Here’s Why We Launched LetsVenture’s Mobile App

It has been an exciting 33 months since our inception and pioneering efforts in making startup funding truly easy in the Indian ecosystem. We have consciously chosen to keep the investor side of the marketplace invite only – it does help us curate our investors before they are on boarded to the platform. The startup profiles on LetsVenture continue to grow rapidly – today we have 10k+ startups who have LetsVenture profiles and we continue to strengthen our startup curation process. The metric that gives us tremendous satisfaction and validation that we are doing work that truly matters – enabling 81 startups to raise over $33 Mn on the platform.

By definition, we as a team spend a large amount of time engaging with the investors on the platform. This gives us an unparalleled understanding of their needs, wish list and a good understanding on what drives angel investing.

Without exception, our investor community has the following characteristics:

• Time is at a premium – They have full time day jobs and angel investing is NOT a full time job.
• Tough to engage with startups – A simple, convenient and consistent way to engage with startups and have meaningful conversations continues to be a challenge for them
• Their deal flow pipeline is cluttered – As the brand and portfolio grows, the deal flow is increasingly cluttered, without any easy way to filter or curate
• Syndicate updates – Updates on active syndicates have to be immediate, as it does help decisions to be made quickly
• Our investor base is global and mobile

But one overarching trait stood out – despite the above concerns (and more), every one of these investors is passionate about the India startup story and would like to engage meaningfully with startups.

Based on 2 primary goals – to create ease of access to deal flow, and to ensure information sharing is done in a time sensitive way, we decided to launch the mobile app for investors.

The app has allowed Investors and startups to take the LetsVenture ecosystem with them wherever they go. Investors can now look at their daily feed and quickly check out the profiles of startups and can connect with the startup founders on the go in an easy to use chat feature. More importantly, given the mobile nature of the app, we now have the ability to display a personalised startup feed, based on investor’s preferences. In addition to all the above features, investors will now able to form syndicates and express commits to specific startups with the tap of a button.

The LV mobile app is also our investors’ source of the latest funding news, thus giving them access to curated startups and news – all in one place. Another powerful feature is the group chat that allows investors to chat with each other and a LV team member before they commit to a deal. This enables decision making in the most transparent manner and truly empowers our investor community.

Our thinking has been simple. Make the process of discovery, connecting and making the decision to invest easy, transparent and quick. We’ve been getting rave reviews on the app – A VC Partner I met just recently said “This is the best thing I have seen today”. Investors seem to love the UX, the ease of filtering and the ease with which they can now chat with founders, while keeping their identity private. The average time spent by investors on the mobile app continues to increase. More investors are connecting with Founders via the app. Just another milestone at LV to make startup funding easy!

The app is now available on both iOS and Android platform. Do send me an email once you have downloaded the app – would love to hear your thoughts / feedback. We are always learning from what you have to say to us.

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