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Anytime a new player is entering the markets, there becomes a need to clarify “their market position”, ie. to try and figure out to “what box this belongs to”. Naturally this will be done by each individually, looking from their own perspective.

But, as we are about to launch our full-featured service, let me try to help and make this a bit easier for everyone and give some more insight to our own thinking about Grow VC market position.

Here’s what we are saying in our about page:

Grow VC is Venture Capital 2.0, bringing the first truly transparent, global, community-based approach to early stage funding. Grow VC can help mobile and web 2.0 startup stars secure initial funding for their businesses ranging from $10,000 to 1m USD. Grow VC will not only connect startup entrepreneurs with ‘funders’ (investors) to help them discover their common interests, but also provide tools for the process and new transparent ways of doing things.

Let’s talk this in more detail:

Venture Capital 2.0

This is pointing to where we started our journey. The big talk about the “Venture Capital is Broken“, the talk that the old models of Venture Capital don’t work for new business models. Therefore new business models need new funding models. Following the Web 2.0 model of communicating this we started to talk about Venture Capital 2.0

Truly transparent

This a big part of the the Web 2.0 and social networks. Things that were impossible to think of being public information in just 5 years ago are becoming public by default. To us, it’s only natural that this development will eventually catch up in a big way also in Business and funding startups are not going to be any different. Simply because there are much more problems involved with stuff that is non public information, if compared to being more open. Therefore, in our service, most of the things inside are transparent to everyone.

Global

When we talk about global we mean GLOBAL. We are not talking about “that thing” where you look outside from your own country – No. To us the global is being present in global community that lives at least part of their life online, where things are becoming more global than ever before. Because of the social networks people are really making the Internet “the only true global place in the world”.

Early stage funding

So, our position is not where there are working solutions available and adding efficiency to that would have very little impact, aka traditional Venture Capital. There where the need is several millions and where the cost and management structures are higher. Early stage is the segment where most of the problems of today are. Because of the new entrepreneurs entering to markets that are still learning the ways of startup funding and where the cost of managing, communicating etc. are high, but where also the new stratups are born.

For Mobile and Web  Startups

At least for now, we are focusing solely to web and mobile startups. The reason for this is that,

• those offer some of the most interesting business (and therefore investing) opportunities
• traditional VC don’t really fit to these in their very early stages
• most of the Web & Mobile startup founders and investors are already living the “online life” and their footprints can be found around the web.
• like ecommerce started from computer parts and grew from there we believe that new funding models for startups have best potential to start from web & mobile related startups.

$10,000 to $1,000,000 (that’s USD)

Yep, we even put a number to give a clear range to “seed funding” in our platform. It will be interesting to see what will become the real levels in the beginning and to where those will develop as time goes by.

Provide tools for the process

Now that we have outlined our market position, this is the actual part of what we are doing. Our first step is to move the seed funding process to online platform and provide needed tools to manage the process overall – and for each role to have their own tools for what they are doing in our platform.

Once we have moved the process online, we can continue to innovate and build new and better tools to get the process faster, easier and more efficient for everyone involved. Step by step.

So there you have our market position in more detail. After our launch we may need to add some points to this about our core feature, but most of it will remain the same.

Future position and cooperating with others

Naturally this is just our starting point and only the future will show, to what direction and how fast we need to develop our service.

Our position also leaves plenty of stuff around us that we can’t or won’t focus and we are more than happy to work together with everyone in the startup ecosystem to cooperate on all the things that help new startups. Some our own cooperating ideas we have already outlined, some are still just ideas and most likely, the best ideas will come from you!

So – we build and provide new tools and information to add efficiency and to make things happen faster, make stuff easier to understand and bring down the related costs while doing them. But while doing all that, we are going to only focus to the core problem of the funding process and look to cooperate with others on the related matters. So we look forward to join forces with accelerators, incubators, mentor programs, startup events, localized platforms etc., since our plan is not to star competing with things that are already working, but to develop things that make even those easier to manage and more productive for everyone.

We hope this “more detailed positioning” helps everyone to see “the box we fit” more clearly.

If you are working with startups and have an idea to cooperate with us, please contact us. We are happy to go through your  ideas and see if we can cooperate on those with you.

For those Venture Capitalist that are interested in the startups in our market position – Jouko, my co-founder will soon post about our plans in this area. – Meanwhile, stay tuned or contact him directly.

What do you think of our market position? How would you like us to evolve?

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