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!
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@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.
@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....
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.
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@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.
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Congrats @jamescurrier for the launch of Signal, best tool to connect investors and founders with strong introduction !
Please stop sending email to everyone I click of in a list of people. This is spam and immediately makes me dislike your product.
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@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.
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