Ask HN: 50k round not taken seriously by angels?
I am raising 50k for my startup Blastchat on iOS! However, "people" are telling me I should ask for more money because serious angel investors will not invest because I am only asking for 50k! What's up with that?
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadI know you are saying you are working to solve a problem that no one is looking at but when you say "chat" and "ios" I can only think of saturated markets. You have all sorts of chat solutions for all sorts of needs. What makes you different? What will get you millions of users? Saying you have influencers and NBA Stars brings to mind, well, twitter. And honestly that doesn't help. You have an up Hill battle to convince me as an investor. If you can, I'll invest.
Second, your valuation is way off. Within the last 18 months we have a really successful sale of a venture backed chat application, whatsapp. They got $42.20 per user valuation. That would place you at a $42,200 total valuation. Of course, that's just a fake valuation, you aren't there. The only reason whatsapp got that much was because of the volume of non-US users they had. You have no volume. You are trying to sell me that you are work $1,000 per user. That's an up Hill battle as well. Unless you have a massive market differentiator, it's a tough sell.
I'm not saying it will be impossible. But you need to show me how I am going to turn my $50,000 into a lot more. If you can pay me back within a year, I'll take $75,000 total. If you need it for 10 years, I better see a 1000% return. Remember, many other people have startups which will give me that type of return. You have to show me why you're better than them.
A few other thoughts. Nothing about this post says that this group is in the valley. Not all seed investors are in the valley. Not all companies are in the valley. It's a poor assumption to think they are.
Seed investors want a very healthy return on their investment and they want it relatively quickly. You may invest $5,000,000 or $50,000,000 or whatever amount you'd like blindly in whatever increment makes you feel good. But if you don't evaluate the investments you are making, you won't he investing for long. The "Savy Silicon Valley investors" don't invest blindly.
I've been told many times when rejecting a company that I have made a poor choice because of x, y, or z. My reply I'd always the same, "feel free to pull out your own $50,000 and invest. I have plenty of opportunities." I don't mean it to sound snarky. It's just reality. Investors always have processes. This is mine.
Why?
1) Your investors will model $50k as being gone in an eyeblink. In the Valley, that's ~3 engineer-months. Angels will want your round to last about 12~18 months.
2) All entrepreneurs raising their first round are inexperienced in some way, but for better or worse, the combination of not knowing angel investors want rounds to be bigger and not knowing $50k will be gone in an eyeblink shouts Particularly Inexperienced Entrepreneur Here, which counsels against angels believing that your company will be the one out of 10 which > 10Xes their money. Angels absolutely, positively must invest in that company, and it's hard, so they reserve all their shots for companies they think might be that one.
3) You're horrifically mispricing your company relative to market conditions right now [+], which you would think would suggest a savvy investor would think "Hmm deal of the century", but which actually mostly signals "Stay way the heck away" because of the power law of startup returns ("If you make a practice out of getting great deals on good startups, you will lose money; you need to make get good deals on great startups.")
There are more fish in the sea that investors, by the way. If you really and truly need only $50k to make this business a success, one might suggest friends-and-family and/or bootstrapping and/or -- and one hesitates to suggest this but one may have used it before -- credit cards.
[+] If your company is investable, it is worth > $2 million right now. I'm taking the liberty of assuming you aren't valuing the company at that because no one does a round for < 5%.
Your company may or may not actually be investable. If you're curious, you can read on Venture Hacks. Fair warning: what the Valley institutionally considers as investable is, if one takes it as a judgement of one's worth, pretty brutal for most people building tech companies. (It's not -- I've had basically no investable company in my career until maybe the current one -- but many people wrap their self-worth up in what investors would say about their businesses for some reason or another.)