participants sharing a thought at the Accra meetup
Venture Capital for Africa(VC4Africa) is Africa’s leading founders’ network. It is the largest and fastest growing community of entrepreneurs and investors building promising companies in Africa. The community is free to join and to ensure quality, prospective members, investors and venture applications are screened before they are given access to the site.
Periodic offline meetings are initiated by the group called VC4Africa meetups and they are currently hosted in over 35 cities around the world. These meetups offer entrepreneurs opportunities to meet potential investors, mentors and venture capitalists.
These are some benefits of attending VC4Africa meetups in your local city when it happens:
1. Mentoring and support
-for up-coming entrepreneurs, VC4Africa meetups offer an excellent opportunity to meet people who can go a long way to help you fix the financial and business side of that great idea you are working on! If it is a tech application, you may find people who can help and advise you build a more robust system since they may have walked that road before. They may also connect you to people who can help you use appropriate technologies, resources and exposure.
2. Social Proof
- you may have a problem building the application, but you need people to run alpha and beta tests for you. You need to see if it is exciting and you are getting people on-board. This is an excellent place to meet such people! The quality and mix of people at such events are indispensable! They will provide you honest reviews of your application which you can take and iterate your product till you have a better product. You also get to use them as your early apostles! If they love your product, they will tell others about it and word-of-mouth referrals, which they will do, may do great things for your business.
3. Connection
- you may have built that app, or are building it but you have no idea how you are going to make it mainstream. Get into such events. Build a social network of connections. Don’t wait till the last minute to start looking for funding or mentoring. You meet investors and venture capitalists like Innohub, Afrinova, VC4Africa, etc., and you will know where the money is and how to get it. In addition, you become part of the eco-system so you are known early. It is not always about the money, never forget that. Over 95% of start ups fail not because of lack of funding – so look beyond funding. Get known!
Turning an idea into a business is a long journey, there may be many facets of it for which you are not an expert at, so join either online or offline communities in your area of interest and take all the mentoring, coaching and networking you can get!
Chances aren’t given, they’re taken!
