What do angel investors look for in startups?

Ever since Votechat was featured in USA Today, we have had a ton of incubatee applications from teams from all over the world. We are going to start the next round in March with 3 teams and are still fielding applications till the end of January. A common question is – what are the factors based on which you decide whom to incubate?

Angels are like entrepreneurs and this is the best testing criteria I have ever seen that angels use to evaluate opportunities. Failure should not be fatal to thier business and success should be so big so that it can make 10 failures look insignificant. In that spirit, it is really simple – only two factors – team and space.

Team is obviously the most important factor to look at. Execution is all that matters when you can have tens of amazing ideas in every magazine ever published on entrepreneurship. 

1. Focus: The kind of time and effort that the founders are willing to put in to ensure that their ideas take shape perfectly is ultra important. We need that entrepreneurs fly all the way to India, live in one of CL hacker houses and work with the team closely for us to invest in them. We want to make sure you live your idea to make it successful.

2. Skill Sets: The founding team’s skill sets should be complementary. In other words, their skill sets should be ‘mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive’. This is not a deal breaker because you can always hire people complementary to you, but a big plus.

3. Passion: Angel investors look for people who live and breathe the dream they want to realize. People who want to do a startup as a side thing with their job till things pick up need not apply to angels.

Space is the second thing that is very important. No matter how great your team is, if you are in the wrong space, you cannot have a huge impact.

1. Size: It takes care of the “make 10 failures look insignificant” bit.

2. Saturation: The degree to which the target market is saturated is another significant factor as the degree to which a startup can penetrate it depends upon it. Sometimes new markets open up, like Fracking opening up a whole new space that was open to be taken by fast movers.

3. Disruption Potential: Even if the market is highly saturated, a disruptive service or product can make considerable impact if it has enough such potential in the form of new features/benefits. Whatsapp disrupted a saturated SMS market by being almost free and better in almost every sense.

If you think your business plan and team ‘check all the boxes’, then get in touch with us.

Or, if you are an angel investor, please do share your experiences with us in the comments section below.