At VC4Africa, we’re constantly working to improve the way you experience our platform. Central to the VC4Africa community is the ventures section which now counts more than 200 ventures gaining traction in over 25 African markets. There’s an equal number of ventures in draft mode still refining their profiles before publication. In the effort to improve ventures, and thanks to the hard work of Valery Colong, Fua Tse & Nelson Kana, we’re pleased to announce a number of new enhancements.
One big area we’ve improved is streamlining the venture registration process. Entrepreneurs no longer have to post an offer or work through funding terms. We recognize that a venture goes through different cycles—fundraising, building, fundraising and building again—and we wanted the venture profiles to reflect these different stages in the lifecycle of a company. Now, entrepreneurs can post their venture without having to be in fundraising mode. In this way, the ventures serve more as a digital business card—something any entrepreneur building a business can benefit from.
Include the members of your team and use social sharing tools to promote your venture online.
Here is an overview of some of the other key changes we’ve made:
Venture updates – Now when you follow a venture you will receive venture updates in your e-mail inbox. This function can be disabled, but this new function now allows entrepreneurs to keep their network up to date on their progress. This improves engagement and makes it easier to follow developments.
Social Sharing – If you like a venture or want to share it with your network, try using the new social sharing bar. You can like a venture and share it with your friends on Facebook. You can also use the Tweet button to send an update to your followers. Another option is to copy a custom short URL and use this to promote the venture via email, a blog post or any other way you like.
Publish secure documents and share with investors.
Team Page – Investors and partners want to know the individuals behind the project. Now entrepreneurs can list their team members, advisors and existing investors. If these individuals have synced their personal profile pages with Linkedin, these links are automatically posted in the Team tab.
Documents – This is a secure area for entrepreneurs to upload and share documents related to the venture. Documents added here are only available to site administrators, investors and the venture owner. For additional security, document links cannot be shared outside of the VC4Africa network. That said, we do not want entrepreneurs to publish anything considered strictly confidential. Still, we think this is a powerful new piece of functionality that will help venture owners make valuable connections.
Integrated Twitter feeds – Entrepreneurs can now integrate their profiles with Twitter. This widget pulls in the most recent tweets and gives visitors to the venture profile an up-to-date overview of what’s happening. This helps drive engagement and increase interactions via this channel.
We’re working on a number of other features we will be rolling out the coming weeks, so stay tuned! If you’re an entrepreneur, make sure to register your venture profile if you haven’t done so already. If you’re an investor, apply to be part of the VC4Africa investor network and gain preferred access to ventures currently fundraising and their posted documents. If you have feedback, thoughts, ideas or questions, feel free to share them with us in the Q&A section.