Month: June 2013

40 Questions Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors Will Ask Startups

Here is a list of questions that angels and VC’s will ask startups when deciding whether to invest or not.  If you have answers to these questions up your sleeve, you should be pretty well prepared.

The Idea:

  • What does your business do?
  • What problem does it solve?

Traction:

  • What progress / milestones have you achieved so far (e.g. number of registrations, downloads, sales, pre-orders, web visits, etc)?
  • Do you have a prototype or demo version?
  • Do you have and patents or IP protection (either approved or pending)?
  • How quickly are you growing?
  • Can this traction be ramped up?
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    Infographic – The Marketing Benefits Of Social Media

    This infographic from Wishpond collects data from a Social Media Examiner study into one, easy-to-read visual, looking at the top benefits achieved by social media by more than 3,000 marketers in 2013.

    Highlights include:

  • More than half of marketers who have been using social media for more than 3 years say that it has helped them increase sales
  • More than half of marketers with at least one year of social media experience were generating leads using these channels
  • 62 percent of businesses with 10 or fewer employees agreed social media reduced marketing expenses
  • 78 percent of participants found that website traffic increased with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing
  • Overall, the percentage of marketers reporting improvements has increased in all categories since 2013
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    Infographic – Meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 120%

    The results from Havas Media Group’s 2013 Meaningful Brands study statistically demonstrate that meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 120%. It demonstrates, in hard financial terms, how the relationship between people and brands can benefit from measuring, communicating and delivering increased wellbeing.

    Meaningful Brands – Havas Media Group’s new metric of brand strength – is the first global analytical framework to connect human wellbeing with brands at a business level. It measures the benefits brands bring to our lives. It’s unique in both scale (700 brands, over 134,000 consumers, 23 countries) and scope. read more

    Infographic – Why do so many start-ups fail?

    Building a successful business is every entrepreneur’s goal – but only 1 in 12 succeed. Why do startups fail? The Startup Genome project analyzed data from 3,200 companies and came up with some answers.

    At the core of any successful business are two things: a good product and a large market for that product. In other words, a startup should be able to scale. And to scale properly, it must balance the growth of five core dimensions: customers, product, team, business model, and funding. read more