So for those of you that have the urge to start your own business, or fund a side project you are working on, at some point (unless you’re super rich), you’re going to need to find an investor. This process can be incredibly tricky if you’ve never done been through it before, and I found myself in a similar situation recently, and I had an enormous amount of success using the “Angel Investment Network” located at http://www.newyorkinvestmentnetwork.com/home.

This is not a plug, and I’m not endorsing them for any other reason than the fact that I have used them, and found success without plowing through a long strenuous process to get there.

The site is simple. Investors/Entrepreneurs sign up for free. I’ll be talking from the latter’s perspective obviously. To sign up, visit this link. You are asked to give some basic information about yourself/your company, and then your account is created/verified. After that, you are asked to type up a proposal. They recommend you typing it up on your local machine first (so you don’t lose any data). Now when I did this, I went overboard. I was thinking along the lines of every entrepreneurship class I’ve ever taken, and I made this thing touch on every point I could possibly imagine. However, when you go to submit your proposal on the website, they give you a very limited character limit, and they split it up into different sections varying in importance.

For example, one section will give you maybe 100 characters to type in your main pitch line. Another will give you 500 characters to explain your idea as dense as possible, another 200 characters or so to type in the amount of capital your seeking/share your offering, etc. They do NOT give you the option to upload your full proposal exactly how you’ve typed it (although I would definitely hold onto it).

You might think this is a bad thing. How can I get my amazing idea across in such a limited fashion?! Look, when it comes down to it, investors are like head hunters in the employment industry. They want an idea to hit them quickly and pop out at them (same way a resume would to your potential employer). They don’t want to read a hundred different proposals full in length. My advice, KISS (keep it stupid simple). If it’s a good idea, it’ll turn heads, and that should be all it takes.

Now it’s 100% free  to post one of these short proposals. This is the cool part about the site. You are notified when an investor has requested to obtain more information about your idea. Once that happens, you are given the option to sign up (pay $149 for the base plan), and retrieve the investors contact information that they have signed up with. This $149 gives you full access to ANY investors that want to know more about your idea for a whole year. That is fantastic, and most of the investors here are the real deal. You can view their profile, what they have done before, and learn a little bit more about each and every one before contacting them if you’d like.

Once you choose which one you like, shoot them an e-mail or give them a call, attach your full proposal if you still have it, and away you go!

To give you an idea of how great this site is, listen to this. I signed up around 11am, and had a proposal viewable and approved on the site within an hour after that. By 2pm I had 2 investors request to speak with me, and 1 more by the end of the day. I was able to contact all 3, and within the same day, one got back to me and saw a demo of my site that very evening. We are now (about 2 weeks later), in an agreement, and he has already invested capital in the project. This is how fast these guys move, and how great of a community this site breeds.

I can’t recommend this site enough to anyone looking for an angel investor at any level of capital. This site is a lot more convenient if you live within the tri-state area (as most of the investors are based in/around New York City, NY), however I have seen plenty of proposals on the site from users around the county. If the idea is good enough, an investor would not mind telecommuting throughout most of the process, however there’s a good chance that eventually you’d want to meet the person you are going into business with face to face, so keep that in mind.

I hope this can help you out and excite you as much as it did for me. Good luck fellow entrepreneurs!