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. The market-defining story. It’s a story that makes product-market fit come alive. What works? What’s credible? What are investors looking for? . Caveat: generalizations are dangerous.

Marketing 119

Marketing Social Media Sales Cycle Angel Investor 119

Gust

SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

The secondary market for private company stock is brand new, and so nascent that it is virtually nonexistent. But there was much, much, much more smoke than fire, and I would be extremely surprised if even 1% of those four companies changed hands in the secondary market. On average…none. Invested Interests'

Stock 104

Stock Marketing Sales 104

Gust

NOVEMBER 23, 2013

Marketing strategy actually is quite important to most investors. And investors do not like top-down projections (“we’ll get a 10% market share…”). Invested Interests Power Pitches business plan investors marketing pitching product startup' original post can be found on Quora @ [link] *.

Business Plan 135

Business Plan Marketing Product Startup 135

Gust

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Parts of the answer are that (a) there are enormous regulatory requirements relating to secondary markets, and (b) there are no analysts tracking private company stocks.

Seed Stage 131

Seed Stage Hockey Stick Cap Table Liquidation Preference 131

Gust

OCTOBER 30, 2015

The post The Market Diversifies: International Innovation Captures Larger Share Of Startup Funding Applications appeared first on The Gust Blog. Quarterly data from Gust, the online platform for the global angel investment industry, reveals that while incumbent leaders show no sign of slowing down, new industries and areas Read more >.

Marketing 70

Marketing Startup Global 70

Gust

AUGUST 8, 2012

If it were a new service offered by a startup, I would never use it again, chalking it up to failure to do any customer development whatsoever before bringing it to market. On a customer satisfaction scale of 1–10, this experience scored a zero. Postscript : My laptop battery died with an hour to spare on this particularly long flight.

Customer 143

Customer Southern California San Jose Marketing 143

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

A few other credible ones would include Chairman of the Board (COB), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Gust

JUNE 19, 2012

I used to think you could use convenience and common sense to predict markets. One of my earliest excursions into market research was working for a research firm doing a 1979 forecast on ATMs. There’s also timing and trends, leadership, luck, and maybe even marketing. . Who’s going to enter this market? .

Startup 180

Startup Forecast Angel Investor Software 180

Gust

AUGUST 17, 2014

Narrow the scope more realistically to people with specific age, income, and education demographics, that you can realistically reach with your marketing plan. For a startup, it’s impossible to run an effective Facebook, Twitter, content marketing, and Google AdWords online campaign all at the same time.

Entrepreneur 182

Entrepreneur Technical Review Angel Investor China 182

Gust

APRIL 13, 2014

If both of you are experts at software development, even though one loves design and the other loves coding, that still won’t get the marketing done. Look at the big picture first of development, finance, and marketing/sales. Passion for what they do.

Partner 179

Partner Software Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 179

Gust

NOVEMBER 9, 2014

Agile assumes and plans for iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve as more is known and markets change. Here are the advantages I see with this approach: Faster time to market. Don’t mistake this for a license to launch an incomplete or poor quality solution.

Agile 163

Agile Startup Lean Social Network 163

Gust

MAY 30, 2023

Modern investors love to first read a two-page summary of your business plan, formatted like a glossy marketing collateral sheet, with text well laid out in columns and sidebars, and a couple of relevant graphics. This one had better grab their attention, or they won’t look further.

Business Plan 171

Business Plan Marketing 171

Gust

MAY 17, 2023

Your sights are now set on raising capital in Silicon Valley to scale your business and reach new markets. Imagine that you are the founder of a Brazilian B2B SaaS startup that has landed a few enterprise clients and has some good traction. While your conversations with U.S.

Delaware 160

Delaware Silicon Valley B2B Startup 160

Gust

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

A fair valuation cap is whatever the market will bear. So look to the market for comps. There are plenty of good explainers for what a valuation cap is and does, so I won’t get into that.

Valuation 91

Valuation Security Marketing Startup 91

Gust

AUGUST 22, 2012

One commonly used approach is to identify widely felt “pain points” in the target market; build a workable solution to address them using particularly effective or efficient means; and if the business model pencils out, work like crazy to execute, execute, execute.

Technical Review 172

Technical Review Egypt Morocco Russia 172

Gust

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

The founding team is usually one or two individuals building and testing products as they try to validate a demand for them in the market. Before a technology startup becomes a company, it spends a period of time as simply a project. At some point, founders ask themselves: when is it time to turn this project into a company?

Startup 172

Startup Demand Founder Technology 172

Gust

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Technical due diligence typically starts with a full one or two day review with the engineering and product marketing staff. Market need and size validation. . Investors will validate pre-existing investments and stock ownership to create an accurate market capitalization sheet for your company. Business and financial status.

Technical Review 152

Technical Review Due Diligence Intellectual Property Private Equity 152

Gust

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

But too often people get bored with consistency and drop a working strategy long before the market understands it. Has something else happened, like market problems or disruptive technology, or competition, to change your basic assumptions? And on the other hand, there’s the brick wall. Use your common sense.

Technical Review 121

Technical Review Algorithm Business Plan Technology 121

Gust

DECEMBER 6, 2011

An experienced software engineer, for example, can develop a new mobile app with his or her own resources and market the product on the web with very little capital. Most high-impact companies need substantial cash resources to sustain their rapid grow.

Angel Investor 179

Angel Investor Venture Capital Valuation Software Engineering 179

Gust

JANUARY 4, 2012

Later stage companies have some additional concerns: What favorable impact could IP have for PR, marketing and investor relations purposes, or as an attraction to potential acquirors? Most investors will assume that if the business plan is solid and a large market opportunity exists, there will be vigorous competition from other players.

