Managing Fund Raising and Investor Relationships
for Startups
Entrepreneurs spend a significant percentage of their time raising capital during the life cycle of
their venture. Many will say that it is almost another full time job for the management team. A
well funded company also has greater chances of success than a company which is unable to
raise sufficient capital.
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Importance of Managing Fund Raising Activities
Raising money for a company is very similar to the process of selling a product to customers, the
product in this case being the startup, and the customers being potential investors. While the
idea, past experience, and network are big factors in determining how successful a startup can be
in raising capital, it is equally important to have a well organized and disciplined approach to
fund raising efforts. To continue our analogy with selling, just like every sales person is aware of
the importance of Customer Relationship Management, every company founder must understand
the importance of intelligently managing relationships with potential investors. No investor
wants to trust his money with somebody who cannot organize and diligently follow through with
the process of fund raising.
Consider the case of numerous entrepreneurs, who have an excellent idea, have all the necessary
skills and the right team in place to approach investors for funding. Most entrepreneurs start
contacting multiple VCs and angel investors for funding. They also rely on their network to tap
into other potential investor leads. Pretty quickly, the entrepreneur realizes that he needs to keep
track of multiple investor leads, manage numerous contacts and communications, follow up on
new conversations and close funding offers with investors. If not managed intelligently, all this
can take up a large part of an entrepreneurs time and energy. Even the most diligent entrepreneur
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.
can forget appointments, forget to follow up on leads, miss a deadline and end up losing a
potential investor.
The Solution
To address this issue, entrepreneurs need to develop a standard procedure for managing, storing
and sharing information about investor leads with their team, create an easily accessible online
database, which multiple team members can refer to before communicating with potential
investors. Setting up this kind of system can take up a significant portion of a young startups
resources. To address this issue, we have developed Apptivo, worlds first free Software as a
Service (SaaS) business management suite. All the Investor Relationship Management issues
mentioned earlier in this article can be solved through the Fund Raising Module of Apptivo.
Getting Started with Apptivo
Anybody can get started and begin using Apptivo in 5 minutes flat. New users just need to
register their company on Apptivos website (Apptivo.com) and begin managing all their fund
raising activities through Apptivos Fund Raising Module. Once a company has been added, its
very simple to provide access to additional team members. Additional users can be granted
access to the Fund Raising activities through the Human Resources Module, by creating a new
employee with access to the Fund Raising Module.
Next: Apptivo Way of Fund Raising Management and Investor Relationship Management
© 2011 Apptivo Inc. All rights reserved.