Since our last update in September, the Angelsoft team has been hard at work adding many new features and enhancements to the platform. Below is a detailed list of those features, and the benefits they provide. Additionally, we have formed three exciting partnerships with the Angel Capital Association and the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds in the US, and the National Angel Capital Organization in Canada.  Angelsoft has become the official Collaboration and Deal Flow Management platform for these three organizations, which together represent the large majority of professional early stage investment groups in North America. We are currently working on similar relationships with the other leading business angel and venture capital associations around the globe.  Among the important aspects of these partnerships is access to Angelsoft’s basic investor tools as a benefit of membership in these associations, and close working relationships with these associations to help us define future product enhancements to the Angelsoft platform.

Angelsoft 4.0 - A New Simplified Design: As you have probably noticed, the entire Angelsoft SaaS platform has a new look and feel.  At the highest level, our goals for this release were to greatly simplify the Angelsoft interface and improve its usability. Here are some examples of the most important enhancements:

• Gold features = Administrator features: We have used gold as the color to represent all Admin and Deal Admin features. If you see an action or menu item in gold, then you have Administrator privileges either across your entire Group, and/or for that one particular Deal.

• My Account: Every user now has a simple My Account feature to manage their Primary (Log In) Email address as well as their Password. In addition, Admins or Regular Users can add additional Secondary Email addresses that will allow you to email from those addresses into the Angelsoft system. If Angelsoft does not recognize the “from” email address, it will bounce the email for security reasons.

• Green features = New activity, important features, and features about you: When you see green, you are seeing information or a feature that you control or that is very important for the page. For example, Your Interest Level and Your Rating show their values in green. In addition green sunbursts appear to tell you there is new information available within that feature (such as new Documents or Messages). As soon as you click on the tab, the green sunburst will disappear.

“Deal List” Enhancements: There have been many enhancements to the Deal List, including:

• Custom Labels: Labels (also known as Tags) do all the work that folders do, and also give you an extra bonus: you can add more than one of them to a deal. Labels in Angelsoft function much like the same feature in applications such as Google’s Gmail. Once you’ve created a label and applied it to one or more deals, you can view all the deals tagged with that label by simply clicking the label’s name in the list on the left side of the Deal List.  The most common ways that investors use Labels are to label deals for a particular event (such as “Fall Open House” or “May 2010 Luncheon”) or for a particular industry (such as “Green Tech” or “Consumer Software”).  Their uses are endless, flexible, and limited only by your imagination (and if you come up with an interesting one, please let us know, so we can share it with other groups!) You can also pick custom colors for your labels to add an additional way to manage them. A word on the difference between Stages and Labels. Stages are mutually exclusive — a deal can only be in one stage at a time; whereas Labels are not mutually exclusive — you can assign many labels to one deal.

• The Gold Gear: You will now see a gold gear icon (a drop-down arrow next to a circular gear icon) just to the right of Deal Names in the Deal List for all the actions that can be applied to one deal at a time. These include things like editing access to the deal, updating its status, adding a deal lead, and inviting the entrepreneur to join the deal (if it was initially created by an investor).

• Source Column: We have added a new column in the Deal List titled “Source.” This lets you quickly see where the deal came from. Possibilities include: Internal (deals created by your Angels or VC partners/associates), Web (deals submitted by entrepreneurs through your website), Referral (deals referred to you by another Angelsoft-enabled group), and Co-Invest (deals that have been shared with you by another Angelsoft-enabled group so that you can collaborate within a shared Deal Room.).

• Green check-mark in the Entrepreneur Column: This shows you that an entrepreneur is on the “other-end” of a Deal Room and that you can collaborate with him or her. (Deals without such a check-mark are ones that were entered by an investor (e.g. Angel or VC Associate), and while you can track and collaborate among yourselves about them, the absence of the green check-mark means that the entrepreneur is neither updating the information nor participating in any communications about the deal.)

Deal and Member reports have been greatly expanded. More reports are available and you can also now export the vast majority of information you enter into the system for data backup and other purposes like manual manipulation in Excel.

