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Most advice when it comes to raising seed capital focuses on the pitch, the slides and the business plan. What to say and how to say it.

But fundraising is not only a pitch - it’s also a process.

"Secret" 1: Raising seed capital is a sales process.

Accept that raising capital is a sales process. You are selling yourself, the team, your idea, your vision, business concept and prototype. You are selling your stock in return for cash, network and advice. You are selling an option to future value. In short: You are selling.

If you approach it as a sales process - what are the consequences?

Sales is to an extent a numbers game. You should use the classic sales funnel when you are about to start raising seed capital: The more good "prospects" (potential investors) you put into the funnel, the more "sales" (investments) you get out in the other end.

1. The cold prospect list. This is the key to success. Without it your reach will be too limited and you won’t get to dance with the investor of your dream.
   • At the top you put your dream investors. Then you add another 20 angel or VC’s. Don’t write only their company names. You will have to identify the individual person and his or her email address.
   • Craft and send the pitch email to the first ten. In Europe most of the potential angels and VC’s will read your email even if you are not referred.
   • Don’t bother calling them before they have read your email.
2. Existing contacts. Your existing contacts are your best shots, but they are probably very limited in the angel and VC community. So make the most out of these contacts:
   • Walk through your list of contacts and ask yourself: “Who does he/she know in the angel/VC community?” (LinkedIn if possible)
   • Take meetings with your contacts even when you think the chance is small that they can help you.
3. Generate new contacts. Network as much as you can and as early as possible to gain more contacts.
   • Attend start-up contests, conferences, international and local events for entrepreneurs.
   • Ask every one you meet and talk to: “Who do you think I should talk to? Can you refer me?”
   • With this sales approach you add a quantity focus, which I believe is important at least in Europe where the VC and angel market is less mature than in the US.

If this is your first professional "sales tour", there are another two positive consequences of regarding  fundraising as a sales process:

• You demystify the topic. A lot of entrepreneurs get scared by the fundraising; they don’t think they understand it and they see it as a major obstacle. But selling is easier to relate to and feel confident about.
• You are about to get a crash course in high level sales. Fundraising takes a lot of time, so instead of “wasting” the time, look at it as some serious sales training.

Can a first time entrepreneur really give any advice regarding fundraising? Well, that’s just it: I believe raising money the first time is a very different experience than doing it a second time. The second time you have your own experience, you have a track record and you have more contacts. The first time you usually don’t have much. Since we just succeeded with our first round of financing, I thought I’d share some of my experiences.

There is so much good advice out there so instead of repeating what others have said much better, I will just point you to some very good sources:

Chris Dixon http://cdixon.org/contents/,
Fred Wilson http://www.avc.com/a_vc/archives.html
Steve Blank http://steveblank.com/.
Great link collection: http://tappen.posterous.com/nice-summary-stanleytang-256-must-read-conten#comment
And of course a lot of great answers on Quora.com

Why should you do a trademark registration?

A registered trademark is basically a cheap insurance against conflicts - trademark infringement. There are two types of conflicts you want to stay out of:

Conflict type 1 - Copycats steal your name.

• Without a trademark registration you will have a hard time fighting off the copycats. Having competition is diffcult enough, but when they start stealing your customers by using a similar name, you have a damaging sitiuation.
• Even if it is unusual, you can build a strong trademark without doing a registration. If you have built recognition for your brand name in a market, you have actually established a trademark without registering it. But the hard thing is proving it, and being prepared to do it in court. A registration will from day one give you proof that you were first.

Conflict type 2 - You are the copycat, most often without knowing it.

• You don’t want to get a letter from lawyer saying you will have to change name and pay for damages because you are too similar to an already registered trademark. Trademark search followed by a trademark registration is the best way to avoid this kind of trademark infringement.

For most businesses with any ambition, a trademark registration is a cheap way to stay out of conflicts. Put another way: You are securing the value you are creating in your business.

When can you skip a trademark registration?

