Ask HN: How do we find an investor in the EU/UK for something very technical?

As a startup it's your job to convince investors about the size of your market. When a FoodTech startup or FashionTech startup pitch to investors they don't assume the investor will have an in-depth knowledge of their market, they have to demonstrate through data what the market-size is.

You can do this top-down (what's the size of the market for iOS-to-Android porting by agencies servicing line of business apps) and bottom-up (you spoke to 50x agencies in this market; 40% want to buy your product and were willing to pay X). But you need to have evidence to back your claims.

You can very easily explain what your product does without having to go into deep technical detail. Use your story to explain it: "Converting iOS apps to work on Android was costing us around 150k a project; we've built a product that allows us to bring the cost down to 20k by automating away most of the work. We now want to bring this technology to other agencies."

Why does everyone think its easier to get hold of money in US? My friends in bay area do not know any investors at all. How does one go about this in the US? Which meetups should I go to?

Did you give a talk in Cambridge a few years ago? I went to a Zynamics talk and it was absolutely fascinating - really cool stuff you guys did.

I've forwarded this to a company that does lots of mobile (and invests too). Best of luck!

This. If investors are struggling to see the value of your product, it's because you haven't developed enough of a commercial pitch.

The technical aspects that matter (unlike other solutions to developing for multiple platforms, ours lets iOS developers write native iOS apps the way they normally would; our solution takes their code and makes it work on Android, the web and other tablets) really shouldn't be difficult to grasp anyone that's remotely serious about tech investment. They need to establish your product has a market and that you're capable of marking it work; technical benefits matter but implementation details are secondary.

They do need to know who will buy your product, why, what evidence of success of similar solutions exists and why yours will be better. They need to know you've implemented large parts already for paid client work, and the clients were impressed because none of the other dev shops they talked to could clone iPhone apps for Android that quickly or cheaply. They want to know you have an idea how you're actually going to sell this, and at what price to what sized market.

If that interests them, that's when you can have all the nice conversations about your innovative ways of using APIs and why this manual aspect of your current process can be automated; you might even find they've got a friendly techie to do that as part of the due diligence.