Here are a few random thoughts:

Allow the author of a posting to edit it! Quite often I make a spelling or grammar error and it bothers me that I cannot fix it. Even Facebook allows you to delete the whole thing and repost it. An ability to edit would be even better. I am sure some people use machine assisted translators to help read postings and it is very important for the original text to have perfect spelling and grammar or machine translators will work very badly.

The meaning of the big numerical rating with up/down arrows is not clear to me. Not that I have tried to figure it out but the value and purpose of ratings is really part of a broader subject. Which is...

Organizing information. There is a certain lack of information density in the current site design. You want to have a lot of information in order for the service to be valuable. And, if you have a lot of information then navigation and organization tools become important. Let me address these two topics separately.

Information Schema:

The site could be more interesting if it engaged a founder’s team earlier in the lifecycle of a new venture. So, for example, a management team of just 2-3 people could create profiles and use tools such as threaded discussions to record their conversations (“brainstorms”) about how a new venture would/could look, and be structured. These could be private to only the invited persons, and perhaps later made public as “case studies”. An important artifact in this process would be the evolution of a business plan, which could be considered to be a collaboratively edited document having a certain structure. The platform could assist the entrepreneurs, by providing template questions, etc. Not every kind of business would need to answer every kind of question, of course, but the underlying data model could be like a “checklist” of perhaps 1,000 different questions that an investor might reasonably ask, or a group of founders should ask each other, in the ideation stage of development. Structure does two things. 1) It guides the team into “thinking of everything” and 2) it provides technical structure to the data so it can be searched and categorized in interesting ways later.

The same principles should be applied to other important high level actors, such as investors (individually), vc firms/funds, incubators, governments and countries and geopolitical subdivisions (such as “enterprise zones” or “export zones”). If the platform enhanced the process of communication and collaboration between geographically diverse actors, it would be a major win for Africa. Imagine a startup that intended to market pan-Africa, had a software team in Ghana, was legally domiciled in Mauritius, did marketing and business development out of South Africa and needed a country manager for each country in which it had active operations. To simply find all the people required to make that happen and enable their effective collaboration would be a big service. 

There is some thin line between the private affairs of a private enterprise in its formation stage, and a public platform meant to attract like-minded people who want to learn from each other. What I am suggesting is that the platform’s primary design goal should be to support the emerging venture in its own internal operational needs. In exchange for doing that “for free” the venture is put before the public, and a secondary benefit (that we can learn by seeing how others are doing) is accomplished. At some point a mature venture with too much proprietary intellectual property is probably going to withdraw from the platform and no longer be doing things like publishing their business strategies to the world. This is inevitable, but the goal should be to provide services of such great value to the venture, and enough control, that they withdraw later, rather than sooner. 

When the platform holds enough rich data about each venture it then becomes interesting for investors to mine that data in order to study investment opportunities from whatever perspective the investor cares to use. For example some investors may be focused on a geographic area like “west” Africa, or others will be interested in certain business model concepts like B2B, or B2C, or companies growing by franchising. The information model should be rich enough and detailed enough and the platform should have enough of a vetting process so that immature management teams who still have poorly thought out plans are not placed into the same group as “investor ready” deals. 

Communication Flows:

The current system has a sort of direct email between users component and then threaded discussion lists around global subjects, such as the Questions area. I find the integrated pseudo-email to be very problematic and the user interface not clear. And it will not carry attachments, etc. so it is of little practical use except to allow a narrowband conversation that is semi private. What is needed is a rethink of what kinds of communication flows such a platform should provide.

The use of threaded discussion around topics of global importance seems like a good idea. For example the current Q&A service.

The ability to start a thread attached to a specific venture would also seem to be a good idea. Grow VC allows this and VC4Africa probably does. I can imagine that sometimes these discussions should be very public, such as when a founder is seeking very specific advice about his or her deal. Sometimes they should be totally private; just between collaborating founders or between founders and potential investors. It is probably best to give founders clear controls so they can decide if a discussion constitutes good public relations for their venture or if it best kept to a limited group.

The ability to start a thread attached to a specific investor or vc fund would be good. For instance every VC Fund on the system could have its own “Q&A” thread where basic questions are answered about how the firm does business.

Threaded discussions have failings if they are not aggressively edited and managed. It is easy for someone to ask a question of one actor that should in fact be answered more broadly by all actors (“Generalized”). Similarly it is not unusual for someone to ask in a general forum a question which is really specific to a certain subset; a type of business model, for example. It would be better for everyone if such conversations were moved to a different, more appropriate thread. It is a challenge to do this technically and from a user interface perspective. But it is not impossible. 

Comparison Tools:

Another valuable tool for entrepreneurs (when creating a new venture) and for investors (when considering an investment in a particular venture) is to make comparisons. It is useful to compare ventures to ventures, ventures to established companies, business models in one industry to similar business models as practiced in another industry. It is useful to compare customer demographics and market segmentation concepts and other econometric data such as projected 5 year growth rates. So, for example, a platform could contain “built in” econometrics and data on public companies (or private companies which release data) that can be used as the basis for comparisons. There are certain market forecasting models that are fairly standardized and it would be helpful to the entrepreneur to have this information “built in” and it would be helpful to investors to know that if they are comparing similar projections from two similar ventures operating, for example, in the CFA zone, then the population and other econometrics behind those projections are the same. This way one deal does not look better just because the entrepreneurs used slightly different base data for their forecasts. Most important are comparisons to existing operating companies. There are far too many business plans that are not much more than duplicates of some existing company somewhere else in the world. This is not always a bad idea. Maybe Nigeria really needs something like Facebook that is uniquely Nigerian. But if that is your plan it is best to be clear about it and go ahead and make all the comparisons to Facebook in a well structured way. Probably the way advertisers would want to use such a platform and how much they would be willing to pay will be nearly identical to Facebook, and so a great deal can be learned by the comparison.

I am sure I have other ideas but I will stop for now :)