The 32 startups that will present at Start-Up Chile Demo Day
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
is it possible to sign up to attend? the sign-up link isn't working. is it not yet open?
The public information should say what the companies are doing, and how far they are (maybe just mention one or two milestones for each; you want to make each look good on its own metric), and maybe whether or not money is being raised, but the exact amount is probably bad, and quoting actual price (pre and post money, etc.), like a few of them do, is a really bad idea.
There are reasons not to do lots of explicit price quoting in the US market which wouldn't apply in Chile (US securities laws around a public offering), but there are plain salesmanship reasons to not quote a price before someone is interested. Any serious investor is going to know roughly in the range all of these companies need ($100k to $2mm), and the big rounds are probably going to be made up of multiple investments from independent investors.
Hopefully they'll continue to improve on those things, though.
When raising money, or selling a product, there's a difference between "transparent" and "honest". You don't lead with the weakest part -- you don't price a product based on how much it costs to make -- you communicate value to the buyer and then figure out a fair price.
$500k from someone like hn user pmarca is worth a different amount than $500k from joe smith.
It seems like saying you're raising a small amount sends a negative signal that you're not interested in building a big company to investors.
In addition, like @mtr mentioned, the money goes much further down here. The cost of living is around 4 times cheaper and the cost of hiring developers is getting close to 3 times cheaper and there is a lot less competition for talent. The good thing is that they have the same amazing climate as Cali down in Chile ;)
That said, you are definitely right about the signal it sends. I guess the pitch and the fundraising campaign has to be country sensitive in order to be more effective.
http://www.businesspundit.com/25-internet-startups-that-bomb... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GovWorks
Very interesting variety of start-ups.