping and reading apps, or New Yorkers sharing transportation and amenity apps. The personalization of applications by politics, lifestyle, locale and community may prove more useful in making app recommendations than any automated Genius system that Apple could hope to cook up. Additionally, because providers can monetize recommendations through paid app referral fees, it's entirely possible that influential communities can earn money simply by weighing in with their app preferences. It's honestly so meta that it hurts, but if social media has taught us anything, it's that community influencers are tastemakers. If this is in fact the future, then my question to you is this - Which communities would you take recommendations from, and would you pay for the app? Discuss
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Will Recommendation Apps be the New iPhone App Hotness?
You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson . The duo's filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow's New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one - to make video interesting. Sponsor Like Tubechop , Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service's transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, "At some point, longer videos become useless. It's the metadata and the fact that we're allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool." The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a
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Search, Monetize and Fact Check YouTube Transcripts with Speakertext
While 2009 continued a downward trend as one of the worst recessions in U.S. history, the decline for venture-backed mergers and acquisitions has not been as severe as the dot-com bust in 2001 and 2002. New figures from the National Venture Capital Association show that in the last quarter of 2009, M&A hit $7.8 billion, up from the previous year's mark of just over $2 billion. Overall, 2009's total of $12.6 billion could not equal 2008's $13.6 billion total. Sponsor Mergers and acquisitions totaled over $68 billion in 2000, only to fall below $8 billion by 2002 following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In contrast, 2007's M&A total of $29 billion has declined to just over $12 billion in 2009 - a much more smooth rate of decay which has begun to flatten out. Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, says they expect to see continued improvement throughout 2010. "Clearly, we have a long way to go towards a full recovery but we are encouraged by the increasing acquisition values and the number of companies that have filed a registration with the SEC to go public," he says. A late boost in the fourth quarter of 2009 has helped startups from reliving the experiences from earlier in the decade, the largest of which came from Amazon 's July purchase of Internet shoe seller Zappos for $930 million. This acquisition helped internet specific purchases climb to $2.2 billion in Q4 2009 - a near seven-fold increase from 2008's final quarter. Discuss
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It Was a Turbulent Couple of Years But Startups in Q4 '09 Prospered
It may soon be easier for foreign startup entrepreneurs to set up shop in the United States thanks to immigration reform which would create a specialized startup visa program. The proposed program would make more visas available to entrepreneurs who have at least $250,000 in funding from a U.S.-based venture capital firm, or $100,000 in angel funding. The startup must also have plans to either create five new jobs every two years, raise at least $1 million every two years, or generate at least $1 million in revenue. Sponsor The current system grants 10,000 visas each year primarily to investors that have financed over $1 million with plans to create at least 10 full-time positions. It also allows lower benchmarks for investors in less wealthy countries. However, the new requirements - which are part of a bill proposed by Colorado Congressman Jared Polis (above) - would fall far beneath the current benchmarks, making it easier for smaller companies and those from underprivileged countries to create jobs in America. The idea is the brainchild of programmer, essayist and Y Combinator partner Paul Graham who first wrote of what he called "the founder visa" in April of 2009. In some cases, inspired entrepreneurs enter the U.S., but after their ideas flourish and their visas run out they are in danger of being forced to go home to start their businesses. Investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of Foundry Group , Brad Feld experienced this first-hand at the TechStars program in Boulder, Colorado this summer as two of the ten groups had foreign founders. "Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them Visas - all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome," Feld says. "Both companies are still trying, but each are now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses." Along with other entrepreneurs, start-up advisors and venture capital investors, Feld has co-founded StartupVisa.com , a homepage Feld says has been a resource for the movement inspired by Paul Graham's vision. "In the next few months, we'll be expanding it aggressively to incorporate grass roots support and feedback," he told ReadWriteWeb. One of StartupVisa's contributors, Manu Kumar, helps spread the word about visa reform by recounting his own struggles. "There were multiple points at which I came very close to having to leave the United States because of the visa issues," says Kumar. As the country attempts to pull itself out of one of the largest recessions in history, it only seems logical to make it as easy as possible for foreign entrepreneurs to enter the country and create jobs for Americans. "I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous," says Graham. "The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing. Discuss
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Attracting Foreign Startups: Access To U.S. Could Get Easier
If you ever thought startup life would be about champagne toasts and million dollar term sheets then you need to get back in your time machine and set the dial for the nineties. If there's one thing we learned in the latter half of this decade, it's discipline. To say that it was a tough year, would be an understatement. But those of us who stayed lean will be back for 2010. While the below concepts weren't invented this year, they certainly hit their stride in 2009. Sponsor 1. Outsourced Labor : Rather than hiring onsite staff, more companies flocked to services like Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower to fulfill simple tasks. Companies listed their jobs and thankfully, a temporary workforce was there to get it done. 2. Cloud Scalability : Rather than paying for a slew of dedicated servers, startups took advantage of elastic workload tools like Amazon Web Services and Heroku . These services kept our site running during huge traffic spikes, but they ensured we weren't burning cash in the downtime. 3. Web-Based Project Services : Google Apps made huge headway in 2009 as companies migrated from Microsoft to the cloud. Many startups began using real-time cloud collaboration tools to organize their projects, while others looked to customer service sites like Get Satisfaction and Zendesk to manage complaints. 4. Monetization : While consumers will settle for free products, premium services demand a certain level of competence. According to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, "the most intimate transaction between people is money". In other words, if you put a price on your product and users paid it, you got your feedback. From paid iPhone apps to subscription music services, businesses in 2009 got the feedback they needed to find out if their products made the cut with consumers. 5. The New PR : From soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his Twitter empire to fast talking Windell H. Oskay , Optical Illusion Discuss
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5 Trends in 2009's Startups
