What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know (Part 1)

If You Want Me to Invest in You, Get to Know Me First

By guest author Brian S. Cohen

[This is the first in a four-part series of excerpts from Brian S. Cohen and John Kador’s forthcoming book, which is available for pre-order on Amazon.]

If you want me to invest, it really improves your chances if you do your homework and arrange to get an introduction to me by someone I respect. If you can’t do that, the ideal way to get my attention is to approach me at an investing symposium, business plan competition, or other speaking venue where I have my investing hat on.I am amazed how many emails or calls I get from entrepreneurs who want me to invest in their startups but have not taken any effort to find out the most basic information about me. If founders haven’t done this basic homework before calling me, I have to believe they will be just as lazy when it comes to calling prospects or customers. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Quantifying The 1Mby1M Value Equation

At 1Mby1M, our agenda is to help you figure out how to put one foot before the other and build a sustainable business, irrespective of financing. If you use the program the way it is designed to be used, you would be able to derive value from it on multiple vectors. Let me quantify that equation for you. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Conclusion

I know many of you are struggling to figure out how to put one foot before the other in your quest for a successful entrepreneurial journey. I also know that many of you are continuously chasing investors over customers.

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The Million Dollar Club: Freshdesk

Completing our list is Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender Freshdesk. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy. After a series of successful products in his work as a technical architect, Girish was inspired to start Freshdesk by a posting in Y Combinator’s Hacker News. Learning that a major company in the customer support software industry, Zendesk, had raised its prices, Girish and Shan set out to create an affordable alternative. [Note: Zendesk has since had a successful IPO and is valued at ~$2 Billion (May 2015).]

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The Million Dollar Club: InSync

Atul Gupta first began his entrepreneurial ventures in 2003 with an IT provider based in Bhutan, India. His drive to provide software solutions to local small businesses resulted in a move to Kolkata in 2006, where he founded InSync. Over the next three years the company conducted extensive research through their more than 500 domestic customers. Atul noted that once a business reached a certain volume, customers could no longer manage an e-commerce business without an integrated ERP system.

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The Million Dollar Club: Happy Grasshopper

In October 2010, multiple-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree Dan Stewart began a side venture based on a clear need for effective e-mail marketing campaigns. The project was originally inspired by an earlier venture, a customer relationship management (CRM) company Dan founded in 2007. One of his customers, a marketing-focused teacher to real estate agents and brokers, advised his students to stop sending e-mails that were “boring” in nature. He instead recommended that e-mail messages be “fun, relationship-building, [and] conversation starting,” giving Dan his evidence that creative message content was a challenge facing the market at large.

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The Million Dollar Club: Indus Net

Abhishek Rungta has bootstrapped Indus Net Technologies to a $5 million, 500-person Web design and digital marketing services company from Kolkata, India. Indus Net focuses specifically on application development for Web and mobile, integrated digital marketing, and Web design, with specific work in SEO and SEM.

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The Million Dollar Club: Mansa Systems

San Francisco-based Mansa Systems, led by founder Siva Devaki, is one of them. Mansa provides cloud, mobile, and social enterprise solutions, including cloud storage, secure document sharing, cloud telephony and more. In order to differentiate the firm from its competitors, Siva initially focused on Salesforce CRM, partnering with the company to build apps for Salesforce customers and publish them via AppExchange. Today, the company provides both products and services that extend the Salesforce CRM capabilities.

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