Hey, I feel like bloggin!
I suspect this is due to the product I'm working on finally being at a point where I think it is usable and useful for enough of the target market that I'm willing to really talk about it and seek out feedback at a bigger scale.
What I'm talking about is VCHub, and the way we like to think about it is we're modeling the startup ecosystem.
There's a lot more to creating a successful new company than just the people in the company itself. You have law firms, accounting firms, advisers, investors, so on and so forth.
We started with, and the core of the product still is, an online capitalization table. This is where all the investors, including company founders and employees, are tracked and what portion of the company they own under what terms is tracked.
Most companies currently track this information in a custom Excel spreadsheet, maybe they got it from their law firm or got a hand me down from another company. I'm not going to spend time in this post on why this is suboptimal, for many I think it will be obvious, and for those who have been in the trenches dealing with the situation the problems are very well known.
Around this core of knowing the corporate structure we also track service providers for the company and those who work with it who may not have a direct investment or option grant.
Then you add on top of that the ability to share this information with others, like the previously mentioned service providers, potential investors, advisers, and so on... and I think we have a compelling product that helps solve an area with lots of current pain, mostly in terms of how much time is sunk into managing, updating, and sharing this information.
I'm going to start to blog about the product, what we're doing, and how I'm building it. I'm very interested in feedback on all aspects, particularly around technology and how users see the space we're modeling.
The whole thing is early yet, we have beta users and a customer advisory board (and I'm hoping both sets will read this and let me know what they think of where we're at as we go along), but others are certainly welcome to try it out and help influence what direction we take it.
