Why Investors are Getting it all Wrong When it Comes to Tech Startups
Every single day, I receive an email from a tech company who is trying to sell a service to me. Whether accounting, legal, PR, analytics, recruiting, you name it, the emails come pouring in on a daily basis. After doing some research, I noticed most of the companies either recently were funded in the millions of dollars, or they have already received funding in the past few years. What’s funny is that they continually target every startup they can, whether they have funding or not.
Basically, VCs think that these companies are great even though they rely on companies that don’t have money to pay for their services. Talk about a Catch 22. Wouldn’t it be wiser to invest in companies that the service providers are targeting? Then, once those companies succeed or start to earn revenue, they can then start hiring the service providers for those services and the Catch-22 goes away. That just seems like a much more feasible situation to me than the one that is plaguing the tech startup world.
Here’s one of the more recent emails that I received word for word:
Hello!
Are you the correct contact to discuss possibly working together on user acquisition and traffic growth? Should I send you a more detailed email with information on how we can grow your online sales?
I’m one of the acquisition consultants here at [named removed]. We recently raised $10 Million and have been increasing client’s traffic and attracting new customer acquisition for our clients worldwide since 2008. I would appreciate any help. Thank you!
Can you imagine telling us that you just raised $10 million but now you’re asking for our money too? Did you ever think that maybe we were one of the thousands of startups out there that just simply don’t have the resources or the funding to pay for your service? To the VCs who invested in the aforementioned company: You are investing in the wrong companies. You need to get past the B2B or B2C ideology that has been festering in the tech community for years, and instead, seek out the companies who are thinking outside the box, truly solving a problem that has existed in the world for years.
In the meantime, I will have to continue wasting my time deleting emails or even answering them with quirky and unsavory responses about not being able to afford their service, but congratulations on getting $10 million in funding.
