Thoughts on getting an investment from investors for apps

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our Academy series in this video let's talk about when and how to get funding for your apps I realize it's not fun to be struggling financially I realized that apps need money from marketing for development and it's not fun to have that stress that you're probably experiencing but also there's a truth here is that it's hard to raise money for apps it just is hard so often app entrepreneurs have to wait longer than they'd like before they start seeing financial success or freedom or investment I just a part of it so let's go over the options you have so you have a list of startup investors and mobile app investors on a site like an angel list comets an industry-standard site also smaller investments then investor give can be given out by incubators and instead of incidentally a list of incubators is listed on AngelList com slash incubator so you want to browse that and apply to the incubators now you'll notice that here I wrote Angeles com here I wrote angel that CEO a lot of the variations of their domain names redirect to the same thing so I would just go to Angela's comm slash incubators but I gave you that angel is that CEO just as an example to show you that all these variations of their domains redirect to the same thing and by the way when I say in this video when I give you resources for websites some of them work in the United States some of the work in Europe wherever you are I don't know where you're located so let's say you're looking for investors well let's say you're looking at investors in Mexico or another country well just search Google for investors app investors in Mexico or startup incubators in Mexico so that it makes sense for wherever you are because I cannot do this video for every country in the world separately another option is for you to take loans to start a business are not a good idea nevertheless a lot of intrapreneurs resort to that I don't recommend it but if you end up wanting to do it anyway getting a loan from a bank for a mobile app is not a possibility and till it generates a significant amount of revenue typically around four to six thousand dollars a month that's where you can start getting legitimate business loans if you're before that then you can go to crowd lending sites like Lane vo calm or prosper calm and it might be a little easier for you to get alone again loans are risky if your startup doesn't succeed then you lost that money and you have to pay back the loan so you kind of lost double other sides you I'm sure you're aware of our crowdfunding sites these are IndieGoGo calm or Kickstarter another side is go fund me.com and I like that one because it doesn't have an expiring due date for your fundraising campaign, you can fundraise perpetually which is good and of course, you can raise money from friends and family or you know you can have a job or a part-time job and save money from that job which is actually guaranteed money as opposed to all these other places you can spend your time looking applying to incubators contacting investors doing crowdfunding but you might not get anything so working and getting savings is the actual sure way to make sure that you actually get some money in the end that's actually what I did I didn't ask anyone for money really I just saved money from my job and and then when I needed to take time to work on my app I had savings and that's right that's really what I did so that's what I also recommend to others and of course if you raise money from friends and family be extremely careful with their money I probably would not recommend this although of all these options is one of the easier ways to get money cuz friends and family will let you get some money but most people don't like mixing friends and family in business and also, you want to be careful with their money as well now a few things about investors because investors are probably the hottest topic in-app fundraising everybody wants to get an investment and what do they want well they're looking for a proven team of more than one person typically a large billion-dollar market or at least a very large Multi multi-hundred million dollar market and they want to see a unique innovative product we have if you have a puzzle app or not an exciting game or something like you know kind of not breakthrough then maybe the investors aren't the option because they do look for some really difficult criteria because otherwise, it's just difficult for them to justify their risk of investing in very risky investments and another very important thing a lot of students in this course that I talk to when I talk to them about raising money and I say hey you need to show traction investors want to see traction and real engagement and the answer I typically get is well I have a thousand people or 2,000 people on my app and they're using the app but then when I quiz them further, they say well they're not doing much on the app maybe they play a little on the game maybe they make an account so you have some account you have some emails but they're not actually coming back to the app that's a really a commonly recurring theme for new app entrepreneurs who launch their app get a few downloads a few thousand maybe few tens of thousands but then the people aren't really using the app and then the engagement is not real engagement there are numbers you can show numbers like a lot of downloads but they're not really good downloads and so an investor would say well you're failing your app business so far because they're not coming back there a lot of people are quitting the app so it's like you literally prove that it's failing so what you have to do before you seek out investment monitor the behavior of your users and fix the bugs and make the features better make the app easier to get onboard it make the app like kind of get people using the app and coming back and when you show that in increasing numbers that's traction that's engagement and then it gets interested of investors because you can kind of fool them and fudge the numbers a little bit to make it look like you're getting downloads but really if the downloads aren't quality downloads that's more proof that you shouldn't get investment or do too early and so you've got to work on making sure that people are truly using that app all the time and coming back and that that's true engagement and that's per the biggest test of is your app ready for funding.