Criteria for seed investment from Dave McClure

From Denny's blog:. ... Linkedin. , In profile. CrunchBase. The section on him in his. Online. ). He is one of the Dons. PayPal Mafia. One of the chapters, which is a former resident of Kiev. Max Levchin. - For this informal organization are startups such as Linkedin, Youtube, FaceBook, Six Apart, Slide, Mint, and several dozen others ( including the internet was not a startup Tesla Motors).

So, this person has only a few criteria for the early financing of startups:.

a. By -product refers to a service running on a free or low-cost Open Source software that runs on a Claude or a low-cost engine, developed by a few months (and better for the weekend ), a small team of programmers, who are constantly testing it in real time on live users.
2. Most often, we mean a combination of marketing channels to promote online through paid or organic search traffic (SEM / SEO) search engine, with a viral / social component in the new media and social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and fast-growing mobile platforms iOS . Except for search engines, most of these channels, there are no more than five years, but now have from 100m to 500m users, with a low-budget and measurable marketing companies and even with a small team can easily get billions of users around the world.
3. Income can be easily collected by the various online payment instrumenov, and can be a price to pay for transactions, digital goods, payment for subscriptions, lead generation, CPM / CPC / CPA advertising.

What is interesting here? . You bet on a team of programmers (minimum cost), marketing of ... Say ... Instead, the chosen method of trial and error, live customer feedback. This suggests that startups have moved into the second stage of development. There is a classification in the works for the sale of services ( which are different from those of many goods and which are all start-ups ):.

1. 
   The first stage - do what meets the minimum requirements of consumers.
   


2. 
   The second stage - do what consumers want.
   


3. 
   The third stage - do what surpasses the imagination of consumers.
   

The second stage - this is a good product. It is at this stage is the internet and startups. And yet, how about creating what surpasses the imagination of consumers (such as Disney has created Disneyvorld from which all crazy )? .