Launching Signal 1.0 – a Tool for Founders to Find the Right Investors | Hacker News Reader

Launching Signal 1.0 – a Tool for Founders to Find the Right Investors

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26 pointssignor_bosco26 comments

> give feedback

Change name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

So much this.

Even if there weren't another piece of software named that, I really think these single common dictionary word names need to stop.

Not just that, but there is a trademark on it:

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4804:9ig...

FB also has a product called Signal https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/get-started/signal

Signal from Open Whisper Systems already has a large user base, many of which are in the same demographic which you are targeting.

It would be to your benefit to rebrand under a different name.

CAUTION: It downloads ALL your email addresses in your Gmail.

Not clear how it works immediately until after you connect your Gmail. It tires to find an email for someone in your contacts who can introduce you to an investor. meh.

Your first statement just isn't true. Your last sentence is. When you connect your Gmail to Signal, it infers who your strongest relationships are, with the idea that those are the people who'd give you the warmest intros to investors. You can ask those people to join you on Signal, and if they do, you'll see which investors you can get to (e.g. a strong intro) through them. Compare that to the LinkedIn process today ("hey I saw you're connected to X" ... "Yeahhh but I don't really know them. You wouldn't want an intro from me" ... rinse and repeat) and you start to see one of Signal's benefits.

> When you connect your Gmail to Signal, it infers who your strongest relationships are

Guess how it does that... they say on their own page it scrapes email addresses.

Download <> analyze; ALL <> Only the recent and relevant ones

I see from the Google Request for Permission interface that Signal wants to "View your email message metadata such as labels and headers, but not the email body".

That's way too sensitive for me to give away in exchange for uncertain benefits. I realize that I've given this information to Gmail already. But it's not hard to concoct some very plausible bad scenarios of what could happen with this data if I said Yes.

There is a major chicken and egg problem here.

As a post-YC company, I know a lot of investors. That means my gmail is valuable to you (since you can pull a bunch of info) but that your service is not valuable to me.

You need to better incentivize users that have the information that makes your service more valuable. Something like AngelList's ability to verify that an investor invested in a company, plus the ability for founders to anonymously leave reviews of investors that you confirm they've spoken with.

If, going into our next round, I could only access those reviews by connecting my work GMail, then I can see why it may make sense.

Right now, I don't know why I would use this and I think I'm your target market.

Good thoughts here. Worth noting that Signal doesn't really gain anything from your Gmail data other than the ability to provide you network benefits via the relationship strengths implied by that data. And you don't need to connect your Gmail to use the service. You can sign in with email/password and use all the investor finding tools, which is arguably Signal's primary benefit right now. There isn't a great tool out there to find investors (and similarly, for investors to effectively broadcast what they do and do not want to see). That part isn't chicken and egg. You can use Crunchbase, AngelList, etc., but it's a slog. Signal should keep getting better in that regard.

>Signal doesn't really gain anything from your Gmail data other than the ability to provide you network benefits via the relationship strengths implied by that data.

Instagram grew because it imported and co-opted twitters social graph. They absolutely benefit from being able to build a 10,000 foot view of the current social landscape.

> There’s a long way to go, so please give feedback

Please don't ask for my Gmail account.

Interesting, but can't move past the sign-in portion. I'm not giving a website the ability to see my message subjects, headers and labels. Nothing on your site landing page convinces me of the value in doing so.

Sign in with username/password, then. Signal doesn't require Gmail. You can add your Gmail later if you want to / see the benefit to you in doing so. Signal's biggest benefit to founders right now is the investor searching/finding capabilities. You don't need to be Gmail authed to get value from that. If you build, say, a target list of 50+ investors in Signal, you then might want to see your strongest intro paths to those investors. That's when you can consider the Gmail auth. Always up to you.

VC: "How did you get introduced to me?"

You: "That signal app..."

VC: "So [introducer] gave away my personal contact info to a random company?"

As a co-founder of a startup with no coastal ties will this help me at all? I don't mean to be overly negative, but this is sounds like an echo chamber. It's probably great to maximize a decently connected fundraising effort. Maybe I am misunderstanding the way Signal 1.0 works.

Tons of investors are geography-agnostic. The biggest benefit of Signal right now is simply helping you identify the right investors based on check size, industry preferences, past investments, etc. And I'm sure there are investors in your local area; you should add them to Signal (and invite them to connect if you know them). If your local investor community gets on, that'll give you an outsized benefit.

I feel like this is not the problem people are having. I want to talk to Elon Musk, explain him how we can build a warp drive. If I am half as serious in this endeavor, I don't think I would have problem reaching him. If I am crackpot, he doesn't want to talk to me anyway.

Let's say I have idea for new company, next Groupon. I can reach out to local Chicago investors and they will refer me to people who would be interested.

Very good idea!

I suspect you will see a lot of "privacy" concerned people jumping into thread. This is a catch-22 of sorts. If Signal picks up momentum, people will gladly give you the gmail id. Until then, they will vocally complain that gmail id and contact list is too dangerous to give away. One approach to get over this initial bump might be to get big CEOs and investors to vouch for the product.

I don't see what momentum has to do with it. LinkedIn has plenty of that and I still don't trust them with anything.

LinkedIn has 400M+ users.

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Looks fantastic. I signed up and started down the workflow-- quite a project!

Looking forward to seeing how this looks in a month or two.

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