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We're launching Founderpath today to help saas founders raise cash without diluting their company
Instead of a merchant cash advance needing to be paid back within 6-12 months, our standard deal is 15% interest, 4 year payback, $200k check
We get no equity, no warrants, no weird covenants, and don't require personal guarantees
This cash is way cheaper than if you were to raise from a VC (normally diluting your equity pool by 20%+ and losing a lot of control via a board seat and veto powers)
We're around all day today showing demos & answering questions over at https://www.producthunt.com/posts/founderpath
Hope to see you there!
Weekly.vc (https://weekly.vc) is a weekly email with requests for pitches from top VCs and angel investors.
When investors want to meet, research, invest in, or learn more about a specific kind of startup––either by industry, location, or mission––they submit “requests for pitches” to Weekly.vc.
Every week we compile a list and send them out to everyone who’s subscribed to the newsletter (while keeping the identity of the investors anonymous so there’s no abuse or spam). Founders respond to investors’ requests, we forward to the investors, and if the investors like their pitch, we introduce the founder and investor directly.
Throughout years of building products & services helping hundreds of founders from all over the world optimize their fundraising process, we’ve found warm introductions to be the best strategy to maximize conversion rate and start building positive relationships.
Weekly.vc is the simplest way to keep a pulse on what investors are interested in and to get consistent warm introductions to investors ready to learn more about your project at that moment.
For investors, it’s one of the best ways to get in touch with resourceful startups from all over the world building high growth products on the internet––with many of them looking to raise their seed round.
We’re running an early beta pricing for founders so you can subscribe for just $29/mo to get the email every week and respond to unlimited requests. And if you sign up today, you’ll also get last week’s email!
Weekly.vc is 100% free for investors––both angels & VCs. If you’d like to submit a request, you can do so here: https://weekly.vc/investors
Thanks for the time––and as always we'd love your feedback on how we can improve the product!
–– Matt & Aaron from Weekly.vc
P.S. We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/weekly-vc
Investor Scout (https://investorscout.co) is a categorized database of over 52,000 angel investors, venture capitalists, and VC funds.
Stumbling through bottomless Google results, Twitter bios, AngelList & LinkedIn profile, and Crunchbase pages to find the best investors to pitch your startup can take hundreds of hours to do effectively.
Investor Scout aggregates 52k+ investors, their emails, phone numbers, and hundreds of thousands of other data points in one place so you can quickly find the best investors to pitch your startup to + their direct email address so you can spend less time researching and more time actually booking calls, taking meetings, and CASHING CHECKS
For this update we’ve:
- Overhauled our dataset by adding thousands of new investors and spending a ton of money verifying their emails (to minimize bounce rate and save you time)
- Built out new bulk investor selection tools so you can select up to 50 investors at once instead of one-by-one, and for premium accounts to build unlimited lists and export an unlimited amount of investors
- Added a free plan so you can give Investor Scout a shot without a big commitment
Investor Scout plans start at $69/mo, but we’ve made a special 50% off forever lifetime discount code for early adopters on Hacker News: ‘EARLYADOPTERS’. This code makes us the most affordable investor database on the market––this code expires this week so if you want to give us a try, now’s a great time.
We’d love feedback & ideas on how we can keep improving Investor Scout and make it the best place to raise your seed round! Thanks for reading this
- Matt & Aaron
PS: We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/investor-scout-2-0
Podcast List (https://presshunt.co/podcasts) is a categorized database of 200k+ podcasts with emails & tags to help you find and pitch podcasts to cover your business.
Podcasts are the newest form of media outlet, and coverage of you, your product, or your business can generate tons of attention quickly.
Most podcast lists are designed for people trying to find new podcasts to listen to, which is only marginally helpful for marketers. For Podcast List we’ve designed the ideal list for entrepreneurs and marketers trying to find the right podcast to pitch their story to––either as an organic story/interview or as an advertisement.
Podcast List includes emails, tags & categories, hosts, titles, logos, the number of episodes, links to social media accounts & websites, and links to the podcast’s iTunes page.
To help you find even more coverage opportunities for your product, we've integrated this into our product Press Hunt which means as a bonus you’ll also get access to:
1. Our database of 400k journalists from all over the world
2. The ability to build lists of your favorite podcasts & journalists ️ 3. The ability to export their contact data to CSV so you can easily run email outreach campaigns
Our plans start at $69/mo, but we’ve made a special 50% off forever lifetime discount code for early adopters on Hacker News: ‘EARLYADOPTERS’. This code expires this week.
As always we’d love feedback––thanks for taking the time to read this
- Matt & Aaron from Press Hunt
PS: We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/podcast-list-2
For the last year and a half we’ve been working hard on building the future of PR software at Press Hunt (https://presshunt.co). We’ve compiled one of the most advanced journalist databases available. One of the biggest requests we’ve had from our users is to have guided campaigns ran by PR experts integrated into our core software product.
