Grow VC > Blog

By stargazr441

A warm welcome to all new readers and members in Grow VC. It’s now been a bit over two weeks from our first beta launch, that we had scheduled for the 2nd Q of 2009. So it’s a good time to share some of the things we have experienced.

During our developments, it’s always been very important for us to be able to keep our planned dates and milestones. So as we were approaching the end of June, we started to finalize the material and features we had ready so far and put up the initial private beta service and our main site.

In typical startup manner we were pulling long hours to get everything to the point needed for us to pull this off. When it came to the day of launch we still had some minor hiccups, and missed our target launch time by a few minutes.

Other than that small delay, we could have not asked for more than what we got for our initial launch response -  we were all extremely exited to see the first posts written about our service and see people lined up in our server hitting “reload” in their browser to see when it went live (my apologies for those who had to wait a few extra minutes).

Here’s some of the posts written about Grow VC so far:

ReadWriteWeb
ArcticStartup
Museum of Modern Betas
The Startup
London Calling
The Next Women
Open Gardens

After the big push on working towards the launch, going through this first beta launch, seeing the great initial response from the markets, seeing people registering to our service and immediately starting to give us feedback, I feel personally very humble to be able to continue our journey with you, so a BIG thanks for those that have helped us so far and those registering to our service and wanting to be part of our venture to “forever change the early stage funding model.” After all this is just the beginning! And we are here for the long haul!

Now – after the launch, first being just exhausted after all of the work and hoopla, then enjoying the launch, registrations and feedback we are receiving – to pulling all of this initial feedback and thoughts back together, we have been fixing bugs and adding new features as fast as possible. Also we have had to do some new features we had not planned and restructure some of our existing features. We are very exited to continue our work towards the next milestones in our road map.

As we are running our private beta, we are taking new registrations in limited numbers by invitation only and we have released some invitation codes via above sites.  We have also invitations available via different Grow VC LinkedIn groups.

We are doing this invitation model during private beta, to be able to make sure we can continue to develop our service in an organized manner and communicate with users to help make our service better for everyone.

The road ahead

As we have launched our private beta and there is something to put your head around, there is so much more that we can and want to communicate about our ideas and thinking about what Venture Capital 2.0 means to us. In coming posts we will start explaining more of our thinking and sharing our ideas. We’d also love to get your feedback comments and ideas, on how can we do better.

At the moment, there are a few of the original core ideas with matching feature updates to our service from the early days, that we are still holding onto, so we can release those later in a more official manner. You can expect these bigger releases, first this fall, and the next one by the start of 2010. The reason we are holding back on revealing these, is that there are important open negotiations going on with several parties around the world related to these announcements.

Other than those few bigger ideas, we want to openly share as much as we can about what we are doing and thinking, so those that want can participate and be part of the change we are doing.

We want you!

What comes to you, as a reader, user in our service, being an entrepreneur, expert or a funder, we could not think of a better and more valuable audience, that we would like to be able to serve with our solution.

• as an entrepreneur in general and particularly in web and mobile space, I could not imagine better people that can really challenge us to do our best and give us the type of feedback that matters
• as a funder, selecting start-ups that you feel have earned the extra resources, speed and/or visibility that you can help them to achieve by participate on funding and sharing your knowledge, contacts and expertise to benefit your joint venture
• as an expert, putting all of your knowledge and skills to play an meaningful role, on making not only our service better, but also helping to build some extraordinary companies of the future

In our world that feels more unified by the day (at least in the online world anyway), there is no question that big changes continue to happen on so many fronts and that there will continue to be from small to extreme global problems that need to be solved. This is the exact reason why entrepreneurs are called to action by so many. Problems of all sizes need solving and industries of many types need serious restructuring.

We want to do our part by building a platform where new start-ups can have a seriously new launch-pad, that they can recognize as their own and you can help us develop it even better.

If you feel that what we are doing is important to you – we invite you to join us, via our service, LinkedIn Groups, FriendFeed and/or Facebook. To follow our progress, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and/or follow our Twitter feed.

There is so much that need to be done and so much you can do to help us – to help start-ups, starting right now by sharing your opinions and feedback below