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Signal — Connect with the right VCs
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This is awesome! Super useful for operators to see which investors "focus" on certain themes (i.e. we love online travel), so you can start to see where each investor - angel or institutional - ranks in this focus area.
Hopefully this makes the fundraise process 10x easier and Signal is still a very close, tight community relative to what AngelList has become, which is really, really big and hard to navigate.
@daveambrose Yes, we want to reduce noise and keep it tight. We want to keep adding more useful crowdsourced data to the investors, and then additional features to help the Founder navigate better.
This is fantastic and really needed. A product suggestion that I'd have is being able to filter the fund size, as well as check size. As imho a $100k check from a $1bn fund is different to a $100k check from a $20m fund. I like to filter a list of micro vcs often when helping startups.
@_jacksmith OK, that's on the list of todo's. Navigating the 100s of microVC's is an important challenge we want to tackle, so please keep the suggestions coming.
@james_currier here's a curated list of micro VCs (based on one from @Samirkaji) with their fund sizes, if that could be helpful to you in that process:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsh...
This is awesome (as if something by @jamescurrier wouldn't be).
Some observations on the BIG list page so far:
a. As a starting point, it felt like the most useful filter was "Areas of Interest". I wonder if that should be moved upfront.
b. On the topic of Areas of Interest - it wasn't obvious to me what the difference between these "Areas of Interest" are: Travel, Online Travel, Travel & Tourism is. There are other Travel related categories as well but it feels like they could be consolidated. (There is also an additional "Travel & Tourism" category which appears to be redundant).
c. Would love it if when I selected an Area of Interest, that the subset of Past Investments that matched that Area of Interest for any investor was in a different color/visually presented differently.
Having the year of investment in that area of interest would be extremely useful as well.
Maybe down the road this could even become a graph/chart of some sort.
Either way, I think this would show the depth of that interest for each investor which would allow for even better targeting.
d. For the Investment Amount Range, some additional guidance on which one to pick based on stage of company or other criteria would be useful.
e. For Position and Past Investments - guidance on why or whether you should even pick these would be useful.
f. I'm having a hard time with the 1-10 rating for intro paths. As an example if one path is a 5 and another is a 7, what does that actually mean? How much worse is a 5? Should I even bother if its a 5?
In the absence of anything else, my mental hack was to treat this like NPS, i.e. 1 to 6 - need to nurture, 7 and 8 - nurture/use only if you strike out with 9 and 10.
Looking forward to using Signal more moving forward!
@anujadhiya Great comments! 1) We can add more guidance text for sure. 2) Identifying the depth of interest from an investor is critical to us making the process better. But it's hard. It's complicated, and past investments don't necessarily correlate... if and investor invested in one IOT company, do they want to do another, or have they had their fill for this fund and can't do another for 2 years when the next fund starts? Some investors (in truth) don't have "sector interests" nor do they develop "theses," they just look for great people and they look to be convinced by a pitch. So you can't know before hand what types of deals they are interested in because THEY don't know, themselves. 3) Your sense of the rating system is correct. We're still always tweaking that algorithm, but 1-10 gives you enough range to get a sense of relationship strength.
Remind me of early days of Angellist, when you still could easily connect to and e-mail investors.
@jkaljundi you can't email investors through Signal. You still have to get a warm intro. We think that's better for founders and for investors. Do reduce noise (and increase signal, HA!) we think that founders should figure out who can give them a trusted, warm intro to an investor. And that's the primary function of the Signal tool today. Cold emails waste the time of both sides... typically. Not always... but typically.
I created an account with Gmail, but then it kept saying I needed to add an account for a while - but it eventually got there
A couple other feature requests:
* filters for minimum and maximum - funds with a minimum of $100K but a max of $100M is a little weird
* de-dupe or collapse investors at the same fund (500 Startups, etc come up a lot)
I've messed with other tools and the Google sheets that circulate around and this is great. Thanks James and NFX!
@sachinag Please keep the suggestions coming! We're writing them all down and putting them on the todo list!
For founders, Signal is a simple tool to find the right investors, and find the strongest introduction to those investors. For investors, Signal is a means to appear atop the right lists and attract the right companies.
@jamescurrier Trying this product out (stoked btw!) but can't seem to connect my email – does it have to be a corporate email?
@tzhongg @jamescurrier It's only for Gmail right now. We'll add other forms of email later, but much later. The % of people on Google now is really high. My "corporate" email is @nfx.com but it's powered by Gmail, so it's a gmail account.
@daveambrose Dave, so I'd like to know why you feel that way. Our experience is that LinkedIn is now a graveyard of non-active, non-real relationships. It's crufted up. Whereas my email is where I'm active and we can see where people have real relationships, trusted relationships. We want this network to be tight and real. So we didn't want to add LinkedIn. Are we thinking about it incorrectly?
@james_currier @jamescurrier @nfx Tried it with a gmail account! And so did a few friends who ran into the same problems w syncing
@james_currier @nfx Also was wondering how guys are calculating the relationship strength/score – someone I have never talked to had a 10 while someone who I email a decent amount also had a 10.
@sarahadowney Interesting. That's not at all how we think about it. Angelist does about 25 things, and this just does one thing. Angelist is a network, and this is a tool. You do stuff ON Angelist. You use Signal to then go do things elsewhere. Angel list lets you aggregate people you don't know. Signal lets you see who you do know. So many differences....
Congrats @jamescurrier for the launch of Signal, best tool to connect investors and founders with strong introduction !
Wow - I started building something similar for Bots (https://medium.com/@sivola/vcs-i...) as it's such a major problem to find the right investor, interested in your market and at your stage. Will definitely give a try to this - it seems very powerful and it's from James ;-).
(Found a little bug in the Add connection section: if you click on load more, previous selection is gone)
@sivola Oh, sorry about that. We'll look into it. Please keep the suggestions coming. We will add a "Bots" area of interest to Signal, and then investors can add themselves or better yet, you can add them. If you want, you can even send a list to us and we'll have people put it in...
Please stop sending email to everyone I click of in a list of people. This is spam and immediately makes me dislike your product.
@utdiscant I agree! It's changed as of two hours ago. Now says "send invites." More changes on that invite flow to come. And changes to the text in the emails.
I've been dreaming of this product @jamescurrier. I was able to claim my gmail but am having trouble claiming the other four pieces. I've tried it on chrome, safari, firefox and I came through the StrictlyVC newsletter. Hope that's helpful for the QA folks. Thanks for making this!
@antonio_bustamante Great! I'm so glad you like it. Any suggestions for improvement is welcome. We have a long way to go.
@joselfgaray I think Europe can bring it to itself, actually... just start adding investors and their data.
@james_currier great! I couldn't find the London location filter, so I thought it was not yet available.
Signal is hands down THE best tool for sourcing and managing investors! 🎉💸
We've been part of the private beta for half a year now and we saw the product grow and grow into a power-tool for CEOs and founders.
Go @jamescurrier and NFX team 💪🏼
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