Perfect letter to investor


translation of the article by David Cohen: cult personality, founder and Director of TechStars (one of the top us startup accelerator), a venture capital investor. Tells about the "correct" letter he ever received from startups looking for advice and money. On the topic of the day of Russian startups.

As you might imagine, I get tons of emails. At last check there were more than 500 per day and 50 from people I don't know. They often ask for advice or want me to pay attention to their startup for investment. And that's fine, I try to answer all. But one day I received a very good letter. It didn't sound like “cold call”, it was carefully thought out and very relevant. And here are its contents:


hi David,
I have a question for you on the topic of startups, which I think, like was created for you.

We are starting the project CriticalArc, the main goal is to solve the problem associated with broadcasting in real time the status and location. Such things as imprisonment and critical events. We develop a very strong back-end to ensure critical business applications. We have a start page (www.criticalarc.com) and we plan to present our first system at a startup event here in Sydney on the 31st of March. Now we attract clients, and programmable as hell.

I know you have experience in dispatching systems to work with Pinpoint and I was wondering your opinion in this case: we, as a startup who is looking for investment and a scalable business model to focus on the infrastructure or on solving specific problems? Or best to start a fire with two hands and decide where to focus later?

In other words, ideally, we should be SimpleGeo (but real time) or we should provide a solution for something, what were you doing with RightCad in PinPint?

I will be glad to hear what you think!

As a bonus question: it would be interesting to know how many projects are you currently Dating? The geolocation trend is the same theme as the clones Groupon'and pitches which you probably hear every day? Or do you think that it is not all the seats are occupied? Several it's hard to judge from Australia.

Thank you for taking the time to read! I assume you're now falling down from viewing applications for TechStars. Good luck with the summer program!

Sincerely,
Glenn Farrant
CEO of CriticalArc


What I love about this letter:

the
    the
  • He knows my background and formulates the question using relevant context.
    • the
  • He knows who I am (link to TechStars)
    • the
  • He understands that I see a million clones of Groupon, which I, to put it mildly, annoyed.
    • the
  • Clear that he was overall an intelligent guy, able to clearly and simply articulate their thoughts.
    • the
  • He speaks the same language with me. He mentioned Pinpoint and summer program (despite the fact that he's in Australia where it is winter). He refers to SimpleGeo is one of my investment projects. And he formulated a question so I just answer it.


Of course, I try to reply to all emails I receive, especially if it's from entrepreneur. But it really was special and made me desire to help. So I decided to share and tell what was the cause.
Article based on information from habrahabr.ru

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