Gust

SEPTEMBER 27, 2014

One excellent way to do this (with a good bit of help from the experts), is to create a draft business plan using LivePlan from Palo Alto Software. Gust is used by over 1,000 angel investment groups, accelerators, business plan competitions and support programs to manage their applications.

Angel Groups 159

Angel Groups Elevator Pitch Software Review Deal Flow 159

Gust

FEBRUARY 22, 2014

When people would ask a similar question back then about the difficulty of software development, my usual response was “anyone can write a TAP program over a weekend that will work with 80% of the paging systems in the world…but getting it to work on the other 20% will take you a year.” despite having lots of competitors.

Belarus 107

Belarus Kazakhstan Portugal Accredited Investor 107

Gust

JULY 12, 2012

The following day, I delivered a four hour workshop on capital sources and pitch strategies for fifteen entrepreneurs in the Propel program. We finished our first full day at a dinner with Halo , the Northern Ireland Business Angel Network (Alan Watts). We had a lovely time in Northern Ireland.

Community 121

Community Estonia Ireland Finland 121

Gust

MAY 11, 2014

A good place to start looking is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which is a lifeline for high-tech startups. A more general approach is to check out Grants.gov , which is a searchable directory of more than 1,000 federal grant programs. Pursue grants and investors in parallel.

Seed Money 164

Seed Money SBIR Dilution Government 164

Gust

AUGUST 29, 2012

Somebody asked me in email what investors look for in the marketing portion of a business plan and/or business pitch. If and only if that potential market seems to come alive, it needs credible plans to move from ideas and messages into media and concrete marketing programs with some backbone and metrics to them.

Marketing 119

Marketing Social Media Sales Cycle Angel Investor 119

Gust

JULY 8, 2012

For angel investors, early-stage means there is a good business plan and maybe a prototype, but no customer revenue. For a startup founder, this stage is when the “big idea” has become a passion for him, but he hasn’t written anything down yet. For VCs, early-stage means customer revenue is less than $10M.

Early Stage 177

Early Stage Finance Seed Stage Entrepreneur 177