A Fundraising Survival Guide

I can see that lucky things have happened to us and that the degree of success (especially the part about being able to afford more people than just myself) has been greatly influenced by luck. But I also think you're guaranteed to have some good fortune along the way.

If we weren't doing what we're doing we would be doing something else. In our case we're doing conferences but we could be doing intranets or adding integrations with other websites or building custom social networks.

I got an interesting take from one of the founders of Apperceptive, a just acquired Movable Type services company. He said that they intended to build a product company but that once they got started with services they found that the "world has an insatiable appetite for services."

That was my experience, once we'd built something that could be valuable we had a number of excellent service options.

I'll agree with anyone who says that bootstrapping to this stage is hard but I'd argue that it's quite repeatable. I'd like to take the company one stage further, to a point where we have stable non-services revenue and I won't make any claims about the repeatability or luck factor involved in doing that.

- Winner take all markets with strong positive network externalities have bit first mover advantages: eBay.

- Products requiring large investments probably require investments: if you trade time for money, you might be really late to market compared with a firm that got money.

- Products where it's easy to start competing and carve out a nice probably don't require much in terms of investments.

"Investors rarely grasp this, but a much of what they're responding to"

(there shouldn't be an 'a' before 'much')

Oddly enough, the best VCs tend to be the least VC-like.

I suspect that rather than being odd this is nearly tautological for any profession -- "the best X tend to be the least X-like". Professional stereotypes are set by the multitudes in the middle, not the highest-performing outliers.

Further, atypical behavior can be both a cause and effect of excellence. Being 'different' helps them be 'better', but also by being 'better' they gain freedom and confidence to deviate from norms.

(Of course, "the worst X tend to be not very X-like" is also true. But they're more likely to at least try to emulate the average X.)

Can have Entrepreneurs sign up, upload their business plan/youtube presentation. Then VCs will be able to login using a special verified VC account(that way Entrepreneurs will know that only VCs will see their presentations). And then be able to see the uploaded presentations and contact entrepreneurs for an in person interview.

Throw in a bunch of filter options for each party. A few web2.0 mashups for maps/scribd pdfs etc and bam instant millions.

To make money can charge either Entrepreneurs by telling them you are charging them in order to filter out the weak startups: "If you don't believe in your idea to pay $___ in promoting it to investors, what makes you think its good enough for investors to put in real money?" Or you can charge the VCs($____ to see each business plan or a monthly payment) or make it a non-profit organization and have a bunch of VCs donate to it.