Improved “New Deal” Feature: Entering new deals yourself (instead of having them entered by the entrepreneur) is now faster than ever, and more useful with the inclusion of One Line Pitch, Deal Lead and Referred By fields now exposed in the New Deal dialogue. This will improve the work flow for both VCs and angels or anyone logging deals into their own account.

“Group Profile” Enhancements: The public Group Profile page for your investment group has been restyled to highlight the most important group information and statistics. Administrators now have better control over what precise information is displayed on their Group Profile. While the decision to include, or not include, specific details in your group’s public profile is completely yours to make, you should know that our statistics show that there is a direct correlation between the extent of a group’s transparency about its statistics, and both the quantity and quality of the deal flow it receives. Feel free to drop us a note if you would like to discuss our findings!

Ability to Edit “Investment Date:” Admins (and Deal Admins) can now edit the Investment Date for a deal that has been move to the Invested Stage. We strongly encourage you to manually enter in ALL the deals in which your group has previously invested (even those from the Dark Ages before Angelsoft and then check to be sure that all the “Investment Dates” are correct. This will help you enormously in generating accurate reports. In addition, data displayed in your Group Profile will also be more accurate.

• New “My Dashboard” for all users, including Guests: The “My Dashboard” page, which is the first page that all regular users (i.e. non-Admins) arrive at by default when they first log in, will be simplified and revamped. In addition, this page will serve as the homepage for any Guest whom you add to a specific deal as well as any person applying to become a member of your Group (the Member Application feature is primarily for Angel Groups).

• Premium Reporting: Angelsoft will soon be launching premium upgrade (additional license fees apply) options for our investors. The first premium offering will be a very sophisticated reporting system that allows users to create detailed custom reports, and also provides access to a number of comprehensive pre-designed reports. This feature was designed with the help of many of our venture fund and ’super angel group’ customers. If you are interested in learning more about these options and potentially upgrading to access them when they are released, simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket. Please note that all Admins within your group must upgrade in unison and at the same time and that the upgrade fee is purely driven by the number of Admin users in your group.

• Deal Importing: As an increasing number of the world’s larger angel/investor groups are adopting Angelsoft, we have been working with them on a case-by-case basis to import all of their past deal activity from their legacy spreadsheets, databases and web sites. We are in the process of developing standardized importing tools, and over the next few months we are going to be able to bring that capability to ALL of our investment groups! If your group has any structured information on past deals in which you’ve invested (even large numbers of applications that you did NOT fund) we invite you to load those in to your Angelsoft account. This will give you a comprehensive picture of your group’s activity, past, present and future, and will allow you to use our extensive reporting features to analyze and report on your group’s activities. To take advantage of this importing service, simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket and we’ll handle all the technical aspects for you, importing as many deals as you’d like!

• Multi-Round deal management through Linked Deals: One of the most frequent requests we’ve received is for the ability to better manage multiple funding rounds for a single company. We’re pleased to let you know that a forthcoming release will support the ability to link deals together, so that multiple rounds can be associated with one venture. This will allow groups to support the integrity of each round namely, maintain independent access lists, and independent stages (so that, for example, Round A might be in the Invested Stage, while Round B might be in the In-Progress Stage.)  The “Link Deal” feature will allow you to link deals in the order you want and will allow you to link both new and existing deals.

• Event Enhancements: Many enhancements to our event management system will be released in the coming months, including improvements for RSVPs made through Angelsoft, to deal with the non-standard way that certain email clients (e.g. Gmail) handle invitation responses.

• Contact Management Enhancements: We plan to greatly improve contact management (similar to CRM systems like Salesforce.com) to help you better manage ALL of your contacts, including Members/Users, Guests, Entrepreneurs and the Sub-Groups to which they belong. For example, you will be able to email all Entrepreneurs that you have invested in or that have applied to you.

We continue to welcome your feedback, and encourage you to reply to this email with any feedback, thoughts or requests you might have…or simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket at any time to tell us what’s on your mind!

Best Regards,

Bob Teree

VP of Product Development

Angelsoft