
Launching Signal 1.0 – a Tool for Founders to Find the Right Investors - signor_bosco
http://essays.nfx.com/launching-signal-1-0-a-tool-for-founders-to-find-the-right-investors/
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mixedCase
> give feedback

Change name.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_\(software\))

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SEJeff
Not just that, but there is a trademark on it:

[http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4804:9ig...](http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4804:9igaph.2.4)

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Dangeranger
Signal from Open Whisper Systems already has a large user base, many of which
are in the same demographic which you are targeting.

It would be to your benefit to rebrand under a different name.

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soheil
CAUTION: It downloads ALL your email addresses in your Gmail.

Not clear how it works immediately until after you connect your Gmail. It
tires to find an email for someone in your contacts who can introduce you to
an investor. meh.

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petersimones
Your first statement just isn't true. Your last sentence is. When you connect
your Gmail to Signal, it infers who your strongest relationships are, with the
idea that those are the people who'd give you the warmest intros to investors.
You can ask those people to join you on Signal, and if they do, you'll see
which investors you can get to (e.g. a strong intro) through them. Compare
that to the LinkedIn process today ("hey I saw you're connected to X" ...
"Yeahhh but I don't really know them. You wouldn't want an intro from me" ...
rinse and repeat) and you start to see one of Signal's benefits.

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dsl
> When you connect your Gmail to Signal, it infers who your strongest
> relationships are

Guess how it does that... they say on their own page it scrapes email
addresses.

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petersimones
Download <> analyze; ALL <> Only the recent and relevant ones

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dsjoerg
I see from the Google Request for Permission interface that Signal wants to
"View your email message metadata such as labels and headers, but not the
email body".

That's way too sensitive for me to give away in exchange for uncertain
benefits. I realize that I've given this information to Gmail already. But
it's not hard to concoct some very _plausible_ bad scenarios of what could
happen with this data if I said Yes.

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tyre
There is a major chicken and egg problem here.

As a post-YC company, I know a lot of investors. That means my gmail is
valuable to you (since you can pull a bunch of info) but that your service is
not valuable to me.

You need to better incentivize users that have the information that makes your
service more valuable. Something like AngelList's ability to verify that an
investor invested in a company, plus the ability for founders to anonymously
leave reviews of investors that you confirm they've spoken with.

If, going into our next round, I could only access those reviews by connecting
my work GMail, then I can see why it may make sense.

Right now, I don't know why I would use this and I think I'm your target
market.

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petersimones
Good thoughts here. Worth noting that Signal doesn't really gain anything from
your Gmail data other than the ability to provide you network benefits via the
relationship strengths implied by that data. And you don't need to connect
your Gmail to use the service. You can sign in with email/password and use all
the investor finding tools, which is arguably Signal's primary benefit right
now. There isn't a great tool out there to find investors (and similarly, for
investors to effectively broadcast what they do and do not want to see). That
part isn't chicken and egg. You can use Crunchbase, AngelList, etc., but it's
a slog. Signal should keep getting better in that regard.

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basch
>Signal doesn't really gain anything from your Gmail data other than the
ability to provide you network benefits via the relationship strengths implied
by that data.

Instagram grew because it imported and co-opted twitters social graph. They
absolutely benefit from being able to build a 10,000 foot view of the current
social landscape.

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kinkdr
> There’s a long way to go, so please give feedback

Please don't ask for my Gmail account.

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marklyon
Interesting, but can't move past the sign-in portion. I'm not giving a website
the ability to see my message subjects, headers and labels. Nothing on your
site landing page convinces me of the value in doing so.

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petersimones
Sign in with username/password, then. Signal doesn't require Gmail. You can
add your Gmail later if you want to / see the benefit to you in doing so.
Signal's biggest benefit to founders right now is the investor
searching/finding capabilities. You don't need to be Gmail authed to get value
from that. If you build, say, a target list of 50+ investors in Signal, you
then might want to see your strongest intro paths to those investors. That's
when you can consider the Gmail auth. Always up to you.

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dsl
VC: "How did you get introduced to me?"

You: "That signal app..."

VC: "So [introducer] gave away my personal contact info to a random company?"

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mgamache
As a co-founder of a startup with no coastal ties will this help me at all? I
don't mean to be overly negative, but this is sounds like an echo chamber.
It's probably great to maximize a decently connected fundraising effort. Maybe
I am misunderstanding the way Signal 1.0 works.

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petersimones
Tons of investors are geography-agnostic. The biggest benefit of Signal right
now is simply helping you identify the right investors based on check size,
industry preferences, past investments, etc. And I'm sure there are investors
in your local area; you should add them to Signal (and invite them to connect
if you know them). If your local investor community gets on, that'll give you
an outsized benefit.

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desireco42
I feel like this is not the problem people are having. I want to talk to Elon
Musk, explain him how we can build a warp drive. If I am half as serious in
this endeavor, I don't think I would have problem reaching him. If I am
crackpot, he doesn't want to talk to me anyway.

Let's say I have idea for new company, next Groupon. I can reach out to local
Chicago investors and they will refer me to people who would be interested.

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the_common_man
Very good idea!

I suspect you will see a lot of "privacy" concerned people jumping into
thread. This is a catch-22 of sorts. If Signal picks up momentum, people will
gladly give you the gmail id. Until then, they will vocally complain that
gmail id and contact list is too dangerous to give away. One approach to get
over this initial bump might be to get big CEOs and investors to vouch for the
product.

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swiley
I don't see what momentum has to do with it. LinkedIn has plenty of that and I
still don't trust them with anything.

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petersimones
LinkedIn has 400M+ users.

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sperm
Brought to you by NFX Cult

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whatnotests
Looks fantastic. I signed up and started down the workflow-- quite a project!

Looking forward to seeing how this looks in a month or two.

