Many Startups Are Proud Of Their Technology, Platform Or App. And They Should Be.
After all, it’s taken blood, sweat and tears to scope it, build it, scratch it, build it again and then iterate to get the whole thing market ready.
A lot goes into technology planning and development and although this is important, it’s actually not the main thing we use to assess an investment opportunity.
When we look at potential startups to join our investment portfolio we do care about the technology, but initially we care about three key areas.
The Metrics
The single most important thing we look at is what the numbers are showing. How many customers or users have been secured over how long, what’s the MRR and planned ARR, what are the digital/SEO metrics showing and so forth. Another important one is that the founder know’s the future numbers required to take the venture global. This isn’t something that can be outsourced to an advisor as the founder needs to own these numbers and how they got there.
The Founder
At Sprint we’re proud to be founder first. This means we’re primarily investing in the founder /team and then the technology/venture second. We’re looking for attitude over ability and the old adage of “fake it till you make it” won’t cut it. The founder has to have an edge to them and just like our founders here at Sprint, they’re out to prove a point to the doubters.
A Global Opportunity
IWe need to see global opportunity and although it’s fine to prove the MVP and venture concept in Australia, we’re really wanting to see what international problem solving the venture will achieve. How will it transform real lives, create global emotional engagement and can the results from the Australian trials translate into global scale opportunities? Big, but important questions.
After these three areas, the technology is absolutely a key focus and a key tip here is we’ll be looking ‘under the hood’ at the entire stack, code base and security. The majority of times during DD we’ll ask external experts to review the code/security/hosting and make sure it’s all scalable and super tight.
So founders – let’s chat if you’re ready to demo your metrics, founder values and global ambition!
P.S. – if you don’t understand some of the acronyms in this post like MRR, SEO or DD, Google them!
