Outpost Two Point Something
Screw the chapter, this is a whole new book.
A couple of years ago we pushed out a very rough beta version of Outpost. At the time Outpost was entirely focused on bridging the investor/founder connection gap. I wrote a fairly exhaustive blog post about it at the time and explained our reasons for pushing it out early. We were happy with the response we received, and the subsequent few months provided an extensive library of feedback.
The main lesson learned from investors was that while they loved the deal filtering process (what we call connect links), our UI/UX and most importantly the efficiency by which investors could manage their inbound dealflow was the main attraction. In general, investors expressed the desire to run their entire dealflow process in Outpost.
This was by no means the initial idea for Outpost. We assumed it would stay as an intro machine, matching up founders with potential investors and then allowing them to pursue the relationship to their own ends. Most investors/firms/family offices/ have some sort of proprietary process that involves several applications and steps in order to manage dealflow. It’s an enormous pita. But having seen so many waves already crash on these rocks we were well acquainted with the difficulty in trying to build such a tool and were therefore tentative to try and build anything that would begin to branch out into the dealflow management process.
But feedback is feedback and when customers start telling you they’d love it if you did more, well then that’s what you have to do even when you know that what they are asking for is going to take a significant amount of time to develop.
We made the collective decision to back off of our public promotion, shut down our growth strategy and refocus on building out the next iteration of Outpost, designed to solve for our investor user feedback from the Beta app.
Where to begin:
During our initial investor rollout, we began to hear some recurring themes. First of all investors were asking “if you’ve got both of us (investor and founder) on the platform can you just make a connection to us directly on app?” In the beginning, we were simply making an automated email intro between both parties which worked great, but that interaction means that we were just dumping users back into their inbox to handle more emails which is anything but desirable. Our investor users were right to want to cut out the extra step. But that one extra step would appear to equate to a host of other major changes and feature needs.
If we make an intro on app, what does that interaction look like? Text, video calls, what info gets exchanged if any, etc.?
We took the feedback and began to map out what a full-fledged deal flow management tool would look like for the venture industry.
Now I am woefully aware of how many different CRM, email widget, cloud tools have been built over the years trying to solve the venture deal flow rat’s nest and nothing has met the bar.
But why?
Because deal flow has several components.
Sourcing/Inbound
Filtering – “Wheat from Chaff” which has multiple stages
Meetings and Due Diligence
Investment/Pass decision
Portfolio Management
Each one of these stages can have multiple avenues of processes. Sourcing for example can come from text, email, social media, meetups, webforms, etc. Streamlining such a process isn’t that easy. But even still, the majority of these deals won’t fit the thesis of the investor who is reviewing them. So they’re just a waste of time.
Having spent a lot of time and effort mapping out what we think would be the perfect tool we came up with the next iteration of Outpost.
What’s in Outpost 2 Point Something?
Inbound sourcing and filtering deals:
Connect links – Streamline “out of network” inbound deal flow like your website or social media profiles, by sharing a single link to a form that takes all of 90 seconds to complete.
Filters – Automatically filter out deals that fail to meet your investment criteria.
Email deals – Capture deals that are sent to your inbox by sending them to Outpost
Add Deal – Create your own deal entry in seconds.
Funnel Management:
Billboards – Easily view and sift through deals at breakneck pace
Tags – Assign tags to deals that include team members, ratings, stages, or custom tags
Filters - Sort deals by pedigree info, ratings, lead partner, stage, or custom tags
Deals, Portfolio or Graveyard – Every deal ends up in one of three places and the data surrounding these deals is stored forever.
Deal Files: A central repository for anything related to a deal.
Chat: Keep chats about a specific deal with your team in one place
Share: Share deals directly with your investor network whether on or off Outpost
Notes: Take notes on pitches, due diligence, etc
News: Monitor any articles published about a company that’s in your flow
Main Chat: Keep team communication centralized so that it isn’t split between slack, text and whatever else is being used today.
Conference Rooms: The portal between founders and investors.
Documents: Founders can upload any documents, data room links, videos, website links, etc into one location. This means no more hunting for a pitch deck or having to download one 3 times over, during the course of an interaction.
Founder Chat: Chat directly with the founder and ask questions at lighting pace.
Scheduling: We built out the fastest and most efficient scheduling tool on the market and it’s housed within every conference room. It takes about 25 seconds to schedule a meeting which includes everything the parties need to make it happen. Zoom links, Gmail invites, documentation, notifications, the whole nine yards.
Portfolio: Once you decide to invest in a company, you can move it to your portfolio page. No we don’t handle any of the investment process, however moving a company into your portfolio unlocks a few things.
Chat: Chat with your portfolio founders directly within their File.
Updates: Founders can send updates, quarterly presentations, and keep you apprised of any new fundraising endeavors.
Metrics: Keep a weather eye on everything happening within your dealflow and get insights that until now you’ve only ever dreamed about.
While there are plenty of additional features we anticipate rolling out over the coming months, it’s our belief that with these additions we’ve captured the entire deal flow process from deal origination to portfolio tracking.
We’ll be producing in depth content related to these new features over the coming months!