I’ve been speaking to an increasing number of entrepreneurs since launching StartupStats and I’ve heard a common statement from many: “We’re not on AngelList because we’re not raising money.” Simply put this is the wrong way to think about AngelList. While AngelList initially evolved from an email sent by Naval and Nivi which listed out high potential startups, it has evolved into a robust community. There has even become a unspoken rules of engagement on AngelList which I’ll save for another post. In the meantime, check out the reasons below that you need to stop waiting and join AngelList now!

Monitor The Market

This is the most obvious reason for signing up for the site. AngelList is a massive source of competitive insight (we know because we’ve built a large database using their API). You can see who’s likely to be raising funding, who’s in specific markets, and how people are connected. This last point is probably the most important aspect of AngelList: you can see who’s connected to who.

Build Relationships

However keep in mind: just because you’ve followed someone on AngelList does not mean you should start reaching out to them. The value of contacts on AngelList is extremely high. It can be used for fundraising, building partnerships, and even recruiting. Fortunately the community is still small enough that I’m not constantly bombarded with spam. I have had friends that I see immediately following a ton of investors. Just like on Twitter and other sites around the web, your following/followers ratio is a good signal as to whether or not you value your AngelList connections. If you’re thinking long-term I definitely would value your contacts on AngelList.

More Likely To Get Coverage On StartupStats

This is a bit of a self-serving plug, but AngelList is serving as our primary index of startups currently. While we’ve utilized other databases around the web to surface startups, we stripped everything down to basics and went back to AngelList. We then overlap AngelList startups with other data points around the web to surface upcoming startups (which we send out in our daily email so if you haven’t subscribed, do so on the right side of this page). If you aren’t on AngelList, you pretty much are guaranteed not to get coverage on this site.

More importantly, we’ve been using our database to send out startups to other large publications to help them surface startups, so the bottom line is this: sign up for AngelList and increase your odds of getting press.

Get Funding When You Want It

While AngelList isn’t the only source of funding, it’s just about guaranteed to accelerate your fundraising process when you are looking. While I won’t go into details on gaming AngelList in this post, getting a few external investors that you can put on your profile as social proof looks great for when you decide to turn on the fundraising switch. There’s no reason any startup shouldn’t try to build some buzz during their fundraising process by promoting themselves on AngelList.

A Highly Influential Community

See and be seen. That’s one of the many mottos of super networkers. If you aren’t on AngelList, you aren’t in the network. I would be willing to bet that there is a strong correlation between being on AngelList and the value of your company (read: total speculation). Literally the vast majority of the world’s leading startup investors are on AngelList. You’re crazy not to increase your odds of getting in front of them (well, aside from the fact that you should be building your business rather than just networking…).

Join Now!

Not sure why you’d need any more reasons to join at this point. Take a couple minutes and join the site. Oh, and once you’ve signed up,make sure to follow us!