The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don’t try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don’t make God-jokes in Utah and you don’t get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you’re looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here’s a list of five to get you started.
1. BOTH SIDES OF THE TABLE, @msuster: Investor, entrepreneur and blogger Mark Suster is a partner at GRP VC and recently created Launchpad LA – an incubator for Southern California-based companies. Suster has an 11 part series on what makes an entrepreneur successful and it’s a great primer for first time startup founders.
2. PAULGRAHAM.COM: Best known as the co-founder of YCombinator, Graham and his partners revolutionized the investment model. The entrepreneur popularized both the incubator-style program model and the term ramen profitable to describe lean startups. To look at what Graham is interested in, YCombinator publishes Requests for Startups on an ongoing basis.
3. A VC, @fredwilson: Perhaps one of the most well-known blogger/VCs, Fred Wilson is a principal with NYC-based Union Square Ventures. He has a 15-year track record and some of his investments include Twitter, Disqus and Etsy. Wilson is an avid blogger and offers insightful commentary on emerging tech trends as they happen.
4. VENTURE HACKS, @venturehacks: Run by startup advisors Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant, Venture Hacks offers great advice for early stage startups. The two have raised more than $100 million dollars for companies like test prep site Grockit and open source music company Songbird. With connections to major firms such as Sequoia, Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the duo’s blog also features guest posts from top-tier VCs.
5. VENTURE BLOG, @ventureblog: August Capital’s David Hornik is a former lawyer who has celebrated successful investments in Evite and PayCycle. During the winter of our financial apocalypse, Hornik was one of the first investors to offer a hopeful message to startups. Entitled Innovation Doesn’t Take a Vacation in an Economic Downturn, Hornik’s post inspired many to continue in their pursuit of great products.
Photo Credit: Flickr user Alistair and Andrew Magill
