Where to find an investor?

Finding an investor for a startup is a matter of survival. The greatest idea without financial support will remain an idea only. Therefore, sooner or later, the founders face the question: where to find an investor?

Recently, an article on choosing an online platform for finding investors appeared on our blog. During our research, we visited and analyzed the platforms themselves, read other bloggers' reviews, and, of course, customer reviews - the laudatory ones and not so much, about how their pains were solved, and how difficult it was to find something suitable if the project is highly specialized. As a result, so much information has been collected that we simply couldn’t fit it into one article. And the main inspiration for this was the stories of those founders who successfully found an angel for their startup. We assume that having insider information will be very useful for beginners.

So, a startup needs money for development – everyone knows this, and investors are ready to invest in good ideas and compete with each other for promising projects. Why? If the angels had extra money and they just wanted to help, it would be called differently: charity. But they all are investors without exception, which means they are hunting for profit.

Even a novice investor has a so-called “portfolio”. This is a scheme: approximate for someone, strict to follow for others, a plan for how much and where they will invest. Not all investments are profitable – an obvious fact, the expectation is that one successful startup will recoup all that was invested in 4-5 unsuccessful ones. How portfolios are formed is a topic for a separate article, but there is no need to dig too deep. The main thing is to understand that investing often but far from always does not follow the principle: whether the investor liked the idea or not, but according to a clear scheme that the investor has worked out just for them. Let’s say his portfolio includes 20% fintech projects, 30% sports and health care, and 50% SaaS. And these sections are already taken – you will be refused, if your startup does not fit any direction at all – you will be refused. Not because the idea is bad, but because this is business and an experienced investor with a formed portfolio selects only what they need in their portfolio according to the chosen directions.

So, where can you find an active investor for your project? Most of the successfully raised founders agree on LinkedIn and Twitter. Often the choice is conditioned by preferences and the presence of a wide network of your own contacts in one of the social networks, but in fact, it is important to understand where your investor “haunts”. It is very easy to Google the search combination: Twitter/LinkedIn + investors + your direction (industry). Some people write articles with a selection of investors on the platforms. But the investor’s activity is easy to understand simply by going to their page and looking at the frequency of their posts and when they last visited the page.

Of course, some resources track the number of active projects by the investor, and you can understand what type of startups they are interested in. But the dynamic with which everything changes in the modern world, the speed of trends and preferences shift – there is no better place than an active page on the social network. After all, it is there that you can see what interests your angel right now and allows you not to miss your moment.

Lifehack for beginners: here you can find many ready-made documents collected in one place that might be handy if you are just establishing your startup.