Infrastructure Ventures + Maestro - Fundraising Platform

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

We are creating a VC engagement platform that allows founders to efficiently build their investor pipeline by leveraging human behavior signals. 

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

We will be leveraging Twitter, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase APIs as well as other social listening solutions that will increase the value of the tool.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

I am not against doing this as an open source project, but the learnings that are required to develop this project and do it well enough to translate the goal of the tool (providing founders with an efficient workflow to gain more VC relationships and get funded) are specialized. I am not sure if there is sufficient value in providing this project as an open-source project, but I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Context:

Infrastructure has been helping the NEAR, Kadena, and ICP ecosystem founders jumpstart their fundraising pipelines with our Path to Capital service. The service typically lasts one month and is designed to get a pipeline of interested and warm investor conversations for the founder and then show the founder how to grow their own pipeline using the tactics that we used (social listening, leveraging referrals, conferences, and direct outreach) to grow their investor pipeline from a cold start. 

We have conducted 18 of these engagements in the past year, and 2 of the 17 companies have received funding or options for investment rights into their companies. This is a significant increase from the standard .05% of startups that receive funding each year from venture capital (CB Insights). Here is a link to an end of engagement report.

We are looking at developing a tool that will help founders efficiently build their investor pipelines. This tool is based on our teams learnings of how to efficently gain introductions to investors a well as how to get in touch with investors in a short amount of time. 

Here is how we envision the workflow.

Base data + social listening:

We start off by leveraging the Crunchbase API to allow users to pull in data and target the investors they are interested in speaking with. The user will then save the list of accounts. The user will then be asked to input keywords or phrases they want to receive alerts on when a contact in one of the accounts they have saved mentions a keyword or phrase on LinkedIn or Twitter. These alerts will come to the user each day for their review, and the user will be able to decide which conversations to engage with. 

By leveraging LinkedIn and Twitter social listening, the user will be able to find engaging investor posts and comments on a daily basis, not waste time trying to find these opportunities but benefit from the tool serving these opportunities to the user each day. Social listening is not a new concept, but the current solutions (Sales Navigator, Hootsuite, etc) are costly and cumbersome and don't incorporate the behavioral data that shows the most approachable contact in the account.

Enrich the Data By Leveraging Human Behavior Signals:

Once the user has their account lists and social listening phrases set, we will show the user the most approachable person in the investor account based on their online behavior. 

We have found that it is much more efficient to first understand who is approachable in an investor account than to try to blindly contact VCs or investors in an attempt to find the right person. We will take all of the contacts in the account and then filter them, and then highlight the contacts in the account that exhibit signs of being approachable. 

These signs include posting frequency, if the contact replies to comments on their posts, frequency of comments on others' posts, sentiment analysis of their posts and comments, if they engage with people they don't know, what day of the week they are most active online, whether they post original or reposted content, what types of posts and content they engage with and whether or not they have given recommendations to others and how many recommendations. Here is an example of this concept on a spreadsheet.

These and other signals are all gathered at a contact level given a weighted score. The user will be presented with an account hierarchy map that will show them the most approachable contacts in that account stacked ranked from highest to lowest, thus saving the user a significant amount of time trying to break into new investor accounts. 

The tool will also provide account recommendations like conferences attending and account penetration strategies (multi-threding account opportunities, etc.).

The user will then know which accounts/investor firms are the easiest for them to penetrate and engage with.  

Understanding the best path for referral:

It is very common for the most socially approachable person in the account to also be the most connected person in the account to others within the investor firm. The most approachable person may not be the exact investor that the user will need to approach, but they will often be the "champion/connector" and will be able to provide a referral to the right person in the account. 

Venture capital, family offices, and angels all prefer referrals as a way to signal early signs of credibility compared to cold outreach. This tool is designed to help the user effectively target those in the field who would be able and most likely to provide a referral. 

Contact interface:

Once the user understands which contacts in the account to focus on and clicks on a contact in the account, they will be taken to the contact interface screen, where the tool will search through the past posts of the contact and provide contact recommendations like what conferences they are planning on attending, what they talk about, what they are most interested in. The tool will also pull up the contact's most recent comments and posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, prioritize the most engageable posts for the user to engage with, and start a dialogue with the contact. 

Eliminate the inefficiencies of social prospecting: 

The success of our Path to Capital service was mainly due to years of knowledge of how to use social prospecting to the founder's advantage. With this tool, we are taking the knowledge that exists within the company, eliminating the inefficiencies that exist with current social prospecting processes, and providing it to the Cardano ecosystem so more of its founders can quickly build their investor pipelines and get funded. 

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Our goal is to develop this tool, help Cardano founders build their investor pipelines, and create broken traditional fundraising processes. By helping more founders gain institutional capital, the Cardano treasury and grant program will become more balanced and will be able to grow faster as more projects no longer need grants once they gain sufficient outside capital to grow. 

As Infrastructure Ventures will be using this platform as part of its incubator platform, Maestro will be the entry point into the Cardano ecosystem for builders who come through our incubator program.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

The tool is based off our successful approach of 18 Path to Capital engagements over this last year. The approach works and has worked for every engagement we have fulfilled. Instead of billing a founder $8,500 for an engagement we are creating this tool for them to use to take the approach we have spent countless hours perfecting and leverage the tactics that we use to create investor pipelines.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1 will include the completion of the following (ETA 1 month)

1. User stories
2. Selection of which APIs will be used 
3. List of custom core features to be developed
4. UX design completed 

Milestone 2 will include the completion of the following (ETA 2 months)

1. Development of custom features 
2. API integrations
3. Testing of all features

The final milestone will include the completion of the following (ETA 1 month)

1. Production ready and beta release Cardano founders

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Aaron Anderson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-d-anderson/

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

The average quote I have received from developer shops to develop this tool is $25,000. The cost will be spread out accordingly.

Month 1 = 22,500 ada

1. Feature research
2. User stories
3. Selection of which APIs will be used 
4. List of custom core features to be developed
5. UX design completed 

Month 2 = 22,500 ada

1. Start development of custom features 
2. Start API integrations

Month 3 = 22,500 ada

1. Finish development of custom features 
2. Finish API integrations
3. Stress testing of all features and tool

Month 4 = 22,500 ada

1. Beata Ready - release to Cardano founders

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The costs are reflective of the quotes that I have received from the developer shops that I have spoken with about developing this solution. The costs for developing this tool are low compared to custom development work done in America. I found that American development agencies wanted at least 50K to do the work. The agency that I am looking at is in India (https://onelabventures.com/) and is able to accomplish the work for the budget requested.