HN Explorer

Hacker News, shut up and take my money

31 points by cheerioty ↗ HN
Recently I made a couple of attempts to offer early-stage startups on HN both money (small to medium check sizes) and advice... All attempts yielded pretty much zero responses so far.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487830

I've successfully raised capital for my startups in the past (https://medium.com/questmate/how-we-raised-a-us-1-5m-seed-round-at-us-13-5m-using-nothing-but-our-product-ca5215d40a98) and also have a good portfolio of investments into startups either directly or via other people's funds (read: VC) as an LP.

My hypothesis is that, despite economic turndown, investment money is still available in abundance.

So what's yours? Does it sound too good to be true, maybe?

45 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread
tailspin2019
I mean, if you're desperate, I've got a few side projects I could show you.

I probably need advice more than money, but I'll happily take the latter :)

Edit: Also more seriously, would recommend adding some contact details (at least) to your HN profile. If you're doing outreach here, that would probably help (not everyone wants to Tweet about this sort of thing!)

cheerioty
Not desperate ;) Just keen to connect, learn & help. I've just updated my HN profile with my Email. DMs are also open on Twitter.
dekervin
I just sent you an email, you can see what I am hacking on in my bio!
sergiotapia
I'd love to speak with you, how can I get in touch? My email is in my HN profile.
cheerioty
I'll ping you but have also just updated my profile with my email and Twitter handle.
chrisdalke
Do you have a particular investment thesis/focus? I think many early-stage startups are hesitant to take investment vs. bootstrapping unless that investment also comes with some significant domain experience, scaling advice, connections, etc. and is from an investor who's well-aligned with their vision.

For HN specifically: maybe helpful to write up a high-level summary: Who are you, what's your focus, what kind of startups are you interested in helping? In this forum the anonymity-factor is higher (vs. twitter or other venues) so that information is probably more important here.

cheerioty
I've updated my profile to give a bit more background on myself. For some reason, I assumed interested people would just quickly do a quick background check themselves instead of me selling myself to them. In retrospect, I see how this might have been a bad assumption.
solarmist
I skimmed your bio, and "yes" it makes all the difference. You now come across as someone that it's at least worth talking to.
throwaway2037
Agree. Double thumbs up for this profile. Many times I read someone's profile and it is almost nothing. If you are looking for support/funding, please spend some time to create a good profile!
cheerioty
My general investment focus is quite simple: I either invest in stuff I'm already a happy customer of (mostly stocks), things I wish would exist but doesn't, and/or stuff that's just stupidly ambitious but could change the world as a whole (for the better) if successful.
shyn3
There is a post about a 100k userbase without the runway money. You may be a good fit.
cheerioty
Cheers! I actually already left a comment there a few hours ago, but still struggle to figure out what that person is actually working on.
shyn3
A lot of posters here don't shill their products unfortunately although I bet many have great products.
solarmist
Well, part of it is because people describe it as "shilling," so they would rather avoid bad interactions or the perception of being pushy or sales-y.
shyn3
Irony is biggest reason most products fail is the lack of sales.
solarmist
Yup. Very true. It’s an odd culture we have.
lostgame
Hey! I’m working for a small mobile gaming startup with a working product and I’d love to talk. Email is in my profile! :)
cheerioty
I couldn't find your email in your profile, unfortunately. Feel free to ping me on mine though. Looking forward to a chat!
darkhorse13
I have a pretty interesting/weird idea of making apps from docs (as in you write a doc to create an app). Would you be interested? I have my email listed on my HN profile. Would love to discuss this idea with someone.
cheerioty
Let's do it! Mind emailing me if you haven't already? My email is in the profile now.
darkhorse13
Awesome, just sent an email with the subject prefixed with "[Hacker News]". Looking forward to it! Forgot to mention, I have a rough working prototype.
MOARDONGZPLZ
This seems arrogant. Your two previous posts offer no detail, basically just “Who’s Raising?” as if everyone is going to beat a path to your door. Your medium post talks about raising $1.5M, which is fundamentally not impressive at all, and I don’t mean that pejoratively or dismissively. The company where I was employee #5 and helped build from Day 1 recently raised 100x that much and I wouldn’t in my wildest dreams talk about that unprompted or think anyone cares what I think about fundraising in the least.

