Open Deals provides you with a place to view and rate & review deals. Whether feedback is positive or negative and whether the deal is local or all the way across the country, your feedback is valuable! As more and more member provide negative feedback, other investors won't waste their time looking at the less interesting deals, and the good deals will rise to the top.
Also, as you build a reputation as a great deal reviewer, other Angel groups will begin to know who you are and what types of deals you like. Open Deals becomes your private community to establish your expertise , reputation, and trust as an investor.
1) Start with the Deal Dashboard:
If you do not know how to find the Deal Dashboard for a deal in Open Deals, please view the Basic Guide to Open Deals tutorial.
2) Scroll to bottom to find Ratings & Review section:
3) Click "Rate & Review this deal":
4) Enter in your ratings for each category:
5) Type up a review with all your opnions on this deal:
Here is where you can establish your credentials. The more valuable your feedback, the more other investment groups will appreciate your work. The more thoughtful your reviews, the more you will establish your area of expertise in the eyes of the early stage investment community.
Open Deals is a new feature on the Angelsoft platformt that many of you have been starting to use since its release about a month ago. It comes from the fact that we had many investors asking us for new sources of dealflow, and many entrepreneurs asking for ways to get in front of more investors. Open Deals solves these problems and much more. It gives investors a private place to collaboratively discuss deals, find co-investors, and build a reputation within the investment community.
To learn more, please follow the tour:
1) Finding Open Deals:
Open Deals is located in the upper right hand corner of your screen when you are logged into Angelsoft and viewing your groups deal list. Click on it to view the Open Deals space.
2) Understanding the Open Deals Home Page:
In the Open Deals Home page there are 3 main sections, and a number indicating how many of each type of deal there is.
1) "Recent Deals" - this will take you to a list of all the most recent deals that have come into Open Deals.
2) "Deals from other groups" - clicking this will take you to a list of all the deals that have come into Open Deals through an existing Angelsoft user.
3) "Deals within 500 miles" - clicking on this will take you to a list of all the deals within a certain geographic range of your group or personal profile location.
Now, click on any one of these to be taken to the appropriate view in the Deal Directory.
3) Deal Directory:
The deal directory is a list of deals filtered by the options on the left hand side. If you want to see deals by proximity to your location, you can cick on "closest to me", if you want to see deals that the most investors have viewed, you can click "Most viewed".
4) Deal Summaries:
When looking at the Deal Summaries in more detail you will see there are two types of deals. First, there is a Group Deal. This a deal referred into Open Deals by an Angelsoft User. Deals that do not have the "Group Deal" designation are deals that have been directly submitted by an entrepreneur into the Open Deals space.
5) The Deal Dashboard:
Once you click on a specific deal, you will be taken to a deal dashboard that is very similar to what you are used to seeing in your own Angelsoft account. The main difference is that, if you want to show this deal to your group, then you just have to select your group from the "refer this deal to my group" button.
6) Ratings and Reviews:
Scroll to the bottom of the Deal Dashboard, and you will see the Ratings & Reviews section. This is where you can make comments and rate the deal in question. Your feedback positive or negative contributes to the communities ability to filter out the good deals, while it helps establish you and your groups reputation on the system.
Open deals can be used as a source of extra deal flow for your investment group. As you navigate from deal to deal putting in Ratings & Reviews, if you find a deal that might interest your investment group, you can simply refer it back to your group. With the click of a button, you can send a copy of this deal to the new submissions folder of your group on Angelsoft, where it is then ready to go through your group's investment process.
1) Find the Deal Dashboard:
If you do not know how to find the Deal Dashboard for a deal in Open Deals, please view the Basic Guide to Open Deals tutorial.
As an active angel investor, I am faced with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to potential companies with which I can get involved. I receive new business plans every day from people who know what I do; I see all of the deal flow that comes through the professional angel groups to which I belong (such as New York Angels); and recently, with the advent of OPEN-deals, I find myself inexorably drawn to seeing the latest investment opportunities from around the country.
But because of the sheer number of companies involved, I, like most other active angels, tend to make very quick, first-pass decisions as to whether we should even bother to look at a plan, let alone invest. (For example, I personally have no interest in real estate investment deals, movie opportunities, or biotech; the first I've got enough of, the second is too risky even for me, and the third I'm not smart enough to understand. I also don't generally look at deals that are too far away from me geographically...although this is beginning to change with the high quality of deals I've been seeing in OPEN-deals.) This first pass will typically cut by about half the number of companies in my mental in-box.
