This is a great idea. I tried using various CRMs for keeping track of investors in our round and none of them were well suited for the job, so smart to build a single purpose CRM for fundraising hooked into AngelList. Does the product support Bcc for emails to keep track of communications? What are your plans for keeping startups around after the round is raised? Just an idea that might be out of scope, but I could see a monthly investor update component being a way to keep founders engaged with investors and your product too.
Feel free to ping me if you want to any feedback - andy@tettra.co
@andygcook@tettra Thanks Andy! Great suggestions. We will add email bcc or Gmail synch in an upcoming version, and we have plans for an investor update function as well.
For now, we are hoping that once you raise money you spend some of that capital in the new-ish FoundersMarket, which is a curated collection of deals on other product that startups need as they scale (InVision, Stripe, Gusto, Bench, Hired, etc.).
Thanks for the suggestions and I'll follow up on the feedback offer :)
@sailornathan Sounds great and looking forward to it. I just sent out a few emails via GMail to potential investors, and it would have been awesome to just Bcc Foundersuite or select a checkbox to sync the prospect into the CRM. Instead I'll have to go into the tool and manually add them all which is more work that could be avoided.
One more piece of feedback is that when you move a deal into the committed column, there should be an input box for the amount committed right in the popup alerting me that the chance of closing has been changed to 100%. That'd save me a click of having to go into the card and add the amount, and since there's already a popup it seems to make sense.
I'm actually planning on using this as my dashboard for raising when I go out. Definitely way better than anything else I've seen to programmatically get and sort the investors in AngelList. Definitely reduces the cognitive overhead associated with just getting started with a process.
This suite is quite cool and easy. It has sort of created a new gestalt for the way I think about the funding process. Thanks @sailornathan! Keep sailing'!
We used the old version of Foundersuite’s CRM to manage investor relations and loved it because the interface was as friendly as Lyft. This takes it to another level. I almost can’t wait to jump into fundraising mode again to try it out.
Love Foundersuite's Investor CRM! As a startup CFO, I've raised over 100 angel and venture rounds for my companies. The typical process is to share a spreadsheet with team and advisors, trying to figure out who should make the warm intro. The spreadsheet quickly becomes a mess and the tracking ends up in multiple spreadsheets, email, paper notebooks, Evernote, etc. the Investor CRM not only simplifies the process but offers the investor search n steroids. (Full disclosure: I'm an investor. A big reason I invested was this piece of the offering).
@professorvc Steve thanks for your support-- your feedback has really helped shape the product. (And to PHunters, if you can get Steve on your team as advisor or investor, it's well worth it...Steve was giving us feedback and pushing our *really rough* 1.0 product to his students, well before he cut us a check! :)
I am a proud investor here, and think that Nathan and the team are onto something special. Spreading best practice from the Valley to the rest of the world :)
Foundersuite is one of those great applications that has a spectacular UI/UX. It was built by someone who gets how fundraising works and has taken those learnings and put them to work in a first rate, disruptive product. Foundersuite is as significant for entrepreneurs, first time or serial, as Slack is for business. It is a must have, do not miss product that will help you get to where you are going smarter and faster.
@danerobert thanks for hunting us! :)
Here's the quick back-story: we were actually on PH about 2 years ago when we first launched Foundersuite as a suite of 5 apps covering idea validation, fundraising, PR, etc. While people loved the general concept, the products themselves...to put it bluntly... weren't great.
One investor we pitched said, "you're trying to scale without really nailing any one use case" (he passed).
So, we decided to focus on a few core things. We picked Investor CRM to be our flagship product, since I believe there's a ton of "pain" and inefficiency in the fundraising process that can be improved with software.
The product that you see here today is designed to help you build a target list of investors faster, and then to manage your fundraise with your team more efficiently...think "Trello for raising capital" with hooks into AngelList's API.
The product is only about a week old, so we'd LOVE feedback, ideas, feature requests etc from the amazing Product Hunt community. :)
ps for those of you who'd like a longer overview on our build process, I posted a blog here: https://blog.foundersuite.com/in...
@sailornathan@danerobert Love this idea -- there's more true value to be gained. I think this is the piece Angel List and Gust failed to deliver on. Kudos to Nathan and team for hopping on it.
@sailornathan awesome sauce. This is an aching pain for startups raising capital. Having the right product, market, channel and so on are necessary, but not sufficient if you can't find the right investors and present yourself well. As a foundersuite-r, I can't wait to fire it up. Bravo.
@sailornathan Awesome. I tried the CRM after @launch fest last year and this is a HUGE improvement. Thanks for doubling down and solving for a particular use case.
@mikepetruzzo@launch Thanks Mike! Yeah, people "liked" the old CRM, but obviously we wanted to build something people "love"...hopefully this is the first step on that journey.
@sailornathan like this a lot. I think you can solve some issues from the investor side of things as well. With regards to the current CRM, will there be a way to export data?
@sailornathan This is great! Huge fan of you and Foundersuite, completely agree with @jaymelone, this has tremendous value to founders, especially outside SV. Makes the process of finding out the right investor and who may be able to give a warm intro much less painful.
Like all the tools on FS, this just works easy. And it's truly unique, synthesizing the fragmented stack I'd previously use for the process of sourcing, communicating and managing the fundraising process. It's a no-brainer.
I have followed Nathan over the last couple of years as he has built out FounderSuite to an amazing tool for startups.
I am particularly impressed by the Investor CRM module, that allows you to have all information about
your fundraising project in one place. No more jumping between Trello and AngelList to keep track of you fund raise!!
This is a super cool TOOL and by far the most efficient way to manage a large set of Angels while raising capital.
Idea Stash