Business ideas doomed to failure. Investors view.
Business angels and venture capital analysts are simply overwhelmed with countless ideas for business. Undoubtedly, many of them are worthy of attention (statistics say only about 10% of the total volume of business projects), but there are out of the ordinary, stupid and absolutely ridiculous projects that no sensible person can finance.
Venture business has its own characteristics that not all entrepreneurs can understand, who dream to realize themselves in this direction. The industry specialization of the fund in principle makes it impossible to finance certain projects, in addition to everything, they often send really absurd fantasies.
The following are collected stories of business angels, which describe the most blatantly insane ideas.
One wise man said that you need to limit yourself to stand out. The same project was conceived so comprehensive that it resembles chaos. This is a very popular mistake of inexperienced businessmen. Runa Capital found a business project, according to which it was planned to create a mega-large search portal containing a lot of search queries – from medicines to hotel reservations and restaurants, from labor exchanges to discount aggregators, from online stores to social networks, political parties and hosting for blogs. In short, a hodgepodge.
A start-up team of three people was supposed to support this resource, oriented to the south of Russia, Ukraine and India. Such ideas are often ignited by pseudo-businessmen in different parts of the world. Experts of Softline Venture Partners faced a similar project where users could allegedly receive the widest range of services.
The employees of the funds were interested in the advantages of such portals and how they managed to replace the entire Internet with themselves, but there was no answer. It was also not clear why creating such a hulking giant. Nobody could provide the business plan itself, they sent only a picture in the simplest format Paint. This figure was supposed to impress analysts with its hyperfunctionality.
If a startup cannot express his thoughts clearly and in accordance with generally accepted project requirements, then there can be no talk of any realization of the idea.
A business angel, Vyacheslav Davydenko, shared a no less curious story. He received an “interesting” proposal for investing in the 4th generation social network. Of course, surely someone knows what kind of social networks of the previous 2nd and 3rd generations.
Like the professional secret agent himself, the developer of this project did not bother to share the details of his idea, did not even touch upon the meaning of such an undertaking, but only hinted that four independent specialists who could not communicate with each other and do not represent anything about the tasks involved in the development of this creation, which are supplied to other developers. The formulation of tasks for each artist was done by the wonder-star itself.
All information fit into a small message, which said plans to create a social network that has no analogues. The startapper stressed the impossibility of disclosing information about the planned opening, but positioned the new resource in such a way that it would not just become popular, but would take away most of the audience from the most popular existing Internet projects – irr.ru, vk.com, avito.ru and the like. The design launch date of the network was indicated – 5 months, the requested amount for the implementation of this secret resource was two million rubles.
The venture fund Runa Capital did not award a bold businessman with such an investment for several reasons – this project is “niche” and is not in the range of interests of the fund, since in this case it is impossible to compare the scale of the idea with profit. First of all, a startup should offer a new and effective solution to a specific need, a task that is highly demanded in society. Only in this case, the business will succeed.
