Product feedback — TZ

Position: Investment manager, directly involved in searching, evaluating, and keeping contact with startups

Current daily working tasks:

• Search startups on Crunchbase, ProductHunt, Angel List
• Reading newspaper, join FB community, acquaintance introduction
• Keep contact and follow-up using the internal system to manage startup profiles

Follow-up priority:

• High: Send messages and emails to check once a month
• Normal: Send emails once per 3 month

Criteria to set priority:

• Team members have experience and are capable of developing a long term product/service. They fill up all C-levels positions in a startup.
• The current issue that they want to resolve
• Matching vision with investors

In order to know the criteria, the interviewee looks for this information inside a listed startup profile:

• A summary of service/product
• Past and current funding rounds
• This information is displayed on the Highlight section of Crunchbase

How investors evaluate that information

• Set up a meeting to hear the pitch directly from the founder
• Signing NDA and get essential documents (company registration, business model)
• Spend time to avoid being convinced by the founder’s enthusiasm and calmly analyst attached documents
• Request for more documents depending on the type of startup, for example, online e-commerce should show Google Analytics and users traction
• The period is about 3 weeks for an early-stage startup

In the process, investor’s pain points are:

• There is no platform to actively find & contact startups with enough essential documents
• The result of an investment manager is to reach KPI to connect to a number of startups. So what they want is the initial connection, they always reply to a startup that reaches out to them first

Comments and suggestions:

• Skype and FB are not for work
• They are using a similar platform: connect.asia
• They don't use the platform’s message service because it’s inconvenient: limited usage, missing files sharing, meeting function. Currently using WhatsApp, Telegram, Email
• Headquarter, registration date is not needed and taking up space
• The current quick filter is useful
• Extra information that supports the Highlight section is only needed when making an industry report

UI comments

• After registration, the thank you message is not clear enough so users do not know that they need to be verified by the admin
• They don't know how to close the Advanced search popup