Applying to AngelPad
blog.imranghory.org
blog.imranghory.org
My experience: The application process was very painful due to bugs in the application. After spending hours filling out the application and getting our video recorded correctly, there was a PHP error on the last page of the application, which effectively deleted all of our application answers. I hit the back button, and poof, all fields empty. I should have known that there was a reason for the message on the previous pages that said something to the effect of "If you get errors, email info@angelpad.org". So we emailed AngelPad.
A few days later, we still hadn't received a response. Luckily, we had most of our answers in text files and chat logs, so we didn't have to completely rewrite everything, but it was nevertheless very frustrating. Again, the application failed on the last page, with some PHP crap printed at the top.
A couple days later, I saw a tweet from AngelPad, reminding people to apply, so I responded immediately and asked if the errors had been fixed, mentioning that I also emailed. No response. Nothing.
So yeah, a day or two later, I re-pasted all our answers into the form and it worked. Finally.
I realize that AngelPad is probably receiving a ton of emails and tweets directed at them, and they obviously cannot respond to everyone. However, it's really discouraging as a pre-launch, unfunded startup to have such a bad experience after spending a day of your time answering questions, knowing that there's already only a tiny chance that you'll ever even hear back. Honestly, my co-founder and I actually had a long discussion about submitting this application – we actually kind of fought about whether we should be spending our time doing such a thing, rather than working on our product. When I eventually convinced him that we should apply, everything went wrong.
Sorry for the rant, I just had to get that off my chest. If you're applying, save your answers frequently.