You may save the trademark registration fee, if you agree to any of the following two statements:

A. It really doesn't matter that somebody starts using the same or a similar name.

• This is the often the case when you plan to use a very generic word or phrase as your business name/domain name - like Fund.com or CowboyHatsStore.com. The name is impossible to trademark and no one can claim that it is confusingly similar to their registered trademark.
• A good generic domain name can help in bringing in a lot of customers. But the risk that is often neglected here is that a competitor starts doing business with a very similar name/domain name, "stealing" or deceiving your customers. Examples:
• - Fund.com may loose some customers to Funds.com - Here both parties are probably well aware of the risks.
• - CowboyHatsStore.com will have to live close to CowboyHats.com in the web search results.
• - AutoRepair.com taking customers from AutoRepairs.com - This kind of situation can of course be very damaging.

B. It really doesn't matter that you might have to change your name in the future.

• Very few businesses would say that they are willing to take this risk. But the fact is that many businesses do, often without being aware of it. Sure, most of them are lucky and don’t end up in conflict. But many thousands of them get that letter that will force them to change name - which is a time and money consuming nightmare.

So, even if you’re going to skip a trademark registration, you should still do a trademark search and make sure there are no confusingly similar trademarks out there, in your markets, doing something similar.

Today Markify is launching the world’s first free search and watch for similar trademarks. Our vision is to make it easier for entrepreneurs and brand name creators to avoid conflict and protect their trademarks and domain names.

With Markify you can quickly and easily check any name to see if anybody is already operating under a similar trademark - both in the US (USPTO data) and in Europe (CTM data). So you can avoid them in your search for a new domain name or trademark. Avoid what the law calls "likelihood of confusion". Otherwise you might have to change your name later. A risk no business should take.

This first blog post cover the story on why and how we built this new kind of trademark search that is both fast, accurate and free.

The problem

Entrepreneurs and brand name creators know how hard it is to create a new, good name. The crowded domain name space has made it even more difficult. And when you have created a name and you think you can secure the domain name, there is still one big obstacle left:

Are there any similar trademarks out there, doing anything related to your business?

To answer that question you have to spend at least $500 on an availability search for similar trademarks, and that is for checking just one name, in one market. And it takes 48 hours to get the result, which is of course way to long in an intense name creating session.

So that was the problem: Trademark search has been slow, difficult and expensive.

The solution

After being involved in professional name processes for ten years I decided to try to change this.  I wanted to make trademark search easy, accurate, fast and free. So entrepreneurs and brand name creators  easily could check possible names for similar trademarks and domain name availability immediately.

I knew from the start that it was not going to be easy, that we would have to be a team with some very specific competencies.

As it happens, my father-in-law, Benny Brodda, is a professor emeritus in computational linguistics (Stockholm University), and he is a pioneer in the trademark search field. He built one of the first software programs for finding similar trademarks and sold his successful trademark search company in the 90’s. Benny has 30 years of experience and is of course a very valuable advisor.

The rest of us in the team are a mix of software engineers, linguists and trademark experts. We spend most of our time on two things: the algorithm work and creating a user experience that reduces the built in complexity.  And we all share a passion for business names - trademarks or domain names.

Together we have built a new trademark search that is easy, accurate, fast and free.

The core: Accurate name similarity

Every year there are many thousand examples of trademark applications that didn’t survive because they were too similar to a registered trademark. Here are some of them:

The entrepreneurs and brand name creators behind these and many thousand other applications didn’t just loose the registration fee. They all lost a lot of valuable time and some of them had to pull back a launch at great costs. Then they had to start a new name process - if they were still up to it . . .

But is it really that hard, to determine if two names are similar or not?

If you want to produce a very accurate search result, one that finds most potential “killers” (we call them that) without a lot of “noise”, then it is very hard. From the start we knew that if we were going to be useful to entrepreneurs, we couldn’t deliver search results with too much noise.

It took us in the team 1,5 year to build the core technology, the similarity algorithm. Endless hours spent on statistical tests and different tweaks. A long time but we think it paid off.

We think our search results are extremely accurate. We can today find the similar trademarks with much less noise than any other trademark search service we have seen. And we are constantly tuning and improving the similarity algorithm, so any feedback from you is very valuable to us.

Benoit Fallenius

Founder, CEO

Follow on twitter: benoitfallenius