For most of the rest, however, I have only a limited amount of time to decide which deals warrant further attention. Now, I'd like to say that I carefully read every word of every business plan. But I don't. I could say that instead, I not-so-carefully read most words of most executive summaries. But, umm, I really don't do that either. These days, what happens in practice is that I pop over to OPEN-deals and skim the latest submissions. My eye is immediately drawn to deals that have videos (because the poster frame of the video is prominently displayed to left of the entry, like this:)
And then, because I'm essentially lazy, I click the video, sit back, and let the entrepreneur tell me why I should look further. It requires no additional action, and fewer brain cells, on my part. Not only that, watching videos is actually fun, whereas reading another business plan...not so. Most importantly, however, a video is an entrepreneur's one chance to 'look me in the eye' and take a shot at conveying his or her essential self. Why is this important? Because as virtually every investor will tell you, in early stage deals our overwhelming preference is to bet the jockey, not the horse. That is, we'd much prefer to bet on someone we think has real entrepreneurial talent, even if the plan requires a bit of tweaking, than take a chance on even a superb plan in the hands of a mediocre entrepreneur. And letting us see you on video, looking right into the camera, is the first step in selling yourself...until we can see you in person.
"But..." I hear you object, "making a video and doing it right takes time and effort". To which my response is, "Doh!" How much are you trying to raise from angels or VCs? $200,000? $500,000? A million bucks? And how many years of your life are you prepared to commit to this venture? Three years? Five? Ten? Whatever time it takes to do the video right, doesn't it make sense to do so, if it will help your fundraising to even the teeniest, tiniest degree?
OK, now let's get to some practical suggestions. In an ideal world, you'd find someone (either a friend, or a professional) who knows how to do videos, and you'd carefully gather B-roll footage, product shots, customer testimonials, and more, and then you'd go into a studio and record yourself talking passionately into the camera in front of a 'green screen', and then you or an experienced video editor would cut the whole thing into a gem-like, five minute elevator pitch (but not too, TOO slick, because then we'll get a little suspicious).
The world, however, is rarely ideal, and if you're like me (and every other entrepreneur I've ever known) you want to get started right away, be finished in half an hour, and do it at your desk. Well, let's see what we can do to help.
First of all, built right into the OPEN-deals application, thanks to our friends at Viddler, is a nifty little widget that allows you to click one button, look into your computer's webcam, and record a live video, which
OPEN- deals will then upload and host for you at no charge:
No muss, no fuss, no cost...and absolutely no reason whatsoever that every single entrepreneur shouldn't have a video included with his or her OPEN-deals submission.
But if you want do a better, more professional job, there are quite a few tools available at very reasonable cost to give you a quick and painless way to create a polished pitch video. Putting aside all of the myriad high-end, production and editing packages, two companies in particular have really cool products that are just perfect for this purpose.
On the Mac side of the house, Vara Software has two great programs that you can try out for free, and download instantly. ScreenFlow lets you run your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation on your computer, while simultaneously recording an inset video of YOU, giving us the best of both worlds. Videocue 2 makes it really, really easy to write up your pitch, film it with your webcam while you read from a teleprompter, and seamlessly add in titles, overlays and images. Very cool...and they work.
Almost identical programs are available for Windows systems from Adobe, which last year acquired a really neat company named Serious Magic that had pioneered the whole 'pro-sumer video upload' field. Adobe Visual Communicator 3 does even more things than ScreenFlow, including letting you record and deliver your PowerPoint presentation, and Vlog It! is a virtual clone of Videocue. (To be fair, the Serious Magic/Adobe folks claim that it's the other way around, and that they were first. I'm not choosing sides, just point out two sets of cool programs.)
(By the way, the third Adobe/Serious Magic product in the list is Ovation, which is a VERY powerful program that takes your PowerPoint presentation, adds in a full teleprompter, timer, and other goodies. Definitely cool for doing pitch presentations.)
So there you have it. Now that you know the secrets, please be nice and pander to your friendly local angel investors by recording a video along with your OPEN-deals submission. It makes it easier and more fun for us, and gives you a much better chance of rising above all those entrepreneurs who weren't smart enough to read this blog entry!
One of the toughest steps in the investment process is getting back to the entrepreneur to let them know that your group is not going to proceed with their funding request. It can be an emotionally charged situation, and because there are so many more deals out there than capital to fund them, it has to be a regular part of your investment group's activity.
If we look at the positive side of turning down a funding request, we see that many groups use this as an opportunity to provide feedback to the entrepreneurs. Its a critical part of the process where the investors are able to give something valuable back to the entrepreneur, and an opportunity to set them on the path to finding funding from another source or possibly from that group at a later date.
To help with this process we've added the ability to send a "declined email" to the entrepreneur.
Take a look at the tutorial below and let us know what you think!
1) Select the deal or deals you would like to decline
Check the box next to the name of the deal, or check the boxes next to the name of all the deals you would like to decline. This feature works in bulk.
So, you have a deal with some serious interest from your group, but not enough to do the full round. This is a great opportunity for you to leverage the Angelsoft network, and get connected to other investment groups nearby. With a couple simple steps, you can post your deal to Open Deals, making a preview available to other Angelsoft users, so they can contact you to discuss the potential of co-investing.
Nothing more than a preview will be shared, and once you are contacted you can still decide how you would like to proceed with this group. Its a very fast and efficient way to find more capital, and a huge value you can offer the entrepreneurs applying to your group.