We’ve launched a similar service in the past called Howler––Boost is a remastering of Howler, integrating it into our core do-it-yourself PR tool and hooking it up with our refined Press Hunt 2.0 dataset.
Here’s how Boost (https://presshunt.co/boost) works:
1. We use proprietary algorithms to match you with 1,000 targeted journalists from our database of ~400k
2. Our team of PR experts writes your pitches––we’ll refine them until you’re happy & give us the green light
3. We run your PR outreach campaign to the journalists & reporters in your list
4. We introduce you to the journalist directly when they express interest in your story so you can set up a time for an interview
Boost is the simplest way to run a PR campaign without spending hundreds of hours manually researching journalists, trying to find their emails, and sending emails to them. We take care of the whole process so you can just quickly get your campaign out without all the BS.
We’ve been working really hard on this, and we’d love your feedback! If you’d like to give Boost a try, I made a 20% off lifetime discount code that will be live for the next few days. Use the code ‘EARLY’ at checkout.
Thanks for your time!
– Matt, Aaron, & Frances
PS: We just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pr-boost-by-press-hunt
About 6 months ago we launched the first version of Scribble on Hacker News & Product Hunt. Scribble (https://hiscribble.com) is a simple, no BS blog-writing subscription for startups, small businesses, and indie makers.
Since launching our 1.0 we’ve learned a lot about how to run a service like this, and today we’re launching a huge revamp:
We’ve about doubled the amount of writers on the team (all native English-speaking, all based in the USA)
We’ve optimized our pricing & ops models to make us the most affordable premium writing service available (without outsourcing or white labeling)
️ We've put together a new dashboard for you to track your order status and SEO / keyword rankings
Content production workflow optimized more for SEO and keyword targeting
If you want to give Scribble a try, you can use the discount code EARLYADOPTERS at checkout for 20% off forever. This code expires in 3 days!
Would love to hear your feedback, and happy to answer any questions. We're also featured on Product Hunt today (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/scribble-2-0)!
– Matt & Aaron
Investor Scout (https://investorscout.co) is a categorized database of over 45,000 angel investors and venture capitalists.
Finding the right investors to pitch your startup to––then finding the best way to reach out to them directly––is a nightmare. The data is spread out all over the internet, down the google rabbit hole, Twitter, LinkedIn, and AngelList.
Research can take hundreds of hours on its own, not even counting the time it takes to actually reach out to investors, go through initial screens, get meetings, and finally close a round.
Last year we launched Investor Hunt on Product Hunt and it was obvious to us that we hit on a strong need, so we’ve been working hard on improving everything about the product.
Investor Scout is Investor Hunt 2.0 (we’ve re-branded from “Hunt” to “Scout”). Since our 1.0 almost 200 companies like Rip Van Wafels and The Family have used Investor Hunt.
For our 2.0 we’ve completely revamped the UI, updated our dataset (we’re also halfway through another massive dataset update that we’ll be launching this year), and built out a more sophisticated system for saving investors & exporting their contact info.
Like our 1.0, investors are categorized by what they’re likely to invest in next (based on their interests and what they’ve already invested in). The dataset includes emails (almost 30k), phone numbers, investor tags, past investments, the company they work for, and social media profiles.
We’d love feedback––thanks for reading this
- Matt & Aaron
PS: We just launched on Product Hunt: https://producthunt.com/posts/investor-scout
Press Hunt (https://presshunt.co) is a categorized database of almost 400k journalists, reporters, and media outlets.
Finding the right journalists to pitch your business to––then finding their email address––is a nightmare. The data is spread out all over the internet, down the google rabbit hole, news sites, and twitter accounts.
Research can take hundreds of hours on it’s own, not even counting the time it takes to run an effective email campaign.
Over the last year we’ve run hundreds of PR campaigns for companies like Instacart and Dos Toros. Our campaigns have been featured by hundreds of media outlets like The Washington Post, The Independent, and VICE.
We started out building media lists by hand, but that sucked. We built crawlers to compile the 1.0 of this data, then purged, cleaned, and enriched it all. With this update we’ve added millions of data points: new tags, phone numbers, journalist media outlet, photos, and more!
Since our 1.0 almost a hundred companies (startups, photographers, PR agencies, etc.) have used Press Hunt, logging almost 80k searches.
For our 2.0 we’ve completely revamped the UI, updated & enriched our dataset (with new attributes like phone numbers, social media accounts, and millions of new data points), and built out a new system for you to save journalists to media lists and export their contact info to CSV (so running email campaigns to them is now even easier).
Like our 1.0, journalists are categorized by tags representing what they’re likely to write about next (based on what they’ve written about before, where they write, and what they tweet about). The dataset includes emails, phone numbers, where they write, and their industry focuses.
We’d love feedback––thanks for reading this
- Matt & Aaron
Scribble (https://www.hiscribble.com/) is an unlimited writing subscription for brands starting at $99/mo. We help startups, indie hackers, and brands write high-quality blogs to attract attention to their products.
