Eric Siu and Neil Patel explain why marketers should become angel investors. You get early access to trends and marketing insights, plus partnership opportunities. They cite Eight Sleep, Remitly, and ShipBob as examples of companies they backed.
Today, we are going to talk about why marketers should be angel investors. So first, we should define what angel investors actually mean.
So angel investor is someone who puts a small amount of money into early-stage companies. Early-stage companies are usually ideas or people who just got their company off the ground and they need some capital to grow faster. Yep.
And so angel investing could be writing a $1,000 check or a $500 check, right? It doesn't have to be $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, $500,000, So these are all angel investments, right? And in my opinion, I think angel investing is interesting because I get a window into another world, right? I get a window into trends that I might be interested in. So as an example, I'm an investor in a company called Eight Sleep, which is sleep tech that I use on my bed. It's great. It cools my bed. It also gives me sleep analytics as well. And they're adding a bunch of stuff to it. So I do think that's very much the future. And now when I read the investor updates, I kind of see what's going on, you know, what's trending. And also I have, you know, what's trending is great, but also I can see what they're doing from a marketing perspective too, how they're growing. And I can also see what they're missing, how I can potentially accelerate them as well. So it gets my mind going from a strategic standpoint, but also gives me ideas as well. And the other investors, when I'm looking at the investors list, I mean, there's, it's a marquee list, right? You have like Naval Ravikant, you have all these other people. So You know, potentially down the road, we could do something together, right? So maybe there's a partnership opportunity there too. So I'm just kind of scraping the surface here, but I wanted to hear what Neil has to say too.
No, look, with angel investing, there's just so much potential because I got into investor years and years ago. And as a marketer, why I love it is if you believe in a product, you believe in a service, and as a marketer, you believe you can end up growing it, Well, if you give them feedback, you don't have to do the work, but if you give them feedback and teach them how to grow it, A, you can end up making more money from your cash because they're growing faster, which hopefully improves your returns. And then B, when you invest in a lot of companies, you can see what they're doing to grow from a marketing and a growth standpoint, and you'll learn new tactics, and then you can end up implementing to your business. A great example of this is I invested in a company called Remitly years and years ago, one of the biggest ways they grew was TV advertising. It really brought my attention towards it. And starting on June 12th, or technically this podcast is a little bit past that because we prerecord, but by now I'm going to be having quite a bit of TV ads going up each and every single week on the financial stock channels.
You know what's interesting too? One thing I learned is a couple of these investments I've done recently, and these, just to let you know, I mean, these check sizes are anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000, $50,000 in general. That's kind of the range that I stay in, sometimes maybe $100,000. But I've learned that a lot of these startups, they're growing a lot through Twitter, which is fascinating to me. I'm just like, wow. And that's actually how I heard of these startups as well. So to me, I mean, we've kind of talked about this maybe the last 2, 3 months or so. I do think Twitter's a very untapped channel. And I'm actually testing something right now where I might be doing some pay-for-performance tweets. Someone that's really good at Twitter is just going to take over mine, and we'll see how that goes. There's a lot of opportunity because when you get connected for these deals, other people want in on these deals too. So what you can do is you can go on AngelList and you can start a syndicate. And so if Neil wants in on some of the deals that I'm getting access to, maybe I'll take some carry on top of it, meaning I'll take some of the profits. And Neil will be happy to do that because I'm giving him deal flow, right, that otherwise he wouldn't have access to. So you get— there's other partnership, um, partnership opportunities there. So I think as a marketer in general, again, you don't need to write big checks because I, I think there's, um, there's something called— it's not Founders Fund, it's, it's Funders Club or something like that. And I put— this is a long time ago— I put like $3,000 into a company called ShipBob, and, um, now that's worth like $41K or maybe $80K or something like that. So I'm like, oh, this is when I didn't know anything. This is like close to 10 years ago, something like that, right? So you can get your feet wet.
Go ahead. Only if you put in like a million dollars.
Oh, I wish. Only if only I did. Anyway, Neil, anything else?
No, I think that's it.
All right. marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. Learn about our virtual and our live event. We'd love to hang out with you in person or virtually, and we'll catch you later.
