Startup Funding Recommendation System

Product Management / UX Design / User Research
Project Overview
Launching a company is an exciting journey, but navigating the complex terrain of fundraising can be daunting, consuming valuable time and energy. Founders often find themselves sidetracked by tasks such as researching funders, cold outreach, and enduring a cycle of rejections. Enter Hockeystick – a solution designed to streamline the fundraising process by facilitating warm introductions directly to relevant funding opportunities.
My Contributions
As a product manager, I spearheaded the end-to-end development of the project. I conducted extensive user research with founders and funders to pinpoint deficiencies in the fundraising process, defining key success metrics.

Collaborating closely with designers, we crafted personas, wireframes, and conducted user testing. In tandem with engineers, I translated user stories into high-quality code. Coordinating efforts with the marketing team, I managed the project's launch and monitored subsequent growth.
A laptop showing a mockup of the website.
Problem Definition
Streamline the founders search, supercharge the funders dealflow.
Through interviews with founders, I found they struggled with inefficient fundraising—spending hours on research and unsuccessful outreach. This issue extended beyond tech founders to small-medium business owners. Conversations with funders revealed a surplus of available funding, but the challenge was matching it with the right entrepreneurs. Funders preferred warm introductions and often focused on specific technologies, resulting in time-consuming searches. These early insights guided our project focus.
A cycle showing the interactions a funder and founder take while getting funding.
Ideation
How might we connect founders to relevant funding opportunities in a quick and seamless process?
Solving a power imbalance favoring funders, our goal was to empower founders for a more efficient process. In ideation workshops, our team conceived a recommendation system. Founders could access it at their convenience, spending just 5-10 minutes to be matched with funding opportunities relevant to their company's stage and domain.

This solution not only empowered founders but also provided funders with a steady, easily manageable stream of relevant deal flow to choose from.
Solution
A lightweight web-based recommender system showing funding opportunities to founders.
We flipped the script by proactively recommending funding to founders instead of the traditional approach where founders initiate the process. Founders simply onboarded, provided brief details about their company through a short survey, and our system ranked funding opportunities against their profile. This resulted in personalized recommendations for founders.

They could then leisurely explore these opportunities, express interest in one click, and funders would be notified with a startup profile, streamlining the process and reducing significant time commitments.
Launch and Measurement
Founders showed huge interest, now to capitalize on the funders interest.
After launch, we experienced significant interest from both funders and founders, resulting in hundreds of quality introductions within the first few months. Our user-friendly solution gained traction through startup incubators and networks, leading to rapid growth and over 1200 startup sign-ups.

The substantial pool of quality startups made it seamless to attract funders to the platform. Leveraging this dynamic marketplace, we efficiently onboarded funders with over $1B in available funding.
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