The startup ecosystem is at an all-time high. Nearly 83% of India’s workforce wants to give entrepreneurship a try. The rise of the entrepreneurial spirit has paved the way for a number of incubators, accelerators, and startup studios, each of which has a different way of operating and solving a problem. All these institutes have a common goal: to help aspiring founders build their startup ideas.
Every founder dreams of launching their idea and getting product-market fit in the shortest time possible. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how to get started and which route is best for the founder. Instead, it depends entirely upon the founder.
The growing demand for institutions that assist founders in building their startups has given birth to a new concept in the startup world: venture building. Although the VB space is new and exciting, it’s still emerging and remains unknown to many people out there.
Before we dive in deep, let’s understand venture builder job description?
The idea stage is the riskiest and most unorganised. Hardly any angel investor would like to invest at this stage because the risk associated with it is very high. The only institution that has tried to organise this stage is the government through its grants programs that it runs with selected incubators. The success of these incubators has been limited and very few have been able to scale up.
Enter Venture Builders. These companies are rapidly organising the early stages of idea-stage startups through a differentiated approach. With the advent of VB firms, apart from friends and family, a VB can be an early investor in your startup.
What are Venture Building Firms?
Venture builders are companies dedicated to creating new businesses in a systematic manner, along with supporting their expansion and ensuring success. Some of the interesting companies that have their roots in this promising new approach are Twitter, Medium, and Lazada. Yes, all of these tech giants emerged from venture builders!
Venture builders typically focus on five main tasks:
Generating business ideas
Assembling teams
Raising funds
Assisting with venture management
Offering shared services
Venture Builder will pick its portfolio using frameworks and will typically take equity in exchange for the organised services it offers. To pay for these pricey but organised services, a VB will typically get a portion of its shares underwritten from a group of angel investors.
For future rounds, it will syndicate as lead by selling at discount portfolio’s equity to a group of angels but would like to remain in control to mitigate risks to its group of backers. Venture Builders will eventually cede control as soon as the first organised VC takes over but till then will keep mitigating risk.
Now one might ask how a VB is different from a VC. Compared to a VC, a VB analyses your product differently. To begin with, they are usually interested in your startup from the beginning. VBs are looking for a good idea, not a great, impressive pitch deck, regardless of where you are in the ideation process or testing and measuring the MVP.
They are different from one another in terms of value creation as well. Since VBs concentrate on starting new businesses, they create significant equity value through their operations as co-founders. As a result, VBs can add 10 times as much value to a venture as a traditional venture capitalist would with only their financial resources.
What is Favcy’s approach to Venture Building Process?
Favcy is a VB that provides ready-to-assemble digital applications and assembly lines to convert your ideas into a venture. We help non-tech founders who are aiming to build their tech-first startups by providing them with standardised assembly lines, product-market fit assurance, product-delivery time assurance, zero wastage and frugal go-to-market strategies.
The following are the proprietary tools that we offer for founders:-
DREK Idea Validator and Software: Enables assessment of the positioning and differentiation of the idea, market size, and relevance.
Founder Market Fitment Tools: Enables founders to assess their core strengths and build teams in areas where they have competence mismatch
Product Strategy Customer Life Cycle Planner: Enables the founder to conceptually create the product journey across 8 stages
Creators Crest: Membership card for the Creators providing Product Market Fitment Insurance, Delay Insurance and other partner services at a discount
Reverse Pitches: Content Property to enable Founders to meet Venture Capital Firms
Second Cheque Syndication: LLP formation, where the VB leads with other Angels to generate capital which is deployed in the portfolio towards portfolio traction.
Opening Day: First showcase of the Founder to a Select group of Angels who are co-participating with Favcy
How are founders benefited by this?
Increased efficiency:
VBs increase efficiency. You go from Idea to launch to investments in 90 days instead of the regular 15–20 months, saving you capital.
Product market fitment guarantee:
One place where the majority of founders fail is bad product market placement. At Favcy, we help you avoid that mistake by offering guidance and a host of different tools that’ll help you identify the right market for your product.
Less wastage of resources:
Involving a VB makes things more systematic. Everything is mapped out, and you waste less of your already scarce resources.
With Favcy, you spend less time wasting resources and gain access to various tools that can help boost your startup's success. The launch process gets a lot smoother and you get the time and resources to focus on working on your idea while we help you tackle the logistics front of it all.
VB and Angel investors
Along with working with startups, VBs constantly have to deal with angel investors. These are the people who will go ahead and invest in the portfolio startups of a venture-building firm. Here, at Favcy, we provide first-time angel investors with access to our platform: 1stCheque. A platform for first-time angel investors to learn the science of early-stage startup evaluation.
A few of the tools that we offer for angels:
First Cheque: Participate with Venture Builder by underwriting Venture Builder’s Equity and get a hefty multiplier for the risk undertaken
Investor Deck and Analysts Reports: Every framework that the Venture Builder utilises to take an opinion is shared with the Angel
Opening Day and Networking: Interaction with the Founder through a Digital Seminar
Portfolio Management Service: Monthly portfolio management update on the Investment that the Angel would have done with the Venture Builder
Second Cheque Syndication: Preferential treatment to the Angel in second cheque participation.
Insights: Content Property on what other top Venture Capitalists are saying
How are investors benefited by this?
An exclusive deal flow of risk-mitigated early-stage startups where you can begin your startup investment journey by starting small and yet earning high returns
Diversification with VC-style investments with low capital
Transparency: As an angel, you receive complete transparency and the freedom to choose based on frameworks and concepts that are typically only available to larger venture capital firms.
Senior Partner to lead exits: Exits are tough. The Senior Partners of the Venture Builder are the most suited to handle exit negotiations, reducing your work.
Conclusion
When it comes to creating businesses with a chance of survival and being profitable, venture building appears to be one of the most systemic approaches. Augmenting your ideas and available skill sets with experienced and specialized venture builders such as Favcy VB cuts down on the number of years that you require to lift your startup up the ground.
At Favcy VB, we have helped 26+ founders validate their ideas and co-build their startups from scratch. If you’re a struggling idea-stage founder, you might want to check: