How To Become An Angel Investor (Using Angel.Me)
Remember when we talked about crowdfunding as a means of supporting your startup? Well, there are (roughly) two types of crowdfunding – reward based and equity crowdfunding. You’re already familiar with the first one – that’s the kind you do on Indiegogo or Kickstarter. This means that in exchange for their support, your funders get some kind of gratitude tokens, your product at an early bird price, or some special perks.
Equity based crowdfunding, on the other hand, allows you to raise funds by offering shares to angel investors. This usually takes place in the early stages of a company’s lifecycle, and in exchange for the money invested, the angel investors get unlisted shares of the company.
Both means of crowdfunding require a platform, otherwise you’re just going around asking people for money and making shady sales deals. One of the platform that enables you to do both kinds of crowdfunding in one place is angel.me. It’s a place where you can present your company to potential angels.
How To Start A Campaign
You go about this the way you would with any other crowdfunding campaign – you get prepared. It’s hard work and requires lots of effort, because you need to create your campaign, run the campaign and convince people to support your idea and project. If you’re doing reward based crowdfunding, think of it as “pitching” to your customers, your target audience, and make the campaign all about your product.
However, if you’re aiming at equity crowdfunding and offering your stocks, you will need a solid business plan, just like you would if you were pitching to investors. Angel investors are investing to support you, but also for future return on investment, and that is never going to happen if you don’t have a good business plan.
How To Become An Angel Investor
Aside from looking for an investment or crowdfunding, angel.me also allows you to become a supporter or an angel investor. You can find a series of projects and companies there that you can support in their crowdfunding campaign. The crowdfunding campaign means that they offer rewards (mostly goods, services or experiences) in their project or shares in their company. All campaigns on angel.me work via the so called “all or nothing” principle. This means that a project is considered funded when at least 100% is reached within the indicated timeline. If the project is not successful, the angels receive their money back.
The main thought behind angel.me is that in this day and age, anyone can be an entrepreneur or an angel:
We believe that everybody can be an entrepreneur. Not everybody should become an entrepreneur, but if you have a great plan and commitment, anything is possible. Likewise, everybody can be an angel now. Investing in startups or growth companies was previously preserved for a small group of people, but digital platforms have created open marketplaces for entrepreneurs and investors. Crowdfunding allows for the process of raising equity via angels to be much easier and accessible to a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs.
Are you going to give it a try?
