This reader email landed in my inbox … 👇
As a VC guru, I thought you might be the perfect person to ask for some advice on finding startups that fit my investment thesis. I’ve been doing a lot of database searching on sites like Crunchbase, but I feel like I’m missing out on the real gems. I’m not sure if there’s a secret handshake or a password to get into the underground startup world, but if there is, I’d love to know it. Otherwise, I’m open to any other tips or tricks you might have for finding the best startups out there.
Here’s one thing that can work.
In fact, it worked for me.
Let me tell you exactly what happened.
I hit a bug in a product that I really liked. Made by a startup, of course 🙂
I opened a support ticket through their little chat widget 👇
Well, as luck would have it:
And as is the case with many early stage companies …
… the founder was on the other end.
So after I did a little debugging for them, and we sorted out the issue:
I put on my investor hat 👇
As you can see:
This wasn’t that hard.
3 steps, is all:
- Use a startup’s product to solve a problem / do a job that you have
- When it breaks, report it to one of the founders or the CEO — whether you know them or not.
- If they respond positively, gently pitch yourself (like I did) and see if you can get a meeting with them.
Hey — this doesn’t always work.
In fact, there’s another startup that I’m totally fanboying over:
And their CEO doesn’t respond to my bug reports.
I’m not worried, though.
They’ll come around, eventually 😉
Because persistence pays off!
