Fundraising has been on our minds since Spinnakr joined 500 Startups. In fact, fundraising is on lots of minds in the Valley, and everyone in our class at 500 wants to maximize their chances of raising capital. Since we have some expertise about what works and doesn’t in website engagement, and a tool that can be used to give investors different messages than other visitors, Michael and I presented “How to Pimp your Website to Attract Investors” to the 500 crew yesterday.
Here are 11 tips from our talk:
Show Who You Are
First of all, you need an About page. Early-stage angels are investing in your team and your story as much as your current product. As a result, your About page is the first place an investor will look when he comes to your site.
Tip 1: Make Your About Page Easy to Find
Your investors’ eyes will immediately scan for an About button or link. So put a link or a button on the homepage and make sure it says the word “about” in it. In addition to being easy to find, your About page should describe the vision of your company and what you are trying to accomplish.
Tip 2: Sell the Dream
Your company story should sell your dream. 500 Startup GoVoluntr describes themselves not just as a platform for tracking volunteering hours, but as “a whole new way to be a do-gooder.”
Tip 3: Place Yourself in Your Vision
If you don’t think you have some great story behind how your company was founded, a great way to get started is with what brought you to found a startup in the first place.
The Fitocracy story is a great example—the founders admit that they were one-time skinny nerds who traded their addiction to video games for weight-lifting and then decided making fitness addictive for others could be a business.
The Fitocracy team tell the story of their company through their own lives.
You might think your story is less obvious, but something is pushing you down an extraordinary life path. Don’t shy away from telling that story—pimp it!
Your story shows commitment. Any investor who considers you is going to be asking himself, “are these kids going to want to be doing this in five years?” If you can completely disqualify that fear by showing this is the inevitable next stage of your life, then you’re one step closer to closing.
Tip 4: Team – Make a Connection
When you do talk about the team, include photos. For startups, more memorable and expressive pictures are best. The Zerply photos are a great example because they let the investor get to know the kinds of people they’ll be betting on.
The Zerply team's photos give a sense of who they are that makes you want to meet them.
Also consider highlighting your technical stack if it’s relevant, since lots of early-stage investors have technical backgrounds. Including other advisers, incubators or investors on your About page (something that isn’t done enough) can be helpful too, since they illustrate how you’re connected to a wider network of supporters, give context for your company vision, and sometimes overlap with investors’ colleagues and networks too.
Show What You Are Doing
Second, even if your website is beautiful, when an investor comes to your homepage he is probably asking himself, “is this site dead, or is there a community of people using it right now?” Show investors that your site is alive with a constant stream of activity.
Tip 5: Show Activity Streams on your Homepage
Consider mirroring Redeemr and featuring your latest Twitter update on your homepage. If you’re stressed about updating your Twitter feed constantly, check out Timely, which will let you plug in a bunch of Tweets and automatically tweets them when they’ll have the most impact.
Redeemr's activity stream on their homepage.
Displaying tweets is an excellent way to get a visitor to follow you. But it’s even better to give different visitors different information. For example, display your Twitter feed to customers and your AngelList status to investors. Spinnakr can help your website do that .
Spinnakr allows startups to display their AngelList status to investors when they reach your site.
Tip 6: Make Your Social Sharing Options Specific
For your Facebook and Twitter links, keep in mind that specific calls-to-action convert better. So instead of “Follow Us on Twitter,” tell them, “Get Our Weekly Discounts from Twitter” or “Track Our Progress on Twitter.” That way you give the visitor a reason to follow you.
Also, your Facebook like button should be linked to your Facebook page, not your homepage. That way, when an investor “likes” your page, he will also get your company’s Facebook updates to show up in his feed.
Tip 7: Pimp Your Blog
Include a clearly marked way to get to your blog from your homepage. Blogs were sorely underrepresented in our class. High Score House, has a beautiful and active blog, but it’s very hard to find.
The High Score House blog is beautiful, but too hard to find from their homepage.
Blogs show an investor that you have expertise in the space, and that you can do inbound marketing and community building effectively. If you don’t want blog posts on the homepage, consider posting just the titles of the recent posts or numbers of posts and comments—just the activity will be impressive to investors.
Show How You Are Doing
When you talk about your product on your homepage, there are two things that tend to convert investors: (1) testimonials and (2) traction.
Testimonial logos
Tip 8: Aim High with Testimonials
If someone has something nice to say about your company, ask for a testimonial. If you can, court testimonials from marquee customers and big brands. Their logos are instantly recognizable, so they scan well on the page, and a big company customer signals you’ve passed due diligence and overcome sales friction at big firms.
Tip 9: Place Your Testimonials in a Perspective
That said, some of the best testimonials can be from small customers, especially if they are placed in the perspective of one of your ideal prospects. This signals that you’ve identified a target market and a representative customer has a genuine problem you are solving. A good formula for such a testimonial is: as an X, your company helps me Y, where is X = your ideal customer and Y is a big problem being solved.
Highrise's customer testimonials follow the powerful formula, "as an SMB owner, Highrise saved my business."
Tip 10: Pick the Traction Metrics that Make you Look Best
When you report traction, keep in mind you control how your own success is defined, so pick a definition that frames your success well and is understandable.
A company like OPower has amazing kilowatt hour savings, but since those can be obtuse, they also show a timeline that reports hockey stick-like growth since their founding.
If you don’t have great growth numbers, you can copy Tumblr and put a live counter with your best stats. DC startup FastCustomer does a great job of this using a free JQuery plug-in called Flip Counter, which can be deployed quickly and easily.
OPower and Tumblr use very different metrics to brag about their traction to a visitor.