Writing a blog is a great way to improve SEO and bring in long-term targeted traffic. Blogs are hard work though. You can’t just write one post, you have to constantly maintain and update it.
Writing one well-researched blog post can take up to 20 hours. Maintaining a quality blog for your company can take 100 hours a month. Why do that yourself?
Scribble puts your blog on autopilot. We write useful, relevant blog posts and newsletters designed for your target audience. Here’s how it works:
1. Send us a prompt or a loose idea of what you want written 2. We spend a few days researching and outlining your blog post, then share a rough draft with you 3. We work with you to refine this draft to perfection 4. You publish the post on your blog 5. Repeat
While our competitors outsource their work overseas to people who don’t speak native English, everyone on our team is a native English speaker based in the US. We're able to keep our costs sustainable by streamlining backend operations with software––not by cutting corners on quality.
We’ll be here all day to answer questions! Thanks!
–– Matt, Daniel, & Aaron
PS: We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/scribble-3
PPS: This is our 12th product of the year, as part of our 24 businesses in 12 months challenge: https://www.westvesey.com/why-were-building-24-businesses-in...
BroadBoard is the simplest & most affordable way to get your product featured on one of the most famous billboards in Times Square. We just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/broadboard-times-square!
Normally advertising in Times Square requires 7-figure budgets and months-long commitments.
We’ve organized a partnership with the management behind the famous Thomson Reuters sign in the heart of Times Square to let startups share exciting news about their companies & products on their billboard for a fraction of the cost: just $500 per feature.
This is one of the largest digital signs in the world (22 stories tall), adjacent from the Hard Rock Cafe and the site of the New Years Eve Ball on 43rd Street & 7th Avenue. See it on Google Street View here: https://goo.gl/jgp1W8)!
Every BroadBoard feature comes with a feature on the Thomson Reuters billboard, a full press release, a photo of your feature on the sign, and distribution to our network of 1,400 content websites. ️
Really excited to share this––would love to hear your thoughts!
–– Matt, Aaron, & Frances
PS: This is our 11th product in our 24 in 12 months challenge, 3rd product in 2 weeks (Read about the challenge here: https://westvesey.com/why-were-building-24-businesses-in-12-...)
Investor Hunt (https://www.investorhunt.co) is a categorized database of 40k+ angel investors and venture capitalists.
Figuring out which investors are likely to be interested in your project and how to get in direct contact with them is a nightmare. All this data is spread out, and finding it pushes you down a rabbit hole of AngelList, personal websites, Crunchbase, and VC fund portfolio pages. All this can take hundreds of hours of research––hours you could be using to actually close rounds.
For the last few years while we’ve been fundraising for different projects, we've built out spreadsheets of all the investors we’ve met with (and who we’d want to meet) complete with data like where to best contact them. Over the years, our private lists grew to over a thousand investors.
After building the data engineering tools to make Press Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/press-hunt) and Howler (https://www.howler.media/) possible, we realized it would make perfect sense to use them to grow our lists of investors into a comprehensive all-in-one database.
Investor Hunt is a simple SAAS product that aggregates the names, contact info, investment focuses, past investments, and locations of the best investors in the world in one place. We’ve grown the list to 40k+ investors (~30k of them have emails, and the rest have alternative contact links like Twitter, LinkedIn, and AngelList).
The database is still very much a WIP––we’re constantly enriching data and adding new sources. We’ve been using this ourselves (and have a few beta users), and have found it really useful, and it’s now 10x bigger than other investor database alternatives.
We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/investor-hunt.
We’d love feedback––thanks for the time!
- Matt, David, Ermek, & Rashid
~3 months ago we launched Howler (www.howler.media) as a simple “PR outreach as a service” product; a productized alternative to $5k/mo PR agencies for $149/mo.
So far we’ve helped ~100 startups like Ben (YC W18), Bitsbox (as seen on Shark Tank), and Off The Grid get dozens of interviews with outlets like TechCrunch, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. (You can see some of the features we’ve gotten our subscribers at www.howler.media.)
We’ve taken all the feedback we’ve gotten from our subscribers and have just shipped a 2.0 with an updated pricing model, brand identity, and landing page. We’ve also recently on-boarded someone to our team in NYC to lead our outreach campaigns and account management. Here's how Howler 2.0 works:
1. We'll write a custom press pitch for you, and we’ll refine it together until you confirm
2. We'll use that press pitch to algorithmically generate a hyper-targeted media list from our database of 500k journalists
3. We'll send personalized pitches to the 125-500 emails in that list
4. We'll follow up with each journalist 1-2 times
5. We'll CC you on the thread if any of them express interest
6. We'll monitor HARO and reach out to journalists proactively if we think you’re a good fit for their story
7. We'll provide analytics of open & reply rates throughout the campaign
We’d really appreciate your feedback on our messaging + pricing model! We also have a 20% discount code for HN: HACKERS.
Thanks!
– Matt, Aaron, David, & Frances