Getting Investments: The Unfair Advantage
I think what leads to a successful startup or any business is the unfair advantage. Sometimes that is money but more often than not that is access to particular resources. Most of the people that will make investments in your startup have a network that might be very relevant to your business. So if you can get investments from people that are in your area and you tell them they have the privilege of investing in you if they do you a couple of favors by tapping into that network. Then you know that they not only put their money on the line but also their reputation.
They become your friends, somebody you can trust.
That is really important when it comes to raising money and you will probably raise money more quickly that way because they will see you are doing something that makes sense in the long run. Try to make it smart money.
Lastly, don’t focus on making money. Focus on solving a problem and if you solve that problem better than anybody else, the money will follow.
Getting into the Chinese market.
Our first product at Mobio Interactive taught people mindfulness. It is a type of mediation that was developed by neuroscientists and physicians. It is very effective and has been proven through a number of research studies to have effects particularly in:
- establishing stress
- resilience
- increasing focus
Furthermore, our studies show our app which is just a mobile app has statistically affected by random test trials. However, there are still a lot of people that do not understand or don’t believe that meditation can have a structural impact on your brain. Particularly not in China which is where we are trying to expand right now, so education is a big part of acquiring users.
We found that actually one of the quickest ways to acquire users is not to try to sell our app directly (B to C) but rather going from B to B to C. Some of our partners in that have been insurance companies. For them having clients that are healthy, allows them to cut their costs. Therefore this can be extremely profitable for them.
So what we do is we prepare our platform under their name and they distribute it to their clients. In China, the first partner that we have has over a million clients, but we are in discussion with clients who have over 200 million clients. So we can essentially go from zero to hundreds of millions of users just through a single deal. This is something you can do if you have something that is really interesting to a large B to C client. That is the approach we have been taking and so far it has been working out for us.
