After some great feedback and suggestions from both our entrepreneurs & investors, we have released a new service that will allow our entrepreneur members to contact investor network! This new feature will allow and encourage open communication between both the investors and entrepreneurs. So far, we’ve received great feedback from both groups.

Here is a quick screen shot of the search criteria (image is reduced in size):

After searching, it will pull up the profiles of each of the investors that meet your search criteria. In this case, you’ll see that there were 10 investors in my area that met the search criteria that I input.

Anyway… check it out and let us know what you think!

Introducing the Entrepreneur’s Roadmap!

What is the Entrepreneur Roadmap?

• A step-by-step guide that will walk you through the entire fundraising process
• It includes articles, webinars, and podcasts to teach you the secrets funding and building your business
• 13 lessons that you can complete at your own pace

Where do I find the Entrepreneur Roadmap?

We’ve got a new look! Login to your FundingUniverse account and you’ll be excited to see some of the improvements that we have made — including the new Entrepreneur Roadmap tab.

How will the Entrepreneur Roadmap help me?

Most people don’t learn anything about fundraising through high school or college. Unfortunately, it’s just not a part of the curriculum. While the classes aren’t taught at other universities, we know that it is one of the most important aspects of building your business. Here are just a few ways that it will help you in your quest to build a successful business:

• It will save you time and money
• It will save you potential embarrassment in front of an investor or lender
• It will help you focus your efforts on a specific type of capital
• It will teach you how to write a business plan
• It will help you create a financial plan to project future financial performance
• It may help you decide to not raise money and bootstrap instead

It’s now live!

For those of you that are looking for a little bit of guidance with your fundraising efforts, we’ve just released the “Entrepreneur’s RoadMap” to help you through the process.

The road map is designed to educate, prepare, and connect entrepreneurs. The guide will walk you through — step-by-step — the fundraising process so that you have all of your options at your fingertips.

The education section will teach you:

1. How to take advantage of the FundingUniverse tools
2. Help you decide if you really need to raise capital
3. Teach you the type of funding that you need (self-funding, FFFs, debt, equity, etc.)
4. Guide you to know how much money you really need

The preparation section will:

1. Prepare for raising equity capital (writing a biz plan, creating financial statements, preparing pitch, etc.)
2. Adequately prepare to secure a loan
3. Provide detailed tips to the fundraising process

And, finally, the connect stage will:

1. Teach you how to get exposure to your investor/lender audience

The roadmap is now available for all DealReady Subscribers! To access the program, login to your entrepreneur console.

To facilitate greater interaction between investors, FundingUniverse has created the Investor Group tool. You now have the ability to create your own online investment group. If you are part of an angel group, invite members from your group to look at deals. If you are a solo investor who occasionally invests with partners, create a group to look at and discuss deals.

Use this tool to invite other accredited angels to look at dealflow. You can discuss your interest with all of your potential investment partners online, without contacting the entrepreneur until you are ready. Additional collaboration tools include voting, message posting and email.

It is easy to create your online investment group. Simply, log in to your investor account on FundingUniverse. In the upper right hand corner of your account home page there is a section that says “Create New Investor Group.” Click on the button. You can select a group name and send out invitations to the people who you want in your group. After your invitees have registered, you are all set to begin looking at dealflow as an online investment group.

We hope this new tool will help you locate deals more efficiently. If you have any suggestions please let us know. We are anxious to know how we can help you find the deals you are looking for.

I love talking to our AngelReady Members! Almost every time I talk to one of them, they are talking about how much they are enjoying the learning experience. It sounds like one of the most popular features of their membership is the Weekly Chat with an Angel webinar (click here to access the archive). I love them too.

Each week, we get the help of an experienced angel investor to present a webinar on a certain topic. For example, yesterday we had Greg Peterson give a webinar on Preparing Yourself for Investor Due Diligence. Greg presented for about 30 minutes after which we opened it up to our AngelReady members for question & answer. There were some great questions! Here are a few examples:

QUESTION: Under the “Financials section” of the Due Diligence binder, should the previous years be broken down into three-month periods or just end-of-the-year financials?

QUESTION: You mentioned a non-disclosure statement… I’m raising money from VCs — do we need to push for a NDA?

QUESTION: We have a company that has been around for just 5 months. Do our financials need to be audited or produced by an accountant or can we give them financials we’ve created internally?

QUESTION: You mentioned a non-disclosure statement… I’m raising money from VCs — do we need to push for a NDA?

QUESTION: Can you list a few specifics that you would expect to see in the operations section of Due Diligence Binder?

After 2 months, we have had some webinars on many valuable topics… including:

• Due Diligence (Greg Peterson, Managing Partner of GH Peterson Holdings)
• 5 Questions to Ask Angels (T. Craig Bott, CEO of Grow Utah Ventures)
• 5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make when Presenting to Angels (Bill Payne, Expert Angel Investor)
• What are Angels Looking for? (Rick Gibson, HOTVentures & Desert Angels)
• Negotiating & Structuring Term Sheets (Stephen Block, Tech Coast Angels)
• Execution will help Fundraising (Sid Mohasseb, Tech Coast Angels)

AngelReady Members: which event have you enjoyed the most? What topic would you like us to discuss?

With the overhaul/launch of the new FundingUniverse website, there were a few things that slipped under the rug. One of the things that some people have asked about is our “FundingUniversity” page (don’t worry…it’ll be coming back with a vengeance).

The other was our 10,000 Company Histories. The amount of valuable content that is included in our company histories is enormous. For example, are you interested in learning the early beginnings at Google? Did you realize that Motorola was founded in the 1930’s during the great depression?

Of course, this is a shameless plug for the company histories… but, honestly, it is more than that. The reason that we have collected this content is because we believe that it is a valuable resource for our entrepreneurs. Personally, I love to learn. I love reading about the struggles and successes of many well-known companies. I hope that you enjoy the resource as much as I do!

Finally, if you find an interesting story in one of the company histories, please make it known by commenting in this entry. Enjoy!

New Business Plan Rating System

As part of the new Angel-Ready™ program that we will be launching at Funding Universe, we will be giving a BUSINESS PLAN RATING to every entrepreneur. The rating will help you gauge the completeness of your business plan and will increase investor exposure for the most complete plans. We will begin rating plans on October 11th, and it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that you update your plan before that date.

Investors Will See the Highest Rated Plans First

The higher your plan’s rating, the higher you will appear on the list in our Investor Gallery™. This means more exposure, more views to your plan, and more contacts from investors. Every plan will be given a rating between 0 and 4 stars based on the completeness of information in the following four categories:

• Management Team
• Market Opportunity
• Sustainable Competitive Advantage
• Traction

Please Update Your Plan

We will begin rating the business plans on October 11th and will post the ratings for investors to see on October 26th. PLEASE update your business plan before October 11th. We recommend that you post a clear and succinct executive summary with information showing your strengths in the above mentioned categories. Additionally, you can upload any other documents that you find pertinent. CLICK ON THIS LINK to login and update your business plan now. We look forward to rating your business plan.