Show How to Take Action
After you’ve done your job convincing an early-stage investor that you’re worth talking to, consider how easy it is to use your website to get in touch.
Most website contact information isn’t well-suited to investors. Gizmo has an amazingly robust contact page, but an investor isn’t going to fill out a form or email your info@gizmo.com address. The contact page is great at convincing an investor you’re for real, but does little to make it easy for him to get in touch.
Tip 11: Target Your Contact Info
We built a way of deploying targeted contact info so that when an investor is on your page, he sees buttons to contact you via AngelList or your personal info, without it being visible to the general public.
Gizmo's contact info is much more relevant to an investor if they use Spinnakr to deploy an AngelList button.
How Spinnakr Can Help
After our talk, we were mobbed with requests to put investor-related messaging on websites, so we signed-up ten (!) companies from our class for our service.
In the words of one of our colleagues, it was a no-brainer . If we help them use their website to deliver a few more follows, shares or intros to them on AngelList, that additional interest will translate into a tangible impact on their bottom-line funding and ultimate valuation, making it well worth a monthly investment.
This was great feedback to hear, because it speaks to our core vision. If we can help you deliver targeted content that impacts the conversion of your visitors (and it does!), then we’ve created real value.
The Spinnakr website when an investor arrives.
It feels great to know our 500 team is as excited as we are about that value .
Startups: 11 Ways Your Website Can Win You Investors
Spinnakr on the wall at 500.
Fundraising has been on our minds since Spinnakr joined 500 Startups. In fact, fundraising is on lots of minds in the Valley, and everyone in our class at 500 wants to maximize their chances of raising capital. Since we have some expertise about what works and doesn’t in website engagement, and a tool that can be used to give investors different messages than other visitors, Michael and I presented “How to Pimp your Website to Attract Investors” to the 500 crew yesterday.
Here are 11 tips from our talk:
Show Who You Are
First of all, you need an About page. Early-stage angels are investing in your team and your story as much as your current product. As a result, your About page is the first place an investor will look when he comes to your site.
The Fitocracy story is a great example—the founders admit that they were one-time skinny nerds who traded their addiction to video games for weight-lifting and then decided making fitness addictive for others could be a business.
The Fitocracy team tell the story of their company through their own lives.
You might think your story is less obvious, but something is pushing you down an extraordinary life path. Don’t shy away from telling that story—pimp it!
Your story shows commitment. Any investor who considers you is going to be asking himself, “are these kids going to want to be doing this in five years?” If you can completely disqualify that fear by showing this is the inevitable next stage of your life, then you’re one step closer to closing.
The Zerply team's photos give a sense of who they are that makes you want to meet them.
Also consider highlighting your technical stack if it’s relevant, since lots of early-stage investors have technical backgrounds. Including other advisers, incubators or investors on your About page (something that isn’t done enough) can be helpful too, since they illustrate how you’re connected to a wider network of supporters, give context for your company vision, and sometimes overlap with investors’ colleagues and networks too.
Show What You Are Doing
Second, even if your website is beautiful, when an investor comes to your homepage he is probably asking himself, “is this site dead, or is there a community of people using it right now?” Show investors that your site is alive with a constant stream of activity.
Displaying tweets is an excellent way to get a visitor to follow you. But it’s even better to give different visitors different information. For example, display your Twitter feed to customers and your AngelList status to investors. Spinnakr can help your website do that
.
Also, your Facebook like button should be linked to your Facebook page, not your homepage. That way, when an investor “likes” your page, he will also get your company’s Facebook updates to show up in his feed.
Tip 7: Pimp Your Blog
Include a clearly marked way to get to your blog from your homepage. Blogs were sorely underrepresented in our class. High Score House, has a beautiful and active blog, but it’s very hard to find.
The High Score House blog is beautiful, but too hard to find from their homepage.
Blogs show an investor that you have expertise in the space, and that you can do inbound marketing and community building effectively. If you don’t want blog posts on the homepage, consider posting just the titles of the recent posts or numbers of posts and comments—just the activity will be impressive to investors.
Show How You Are Doing
When you talk about your product on your homepage, there are two things that tend to convert investors: (1) testimonials and (2) traction.
A company like OPower has amazing kilowatt hour savings, but since those can be obtuse, they also show a timeline that reports hockey stick-like growth since their founding.
If you don’t have great growth numbers, you can copy Tumblr and put a live counter with your best stats. DC startup FastCustomer does a great job of this using a free JQuery plug-in called Flip Counter, which can be deployed quickly and easily.
OPower and Tumblr use very different metrics to brag about their traction to a visitor.
Show How to Take Action
After you’ve done your job convincing an early-stage investor that you’re worth talking to, consider how easy it is to use your website to get in touch.
Most website contact information isn’t well-suited to investors. Gizmo has an amazingly robust contact page, but an investor isn’t going to fill out a form or email your info@gizmo.com address. The contact page is great at convincing an investor you’re for real, but does little to make it easy for him to get in touch.
How Spinnakr Can Help
After our talk, we were mobbed with requests to put investor-related messaging on websites, so we signed-up ten (!) companies from our class for our service.
In the words of one of our colleagues, it was a no-brainer . If we help them use their website to deliver a few more follows, shares or intros to them on AngelList, that additional interest will translate into a tangible impact on their bottom-line funding and ultimate valuation, making it well worth a monthly investment.
This was great feedback to hear, because it speaks to our core vision. If we can help you deliver targeted content that impacts the conversion of your visitors (and it does!), then we’ve created real value.
The Spinnakr website when an investor arrives.
It feels great to know our 500 team is as excited as we are about that value
.