An investor hears about a company from somebody they trust. They look at the website before deciding whether to make contact.
They find a clear product page, some strong design, a sign up button and nothing else. No team, no company details, no indication of whether anybody uses it, no way to tell how long it has existed.
They do not make contact. Not because anything was wrong, but because there was nothing to react to, and they have several other things to look at that afternoon.
The first failure: the site addresses only customers
Which is correct as a priority and incomplete, since investors, partners, press and candidates all arrive at the same pages.
The second failure: the team is missing entirely
The single most looked at item in early diligence, and the one most frequently absent from an early stage website.
The third failure: the company details are absent
Registered name, number and location. Their absence reads as either carelessness or concealment, and neither helps.
The fourth failure: what the company does is unclear
Product pages describe features. A plain sentence about what problem is being solved and for whom is what an outside reader needs.
The fifth failure: there is no evidence anybody uses it
Customer names, numbers, logos or a case study. Something rather than nothing, since nothing is read as nothing.
The sixth failure: the market is not described
Who this is for and how many of them there are, which a customer does not need and an investor does.
The seventh failure: there is no route for a non customer enquiry
Everything leads to a sign up, which is the routing problem in investor and partnership enquiries reaching startup websites.
The eighth failure: the press material does not exist
A page with a description, images and a contact, which costs an hour and is what any coverage will be assembled from.
The ninth failure: the security position is absent
Increasingly a diligence item rather than a customer one, and entirely missing from most early stage sites.
The tenth failure: nothing indicates the stage
Whether this is two people or twenty, whether it has raised anything, and roughly where it is, which shapes whether an investor is even the right fit.
The eleventh failure: the enquiry goes into a general inbox
And waits, which for somebody who allocated four minutes to looking at this is the end of the matter.
The twelfth failure: the founders assume they will be asked
They will not. Diligence begins with what is public, and a company that answers nothing publicly is compared against ones that do.
The thirteenth failure: the site is updated for the product and never for the company
Product pages change weekly and the company information, where it exists at all, is whatever was written at launch. An investor reading a description of a company that no longer matches what it does draws the obvious conclusion.
The fix: answer the non customer questions too
An assistant that recognises an investor, partner or press enquiry, answers the basic company questions, supplies what is public and routes the contact to a founder immediately turns four minutes of looking into a conversation. The early questions are covered in early stage startups and their first customer questions and the questions investors and lenders ask early. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under startups.