Where to find investors

Where can a startup founder find an investor? The process of looking for an investor is very similar to working with a customer. Remember: when you were attracting your first customer, you did market research and drew up their persona. Is it a man or a woman, how old are they, where do they live, what are their pain points, what do they like, and so on. You need to approach an investor in exactly the same way and answer all these questions for yourself. Then it will be easier for you to understand what message you want to send to this customer, through which information channels, in what way and how to do it. So, where exactly should you look for an investor?

The first is to use specialized news websites, newspapers and so on. In Kazakhstan, the outlets closest to the topic of venture investment are Forbes, Kapital, InBusiness and so on. These publications run stories about startups and the investors they have attracted. There you can at least find the names of investors who have put their money into other startups. In Russia, such publications include Kommersant, Rusbase, VC.ru and so on. They also report on venture deals, and from them you can learn about Russian investors.

The second channel for finding an investor is social media. Most investors, like all ordinary people, are on social media, where they share their views and their stories. Through these posts you can, so to speak, catch your investor. In Kazakhstan, the most suitable social network where investors are present is LinkedIn, and to some extent Facebook. In America, Twitter is also popular among American investors. So I recommend being on these social networks, browsing them regularly and running searches with the relevant keywords. The third channel for finding investors, I would say, is taking part in specialized events.

In our country, many events are now held in Astana, Almaty and regional centers. These are special conferences, pitch sessions for startups, incubator graduation days and so on. Investors come to these events as jury members, mentors, experts and so on. That is where you can catch them. The largest organizers of such events are Astana Hub in Astana and the Most incubator in Almaty. KBTU has its own incubator, D-MEP, and so on. You should attend all of them, because at any one of them you might meet your future investor. The fourth channel for finding an investor is networking, that is, communicating with colleagues, startup founders just like you.

By the way, this is a very useful thing: you should make more acquaintances. Every acquaintance can give you a lot of interesting and useful things. These include contacts, experience, various life hacks and so on. So don't be lazy. If you see a startup founder somewhere with a similar product, or just a startup founder, write to them, introduce yourself, meet up. And through this networking you can find out information about potential investors. The best way is to take part in various communities on social media or join large communities on Telegram, WhatsApp and so on. For example, our company Activat has the Activat Startup community, which includes about 250 startups.

And this kind of lively communication takes place there. Astana Hub, Most and others have similar communities. Join all of them and extract the information you need. And finally, the fifth channel for finding an investor is simply using your personal contacts. I strongly recommend that all startup founders tell everyone about their idea and their product: all their relatives, friends, classmates, everyone they can talk to about it, because, quite unexpectedly, some aunt or uncle may suddenly remember that they know someone who invests money in startups, and it may dawn on him, or she may say: “Why don't I introduce you to a colleague of mine,” for example, and so on. There are a million variations here, so you need to use them all: talk about your startup and share it with everyone you know.