Ask any VC investor what they provide to their portfolio companies beyond just the money, and you’ll get a lot of answers, including advisory, introductions to clients, key team members, and more. We do a lot of that at RVC, but we’ve found the biggest gap in portfolio companies' needs is sales and marketing.
Last year, RVC became a marketing agency - a strange move for an angel investing group - and especially for a non-profit organization. But it makes sense once you understand our underlying motivation.
What I have seen over many years of venture capital investing is that the main cause of failure in companies is poor marketing and sales. We back genius startup founders, hoping they’ll commercialize their ideas and grow the company. But tech genius does not always translate into market genius, and the prospect of figuring out channel strategies, messaging, and an infinite array of technology choices, and then running it all, is daunting for founders.
We have literally had money in escrow waiting to invest in a company with a deal we promised to close upon their first sale. It was great tech, but no sales were forthcoming for months and little in the pipeline for us to hold out hope. We returned the money to investors and didn’t invest. Smart people - great tech - no sales.
Rockies Venture Club is doing something about that. We’re providing RVC members with a FREE subscription to the hub.rockiesvc.ai white-label platform, and portfolio companies and the Pro and Hyper members get access to the 24x7 online education and resources.
Members and portfolio companies also get the suite of software on the platform including a CRM that is as powerful as Hubspot (has full automations, AI integration, and no limit to contacts), Click Funnels, Forms, Surveys, E-commerce, mobile app, email marketing, automation of posting on social platforms, community sites, education platform, document signing, ai chatbots for websites and conversational ai for inbound and outbound phone calls with powerful features like setting up appointments, sending emails, and anything else your automations can think of - including full integration with ChatGPT and hundreds of other apps like Airtable and more.
If you used the “name brand” versions of all of these softwares it would cost over $8000 a month!
Last week, we were on a call with a portfolio company that is stuck under $500K in sales, primarily because they have only one sales and marketing person for the whole company - and that’s the CEO! Having an AI-powered platform that automates marketing outreach and lead generation could multiply their sales many times over by allowing the CEO to focus on high-value client conversations rather than tactical outreach. Another RVC portfolio company is stepping up its marketing outreach and has uploaded a list of 14,000 names to its email campaign on the platform. On Hubspot, that would cost something like $2000 per month!
Time will tell how successful we will at building our portfolio value by amplifying the ability of our companies to build incoming traffic, but for now we’re optimistic!
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