Our Approach
Early Stage Investments
One Way Labs invests in early stage startups and builds software in exchange for equity. We look for great founders, solving important problems. We provide a way for nontechnical founders to get their software built without billing developers by the hour or searching for a co-founder with a background in coding.
We help companies raise follow-on capital and bring their tech teams in-house. Often, while a company works with us, we pair the founders with senior engineers in our network to act as their advisor along the way. And can act as virtual CTO.
Technical Co-Founders
If you are a founder without any technical skills, you may try to find a technical co-founder. Which could mean hiring the first remotely qualified person you find and giving them a crazy amount of equity, even if they’re not really ideal for the job. We think it’s better to wait until you’ve got a real product and some users, and then raise some money, and then hire a technical team.
Tech Enabled Companies
We invest in founders who hold deep domain expertise (we look for founder-market fit) and seek companies that have strong revenue models (we don’t invest in ad-supported businesses). This means we are looking to back “tech-enabled companies” rather than tech companies. We aren’t looking for startups with a big technical breakthrough, but rather experts in other fields who want to use technology to solve problems in those fields.
Partnering
We believe the demo, a prototype, or an alpha is far more important than a business plan or financial model for a very early stage company. The demo shows us your vision in a way we can interact with. More important, it shows us that you can build something and then show it off.
— Brad Feld, co-founder Foundry Group and Techstars.
Author of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
Our Philosophy
Product Development
01.
Understanding your vision
We’ll sit down and listen to your vision and strategize on how to bring your idea to life. We’ll discover any challenges we may face and identify the solutions in order to map out a blueprint for a successful product launch.
02.
Crafting your MVP
After we’ve sketched out the product blueprint, we’ll apply our proven methodology to start crafting your product.
We’ll create a working model so you can get a clear picture of exactly how your product will function and make sure everything is just right before we head into product development.
03.
Product development
Our user-experience designers and developers will start working on your project right away. By applying a Lean-Startup method, we’re able to accelerate the development process as well continually make changes along they way.
With daily updates and on-call consultants, you’ll have complete control over your project at every stage of development.
04.
Consumer feedback
We will provide a platform for you to test the and get customer feedback be certain your product is ready for launch.
We’ll iterate that customer feedback back into the development process and work thoroughly to “break the code” and find problems with the application. We make sure the software is working properly and meeting its intended goals.