Linked In QnA, How functional must a prototype be if my goal is to get an investor or potential partner interested in the concept?

This question was asked by a gentleman looking to build something that he could start and wanted to start but would like to get help with finishing. This is the question for virtually everybody with an idea for a product. Essentially it is “How much of what I am thinking do I have to have built and have ready for show in order to attract people with capital to help me”. The Linked In Experts or at least people with experience and were not to scared or greedy to share weighed in and provided some good information.

There were 6 answers to this question total, of which 4 were chosen as good answers and 1 of the 4 was the best answer. Lets take a look as speaking points for the best answer in this case.

Best Answer

1. Convince them that the product could work
2. Mock up only trivial parts of the system but have enough wow parts working to keep interest
3. Allow investors to play if they would like
4. Research attendees and know your audience (If you have ever read “The 48 Laws of Power” this is of major importance for anyone looking to sell anything)
5. When demoing to developers make sure you show the challenge in the application

This is a nice set of rules to go by based on 2 preconditions of having the prototype ready; and having found people that would want to get on board with you. However, those issues to me seem to be of greater importance because you can’t really do any of what is stated here unless those conditions are met. So lets take a look at the other answers to see if someone piped up about ways to find those willing to help you.

Good Answers

1. Functioning product (2 Nods)
2. Get it used by actual users (2 Nods)
3. The other 1 that answered really just pitched their services and piggy-backed.

Answers Note Rated as Good

The strangest thing is that I think that both of these answers are actually much better than the answers of the 1 that was selling. Points from not good answers.

1. Know what your VC is looking for
2. Have a working scale at least
3. If it is a physical product have a working scale version
4. Make sure that it shines (people don’t get under the hood if the body is garbage)

for not rated as good answers these 2 guys actually provided some good insights. For instance number 4, where the the statement is ” Your GUI must rock..” is very true. I have seen many products where the part that the customer, investor, user sees is not appealing and the product fails because they can’t get past the look. So when you go looking for investors make sure they can get past the first impression so that you can sell them on the real meat of the thing. The other points of the not good answers all mimic what had been said before just with different examples.

Well I hope this was a nice little look into this Linked In question and answer. Will have another one next week.

Link to the actual post:

Linked In QnA about Annoying Ads on weather.com

Weather.com has to have some of the most intrusive and annoying ads on the web. Seriously being a web and marketing lover I think done correctly the web has the potential to be the perfect marriage of targeting and convenience. However, I recently got fed up with the bold in your face continuous annoyance of the dancing, moving, jiggling, content covering, bigger than the content ads. I decided to poll the linked in community to get a sense of what others have found as replacements to the annoying advertisement ladened weather site. I promptly received 12 responses to my query from web users that have had it with weather.com. Below are the recommendations of the answerers.

1. Fire Fox with Adblock https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4042 this tool got much praise and for good reason. Currently has over 200,000 downloads and that number is growing by the second.
2. http://www.wunderground.com/ got plenty of nods as well. There are ads there but not the jiggling kind.
3. weather.mobi the mobile solution from weather.com got a few nods as a suitable solution for those that are on the go or would rather use their phone to check the weather. It gets specific and removes flashy stuff.
4. http://www.weather.gov has no ads and has a lot of functionality.
5. http://www.accuweather.com got a nod but it also has ads in a few places

Interesting enough no one mentioned weather bug. I am thankful to all who helped me on linked in with this question and now I pose the same question to you. Please let the rest of us know about your low ad profile weather solution.