with investor insight.

Competitive Advantage over Spreadsheets and CRM:

1) Integration - CRM fails when it takes you away from your workflow. General purpose CRMs like Streak.com are trying to solve this by building into your email client (in their case GMail), CapRally will need to build these ties in order to get real usage, which will in turn produce quality data to run analytics on;

2) General Purpose vs. Focused on Fundraising - Most CRMs are focused on their core user (sales people) and the software data structures are locked into that. Because of this, users have to change their process to match the system rather than the system matching their process. Salesforce has created instances (VC and Investment Bank) which renames the fields and objects, but it is putting lipstick on a sales system.

3) Too Complicated - Despite claiming to want every bell and whistle, when met with a million things to customize, people's eyes glaze over and they go back to what they know.

4) High Price Point - because some of the groups that have previously gone after the market started at times when SAAS or Freemium models didn't exist and had to hire enterprise sales teams, the business could only be supported by huge prices tags. That model limits the amount of users and overall market to just the funds willing to pay for it. The interesting thing is that more deals are done away from funds as well as away from investment banks (7 out of 8). With a Freemium model, we can capture all the deals and the data along with it and create premium features that we can charge the high-end users.