Your conclusion is essentially sour grapes. “People aren’t taking my money so there must be a lot of money because no one is interested,” which ignores other reasons they’re not interested. The reason I’m not interested: Taking an honest read of your linked posts and this one I see no compelling reason to even DM you should I be fundraising because you don’t seem to bring anything compelling or useful to the table except a small check.

Hope this doesn’t come across badly, just trying to be candid. You come across as super arrogant to me despite having essentially no successes, or at least you’re so hand-wavey and abstract that they don’t come across. At this seeming early stage of your “VC Journey” or whatever it’s likely that the shoe is on the other foot and you should be selling yourself hard rather than the other way around.

atian
He/she lives in Australia. As a one-time visitor, seems they are not exposed to the air that you and I share and may explain their experiences with them putting capital where there is little (comparatively) industry.
pickitupsnake
Maybe a little arrogant but as someone looking for a 'small check' to rundown an idea, that doesn't bother me.
cheerioty
I'm sorry to hear it was perceived this way, this was obviously not my intention. I've updated my profile with a little bit more background on me. I'm a bit worried though, seeing your comment here, that actually talking more about my background and, what I consider my personal achievements, will come off as even more arrogant again.
solarmist
No, it's the opposite. You seem to be falling into the money version of the "if I build it, they will come" fallacy. That's where I perceive the arrogance and a touch of "big fish in a small pond." To me, you haven't done anything overtly arrogant.

The fact given two people, most of the time they will not be a good match, often for mundane reasons, so you need to give people reasons to positively or negatively filter against you. Even weak filters like "I have experience in x or y domains and I like z domain, but I'm willing to talk to anyone" would improve your hit rates.

From the perspective of a founder (who's still pre-revenue, pre-funding), I spend a LOT of time filtering who to talk to just because I don't have the time to talk to _anyone_ who might be interested.

Shindi
> ... almost 7 years after Atlassian acquired my previous startup ...

Yeah, OP you're a second time founder and that helps a ton. You don't acknowledge that at all in your medium post.

sharemywin
I know it's off topic:

I assume your part of questmate?

Seems interesting but your "what is questmate" should be a quest.

epicquest
well, we're raising a seed round, and frankly, what we're doing is too strange and disruptive for the vast majority of angel investors, even the ones who think they want to fund something strange and disruptive. get in touch if you want to write a small to medium check demonpore.com
cheerioty
I have no idea what I've just looked at, wow. I got to run this by a friend of mine, one you might potentially know :) Would you mind dropping me an email (address in the profile) and we take it from here?
cheerioty
Bonus points for having the word "Quest" in your name btw, and "64" in your product's one ;)
nickfromseattle
I've been thinking about raising a seed round. Do you think we're seed ready?

- HR SaaS

- Public launch in March 2022

- 400ish free trials

- 68 paid customers

- 90% on annual plans

- 1 churn

- Growing 22% MoM over last 3 months & 18% MoM last 6 months

- Founding team has worked together for 3 years, built a 45 person team for an A16 portfolio company, and shipped (a different) small B2B SaaS together to 4,000 users & $150k in revenue

- ~$500k gives us two years of runway for founders, money for devs create a more mature product, move up-market and invest into building the biggest HR community on the internet.

cheerioty
Sounds pretty damn ready to me, mind dropping me a message (sascha [at] tape.io) and we take it from there?
hubraumhugo
“If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.”

The best way to build relationships with potential investors is to ask for advice, and that's exactly how I got in touch with OP after posting "Ask HN: How to raise a seed round in a down market?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847941

He's now an investor and is supporting us with great advice :) Founders helping founders, that's how it should be!

EGreg
Fine. Here: https://qbix.com/invest

We are doing test the waters for a crowdfund: https://wefunder.com/Qbix

The offer: come in with $50K-200K to be the lead investor and get the earlybird terms. Then we raise $1.07M behind you, and continue to carry out our plan to make an open source Wordpress for Social Networks.

Our apps attracted 10 million users in 95+ countries etc etc.

If interested contact me at greg at the domain qbix.com and happy to answer any questions. Or calendly.com/Qbix/meeting

ffhhj
I'm building a next-gen search engine, are you interested?
cheerioty
Sure thing, please drop me an email if you haven’t yet!