This week I went to South Coast Connections at the Queens Hotel and spa, where the guest speaker was Bill Morrow, founder of Angels Den.

After hearing the story of how he came to set up Angels Den he set out the five questions start-ups have to answer to secure funding from Angels, perhaps interesting is to hear where most fail; I wanted to share it with you so here it is:

angels-den

Note: this recording was made off my phone so it’s not amazing… and yes, I did ask Bill if it was ok to post it online! (especially to share with the Startup-Meetup group on LinkedIn)

1. What do you do?
2. What is the pain in the marketplace that you solve?
3. How do you solve that pain?
4. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors in the market place?
5. How much money do you need? (& does the money you ask for show a relation to the valuation I put on your company?)

I especially liked his openness about failure, one for a future Failure Swapshop perhaps?

Last weeks startup meetup was very interesting,we discussed the idea of having some form of startup contest – see Mark Ng’s write up on the contest idea here

In a rough summary:

Incubator idea – full time commitment / funded / fixed end date to contest (3 months?) / launch day where ideas/teams are founded

part time contest – part time teams / sponsored / fixed end date / launch day where teams can find missing members

or some combo of the two, perhaps a launch day where teams could pitch to be in the incubator and then a free for all for any other p/t teams who wanted to compete for the main prize… whatever that was.

Personally, I’m split on the idea… I totally see the commitment side that Mark argues for.. I also think a p/t contest has merits.