In the middle mockup you see a search/filter field, a pipeline chart, and a few tables. Nothing too fancy. In essence, we were following Fred Wilson’s wisdom that winning teams…

start with a very narrow product that nails something simple but powerful. And then go from there.

For the period of two weeks, our entire lives were run by the mockups and our whiteboard. We mapped out every step — whether it was the best data structure to store our startups and founders to the order in which we designed and coded our app. Proper planning and roadmapping saved us so much time in the long run.

If it didn’t make it on the whiteboard, it didn’t make it into our app.

The Minimal Viable Product

Screenshots, user flows, and killer features

Finally, the best part of this post… time to show you the product! We named it Venture Route. Let’s jump right in.

In the navbar at the top, we included an “Add Entry” button for the investor to add a new startup or founder. We made this button conspicuous and ubiquitous for a reason — our app’s success is judged by the number of entries added per firm. Notice that the only required fields are startup name and founder name. All other fields are optional because we want to guide our users through the funnel with as little friction as possible.

We want to make it as easy as possible to add a new startup or founder.

Upon clicking submit, the user is redirected to the newly entered startup or founder.

Remember I mentioned above that only the startup name is required? This is partly because we didn’t want to distract our users with too many fields. Here is another reason: we added a “Get AngelList” button to help fill in many of the form fields. Naval Ravikant and the AngelList team have built an awesome API for the startup community, why not jump at the opportunity to use it? I absolutely love the following feature.

Because their API requires you to know the AngelList startup ID in order to capture the correct data, we decided to make two API calls. The first queries their database by startup name. We then pull back six logos to choose from. Upon clicking the correct logo, we query the API for that specific startup via the startup ID. It was a blast implementing this feature. Check it out!

Simply click “Get AngelList” and we’ll hit their API for more startup profile info.

Pretty cool, right?

Thus far, the investor has entered the startup name, the founder name, and has retrieved AngelList data. Super cool. But what if the investor wants more information on the founder? No problem, we got that covered too!

The investor will first navigate to the founder’s profile page. This is where we added a “Get Profile” button. Clicking this button will pull in all the founder’s information (contact, social, bio, career, etc), thanks in part to FullContact’s API.

When an investors clicks “Get Profile”, we hit the FullContact API for profile information

Lastly but certainly not least… the dashboard! Here is where we provide the investor with a snapshot of the firm’s pipeline. At the top of the dashboard you’ll see a startup funnel (remember, it’s only an MVP 😉) of how many companies they have at each stage in the pipeline. This is important because it helps identify where there might be bottlenecks or it can act as a pulse of the firm’s current deal volume.

Venture Route Dashboard: Introduced > Spoke with Team > Met Team > Due Diligence > Invested

Just below the pipeline, we built two tables that display all the startups and founders, sorted by most recently contacted. We sorted by last contact date because it seems 80% of a firm’s attention is focused on hottest 20% of deals. Thus, let’s make it easy for the firm to find the most relevant information quickly.

With that in mind, we added the ability to quickly change a startup’s pipeline step with only one click. Ah, the simple beauty of inline editing:

Simply click the pipeline step, make your change, and update!

The last cool feature I like is the quick ‘Add Note’ button at the end of each table row. Suppose you want to leave a reminder that you need to schedule a follow-up meeting. Or maybe you need to begin due diligence and research on the company. Here is where you would leave your note:

Add a note to a startup or founder without having to navigate away from the dashboard.

Unfortunately though, we didn’t have the opportunity to build out this feature as much as we would have liked. There is so much untapped potential here. More to come for sure.

And there it is folks… our 14-day MVP!

Next Steps

Version II of our app will blow your mind

I’m so excited to build the next version of Venture Route. As you may guess, there were tons of features we didn’t include in our MVP. As mentioned, we’d like to rebuild our notes section. Many of the notes are actually conversations that build on top of each other and our current system is too static.

Secondly, we’d like to add features that are ‘push’ in nature rather than ‘pull’. For example, instead of the investor having to email each startup requesting a monthly update, wouldn’t it be nice if the investor could sign into Venture Route and see the update immediately?

Lastly, we have some clever ideas for partner collaboration. We want to improve the way investors communicate and collaborate with each other.

That’s all for now. Please email me with your feedback (below) or tweet this post!

ps. thank you Rob Rav for your brutally honest feedback, James Basnett for the awesome logo, Benji Hyam for continued support and encouragement, and Chad Grills for your edits and enthusiasm.