In today’s world, the cost of validating the desirability and viability of an idea have dramatically decreased. Kickstarter has become de rigeur for funding new hardware ideas. The proliferation of open source software has made building applications easier and cheaper. Venture capital firms and and service providers such as Mattermark and CBInsights have heavily invested in analyzing the many readily available signals to identify future unicorn startups early on.
As those signals proliferate and become transparent, professional investors will quickly coalesce around consensus good ideas, angel investors will have to move focus even more on the earliest pre seed stages where transparency is low, metrics are not available, and the entrepreneur only has an idea. A Minimum Viable Product may not exist yet and the team is in the problem/solution validation stage, at best. In fact, angel investing and the skill sets required from angel investors may return to where they were in the 20th century.
The two people in the picture above illustrate that this is not an entirely new challenge.