

Ask HN: How to get an idea funded? - shahedkhan30

Okay, so I've been trying to take my start-up from it's earliest possible stage to getting ready for Angel Investment.<p>With a low budget, what would be the key things to show investors about my start-up? Ex. Powerpoint, etc.<p>My start-up is based off of an application on the iPhone, so providing a demo of my start-up would be a demo of the application, me having no experience in programming applications, it would cost me a lot to get a demo done, so are there any other choices?<p>Are there any mentors that would be willing to help me out?
======
blrgeek
Have you looked at Customer Development?

So you have an idea for an app. Customer Development tells you what you need
to do to see if the app actually has a market & what the market is worth.

Things you need to do - and you can do all these without having the app ready,
or even the mockups (although mockups are needed for 2nd half of the process)

1\. Do the first approximation business model
([http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_mo...](http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_model_canvas_poster.pdf))
Learn how at ^1

2\. Get out of the building. Talk to prospective customers IRL. Iterate and
define, product value prop, market segment, channels. From this identify how
big the market is & how much it'll cost you to reach this market. Rule of
thumb - for every 100 customers you need a year from now, talk to 10. If
you're B2B and need a hundred customers, make sure you talk to 10. If you're
B2C and need a thousand customers, try to talk to a hundred.

3\. If the market is big enough and possible to reach, you now know how much
you can afford to spend. Bonus, you should now have a list of beta testers who
will be interested in trying this out.

4\. Build minimum v0.1 of the product or all mockups. Validate/Test. Beta roll
out. See traction as expected.

5\. Raise angel money to build v0.2. What angels would like to see - clear
identification of large enough market, clear validated value prop by talking
to enough prospective customers, mockups or preferably initial version.

6\. Build product & Win!

^1 To learn how to build the business model, use Steve Blank's classes -
<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/lean-launchpad/>

------
BrainScraps
If you don't know anyone who can code already, you might be better off
learning to code.

Rather than spending the next 6 months trying to impress some iOS dev enough
for them to give you the time of day, spend that time learning a valuable
skill. If you have the funds, just outsource it.

~~~
shahedkhan30
6 months seems like an awful long time to get this company started, I'm
interested in finding a programmer who we can collaborate with, I'm more of
the Business guy, where he/she can be the Programmer, if you know what I mean.

~~~
ryanburke
I would start mocking up your idea in something like Balsamiq
(<http://balsamiq.com/>). This will make it easier to find a hacker to partner
with and to show the concept to potential investors.

~~~
sohailprasad
Balsamiq is pretty intuitive - if you don't want to buy/install it, try out
the online (flash) demo at:

<http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-web-demo/>

------
filiwickers
"investors do not fund ideas"

This was an often repeated remark at a recent angel investing conference I
attended.

Sorry that is not what you wanted to hear. Unfortunately it is reality.

You need to create some concrete representations of your idea and demonstrate
why people need it.

------
Osiris
Try <http://www.findahacker.com/>

------
dave1619
Find a partner who can code.

~~~
shahedkhan30
Where would a good place be to find this partner? I've been looking around,
and didn't find anyone.

~~~
BrainScraps
This is what I'm saying. Everyone who is worth anything has got a ton of irons
in the fire. Probably projects from people in their network. It'll be a long
shot to get someone to take your project on without some serious incentive.
You may be chasing devs for a long while and have nothing to show for your
effort.

Learning to code may not pay off for this particular project, but it just
might come in handy later. I'm just sayin'.

------
shahedkhan30
Anyone else got any other ideas?

