- Prepare for the investor gauntlet.
- Find and land investors.
- Find talented workers, services.
- Find local pro-small business programs.
- Prepare for the market.
- Prepare for competition and rapid growth.
Below we share how ActSeed is committed to helping you succeed with your business.
40+ Years of Small Businesses Experience Reflected in Our Technology
Our goal is to deliver unparalleled value to seed (early) stage entrepreneurs at a fraction of what this value would cost in a conventional consulting / professional services model. ActSeed couples informational resources and a profiling/scoring system with a dynamic community application that helps entrepreneurs locate people who can help them build their business, including investors, workers, mentors/consultants and professional service providers.
The “What We Do” article is a good overview of how ActSeed works. Let’s now take a more focused look at the specific value we deliver to entrepreneurs and their companies.
Dual, Integrated Value Propositions for the Entrepreneur
Value Proposition #1: Preparatory Framework and Business Profiling
The first value proposition for entrepreneurs is providing a framework for business planning and preparation. This is not a canned solution or a “business-in-a-box” service. Our goal is to help guide both novice and seasoned entrepreneurs through a structured and systematically scored business planning and preparation process.
Investor Prep. ActSeed’s Entrepreneur Group is designed to help you understand what most investors expect, then help prepare and position your company to attract seed investment. Almost every seed stage entrepreneur includes raising capital as a high priority. About 2% of all startup companies secure funding; 98% of all companies fail to secure investor funds. We want to dramatically improve this success rate.
ActSeed’s founders have a combined 40+ years of early stage business experience. We have founded venture-backed, corporate-backed and fully-bootstrapped startups. ActSeed reflects lessons learned from pitching to over 60 venture capital firms and angels as well as preparing detailed financial projections and business plans/presentations for over 30 companies across many different industries.
Investor Access. ActSeed is a new community. The value to Entrepreneurs will grow as more and more investors join. As we build our Investor Group membership during our first few months, we will help our “charter member” Entrepreneurs identify prospective investors through our own professional networks and by highlighting our Entrepreneur Group companies in our Investor seminars, workshops and other recruiting activities. In other words, early adopters will receive a much more hands-on approach to helping with their capital raising efforts.
Preparing and Profiling Your Company. ActSeed helps you address the question, “Am I prepared?” ActSeed segments preparatory activity into two profile templates. The first template is called the “Company Public Profile” and is viewable by the ActSeed community. The second template is called “Company Private Profile” and is only available to those who the entrepreneur explicitly grants viewing permission. Profile templates can be printed for offline review.
Entrepreneur Company Scores. ActSeed generates a numeric score between 0-100 for each preparatory topic (see “Framework” image). These scores help identify where your business needs attention and can be used by others, including investors, as a benchmark to qualify deal interest.
Entrepreneur-Exclusive Resources. Members of the Entrepreneur Group have exclusive access to (1) a digital library of content and links and (2) a forum for peer collaboration.
Value Proposition #2: Dynamic Community of People with Capital, Labor, Services
The second value proposition for entrepreneurs is the community portion of our application we refer to as the “entrepreneur-centric value exchange”.
Entrepreneur Centric. As an Entrepreneur Group member, you can search for and engage people in all other core groups and all other groups can search for your company. ActSeed places the entrepreneur in control at the center of the community.
Advanced Search. To find and interact with others in the ActSeed community, we provide an advanced search screen that allows you to use a comprehensive set of search parameters. You can have results sent to your email inbox on a daily or weekly basis. Imagine having a service that addresses, “I am looking for an investor within a __ radius of my location who is looking to invest in a __ stage company within the __ industry and is looking to invest $__ into a deal within the next __ days.”
Messaging & Member Interaction. When you identify prospects, you can send them messages within the system without revealing your actual identity until you are ready. Recipients of your message can view your public profile and reply back to you. If you both decide to escalate talks, you can then share identifying information (phone/email).
Professional Contact Designation. You can designate other members as ActSeed Professional Contacts, which enables them to review your company’s private profile information. This is similar to the social media action commonly called “friending”. It’s not designed to help you accumulate thousands of connections, but enable you to selectively share private profile data to help move a possible deal toward successful closure. Professional Contacts are meant to be constantly activated and terminated, not accumulated.
Membership Details
If you are building a business or have a business idea, the ActSeed Entrepreneur Group gives you unlimited access to all of our planning tools and resources – including the ability to search for Investors and people in other Groups – for only $39 per month and no long term commitment. Payment information is completely handled within PayPal’s secure transaction system.
One Year = One Hour. A year’s worth Entrepreneur Group access is benchmarked to roughly one hour from an attorney and costs less than a registration fee for a typical entrepreneur seminar. We do not intend to displace startup consultants or attorneys, but ActSeed’s resources may help you avoid thousands of dollars of startup planning costs that can otherwise be applied to areas your ActSeed profile identifies as needing attention.
If $39 is unaffordable, email us at GroupAdmin.Entrepreneur@ActSeed.com; we have “charter member” programs that allow some entrepreneurs to have fees waived.
Conclusion
The essence of entrepreneurship is identifying and filling a need that has sufficient demand to establish a sustainable business. Beyond this concept is an enormously complex and challenging path that derails many great ideas for lack of proper planning and execution. ActSeed wasn’t designed to be a networking alternative to LinkedIn or similar sites. We are big supporters of other professional networking sites, but we provide a different value proposition to the Entrepreneur: organizing critical resources and processes that a seed/early stage company needs to survive and thrive, which means helping you connect with the few people who really matter at the moment, not connecting you to thousands to may matter one day in the future.
If the value we can provide to you and your burgeoning company is still not evident, please send us an email to GroupAdmin.Entrepreneur@ActSeed.com and let us know how we can earn your business.
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Tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, investor, preparation
nice post. thanks.