📶 Betting on opportunities in proptech with Matt Knight (Founder @ Proptech Angel Group)

Running an angel group vs. running a traditional fund, subsections of proptech worth betting on, and takeaways from growing a paid community to 200 members

November 10, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

1,649 members 👥 from 1,279 unique funds 💸 across 119 different cities 🌎

Location: Atlanta, GA

Background: Proptech Angel Group is an angel group out of Atlanta that, as the name suggests, invests in companies shaping the future of real estate. The group has grown to ~200 members, and Matt is the founder and leader of the group. If you invest in proptech, he's a great guy to know.

Talking points (five-second version):

  • Running an angel group vs. running a traditional fund

  • Subsectors of proptech worth betting on

  • Non-obvious takeaways growing a paid community to 200 members

Key takeaways (30-second version):

  • Angel groups are a great source of inside information. If you're looking to get answers to questions you can't find on Twitter, try an angel group.

  • Angel groups are slow because members notoriously don't have free time. Many of these people are running their own companies, so chasing down capital is the biggest con to running an angel group.

  • You have much more flexibility running an angel group than a traditional fund. This is the two-sided coin of having less structure.

  • You can learn things academically, but you don't really understand things until you get anecdotal evidence. To better understand academic concepts, practice them in real life.

  • Any community is going to follow a Pareto's principle. 20% of members will produce 80% of the value. Find those people, and reward them to keep them engaged.

  • When you're in an up-cycle, everybody wants things that are growing to expand revenue. During a down-cycle, people start focusing more on cost-cutters and other things that can streamline operations to reduce overhead.

  • People are renting for longer periods of time for a few different reasons. Some are priced out as home prices have increased, but others are choosing to avoid homeownership because it is more convenient for them to rent.

Full talk (50-minute version):

Links we like:

Jobs:

Confluence.VC Job Board

Curated job postings from top venture capital firms along with the the portfolio companies they invest in. Roles are targeted for investors, community builders, operations, and sales.

https://confluencevc-jobs.pallet.com/jobs

Jasper is looking for a remote revenue sales analyst.

  • We're customers of Jasper, and it's arguably the most powerful piece of software we use. Their AI copywriting helps marketing teams 10x their content without sacrificing quality. This is a great role for anybody that wants to learn from smart people, work at a rocket ship company, and get top-notch perks as part of your employment.

Surfer is looking for a remote product designer.

  • We're HUGE fans of Surfer, and we think that anybody building out an SEO strategy should be using them. They make it easier to rank content by analyzing keywords of your competitors and laying out the structure you should use to compete. This is a great role for anybody with a design background that wants to work remotely at a high-growth company.

Odin is looking for a growth and partnerships lead in London.

  • Cool role with a newer entrant into world of making it easier for people to invest into startups through SPVs, We're bullish on the space, and we're bullish on this team.

Talent:

Tweet of the week:

Commonapp.VC companies:

Commonapp.VC

A better way for companies to get in front of investors

https://commonappvc.softr.app

From the archives:

👥 30-second takeaways on qualities of elite online communities

This week's episode is brought to you by:

Jasper.ai: The Best AI Writing Assistant

If you are creating content, you NEED to be using Jasper.

We started using Jasper last month, and it's been a game changer for us.

Especially as a small team, we're usually limited by time and bandwidth. We can't afford to spend days writing blog posts, but we also didn't want to outsource writing to somebody that we would need to invest a bunch of training into.

Lucky for us, Jasper exists, and we've used their copywriting software to automate blog posts, feature descriptions, listicles, and other parts of our content creation.

We've started referring it to some of our friends, and this is what they've had to say. Forgive the grammar - maybe they need an AI writing assistant?

Check out Jasper if you want to level up your content game, rank higher in Google, and get more traffic to your business.

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay and Tyler

Reply

or to participate.