Intellectual Property 143

Intellectual Property IP Startup United States 143

Gust

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

Research your target market to find out who they are and how to reach them. Combine social media seamlessly within your traditional marketing plan. • According to the “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2011” from Ad-ology, social media will be the biggest budget gainer among small businesses in 2011, with 39.4%

Social Media 125

Social Media Media Startup Curation 125

Gust

JANUARY 31, 2013

Modern theories of economics and finance teach us that in a world of perfect information, the market will decide what a fair price is for any company’s stock at any point in time based on its current financial condition, results of past operations, analysts’ forecasts of future performance, industry conditions and so on.

SEC 158

SEC Prospectus United States Technical Review 158

Gust

APRIL 28, 2022

Every early-stage startup has a unique set of constraints it must deal with and trade-offs that must be made along the way to launch its product into the market. From product development, to legal, to go-to-market strategy, even the most seasoned startup founder can make potentially business-crushing missteps.

Product 91

Product Early Stage Product Development Founder 91

Gust

APRIL 27, 2014

This will include the first version of many critical processes that can be split out later, including market opportunity, requirements, product definition, business model, sales process, and organization. Write down the key elements of your business plan very early, and keep it current as things evolve. Product development process.

Startup 187

Startup Institutional Investors Angel Investor Bootstrapping 187

Gust

MAY 10, 2023

After witnessing the challenges that my friends faced while looking for new jobs during the pandemic, I wanted to find a better approach to the job market. Enployable, Inc. is the world's first value-based AI job matching platform.

Founder 91

Founder Matching Hiring Employee 91

Gust

JULY 15, 2012

For example, if your startup is building a high-tech software product, a dream team of advisors would be a former CEO or high-level exec in another software company, a former software marketing executive, and a former financial executive.

Advisory Board 178

Advisory Board Technical Review Startup Software Review 178

Gust

JANUARY 6, 2023

In fact, there are a number of ML SaaS platforms on the market today that are intentionally designed to do the heavy lifting for you. But there’s just one catch; Your startup requires machine learning (ML), and to you, that feels a bit, well, overwhelming. We’ve got some great news for you!

Artificial Inteligence 91

Artificial Inteligence Startup Design Marketing 91

Gust

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

A great market story. I don’t really care nearly as much about the detailed numbers as what market the deal disrupts and what it changes. I’m talking about what Marc Andreeson calls product/market fit. And I don’t want to invest in teams that are surprised at the question or don’t know what it means. Scalability.

Technical Review 70

Technical Review Software Review Angel Investor Exit Strategy 70

Gust

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

The most common failures are solutions looking for a problem, lack of a defined market, or an inadequate revenue model. I expect that should seem intuitive to all entrepreneurs, but every investor I know has many stories about startup funding requests with major business model elements missing.

Business Model 91

Business Model Green Revenue Operations 91

Gust

JULY 26, 2014

The essence of entrepreneurship is creating a new venture where one does not already exist in the market as you find it. As such, the founding process is one in which the entrepreneur is competing with market forces. Invested Interests entrepreneur fundraising market startup' original post can be found on Quora @ [link] *.

Startup 156

Startup Entrepreneur Cost Marketing 156

Gust

DECEMBER 22, 2011

What do you suppose the market value would be of the trademark “Facebook,” its lowercase “f” symbol, or the Facebook.com domain?). Trademarks , which we touched on last week, are brand and product names, graphic logos, slogans, taglines, and other indicators of origin of the goods or services in question.

Intellectual Property 149

Intellectual Property Technical Review Software Review IP 149

Gust

NOVEMBER 12, 2013

Startups: Investors expect new marketing. If you don’t understand the broader implications of social media, content marketing, curation, engagement, and relationships, then you desperately need a great reason why not. Here’s are some things I think every startup founder needs to keep in mind: You still need to deal with marketing.

Social Media 142

Social Media Media Curation Angel Investor 142

Gust

NOVEMBER 8, 2012

Today, it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a market capitalization of more than $550 billion, directly employing 47,000 and supporting a far larger economy , from contractors and suppliers to iOS application developers. Granted most startups will never become another Apple or Google. Intellectual Property.

Silicon Valley 187

Silicon Valley San Francisco Intellectual Property Accredited Investor 187

Gust

OCTOBER 5, 2014

Look at previous company results, and listen for evidence of self-sufficiency, problem solving, and a thorough understanding of your product, technology, customers, and the market. Most importantly, don’t assume your favorite Fortune 500 executive is the best role model for your entrepreneurial startup.

Startup 165

Startup Early Stage Technical Review .Net 165

Gust

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Too many entrepreneurs develop a new product without regard for market demand , then build an entire strategy based on creating a need, rather than acting on an existing market need. The best startups find a way to drive the market with their technology, rather than push their new technology-driven ‘solution’ on the marketplace.

Technology 167

Technology Angel Investor Early Stage Viral 167

Gust

MARCH 11, 2014

Data from 2012 and 2013 will show lower success rates because most of these companies won’t be mature enough to be in the market for a B. Invested Interests content marketing saas Startup Funding startup management' Originally posted by Tomasz Tunguz on his blog, www.tomtunguz.com.

Seed Stage 169

Seed Stage Seed Capital Startup Green 169

Gust

SEPTEMBER 16, 2012

How do I measure the return on my development and marketing investments? Especially in this world of constant litigation and hackers, how can I as an executive manage the risk to my personal future, as well as the future of my company? How can I control a highly distributed technical operation, which changes every day? Return on investment.

Technology 162

Technology Agile Architecture Distribution 162