00:00 Hello, welcome. We're gonna spend the next few minutes, the duration of this video on improving this VC's list, Google sheet that I found on Twitter from Alexander.
00:12 So Alexander said he's putting together a list of 150 VCs that are actively investing which is really cool. And this is the type of thing that is fantastic for Google Sheets because it's very simple to create update and then release, right?
00:28 And you can release this in seasons. You can say, you know, these bcs invested in the last three months and maybe you got to say a hundred.
00:35 And then you went out to your private group or private network and you said, Hey, I put together a hundred, but I want to get to like 200.
00:44 Let me know if there's anyone on this list that I should take off, or is there anyone not on the list that I should add?
00:49 And here's a criteria, and Alexander did this on Twitter. And so we're gonna go and take this. This is it.
00:56 We're gonna take this sheet and we're gonna try to make it better. I'm gonna probably talk more about branding than anything else, but let's say 80 20 branding to usefulness and actually use helpfulness of this sheet and maybe a few things we can do differently.
01:13 So I made a copy, I haven't done any work yet, and I haven't also just checked out lemon.io, which is the reason that this all exists.
01:21 This is a great lead magnet for lemon.io where Alexander works and is the founder of. So let's check out lemon.io.
01:28 Oh my god, this is an awesome design. It is exactly just neat. It is very distinct and I really wish that this Google sheet looked and felt like this website.
01:45 So I'm gonna take a quick screenshot of this section, and it looks like there's a yellow, but there's more of a green.
01:54 Yeah, let's take this yellow and purple as well. A screenshot there. And I'm gonna go to HTML color codes. I'm gonna upload this file just to get the color codes.
02:02 We'll have this later. Oh man, this is so cool. Let's find the, there it is. Let's take this one first, and we'll also grab the other one here to grab that yellow.
02:18 So we want that color code yellow. We want maybe this purple, this purple. Probably the same purple as before. But yeah, we want that yellow.
02:27 Definitely want that yellow. We want this green and this purple here is probably the same purple as the other one.
02:36 There we go. So we're gonna grab those. We're gonna have these color codes available to us. And let's just double check this is what that 0, 0, 0.
02:43 Yeah. So this is a really cool use. I usually don't use the blackest black, but because lemon.io is, we're gonna do that, we're gonna make this like a dark version.
02:53 I see that he tried these four different colors and had these distinct, you know the, the, what typically happens with a header, right?
03:01 You want a bold header and then pastel everything else. So I don't think that's necessarily the best, especially because we wanna brand the hell out of this Alexander who is putting this list out on Twitter for free.
03:14 People can copy it just like I did and use it. And we want to make sure that people want to share this one, that it's useful, right?
03:23 That's the number one goal. It's useful and people use it and then they share it.  But second, once they share it, that there's a mechanism to get back to us that it, we made it and it should feel like we made it, right?
03:36 This is for two reasons. One for branding, because people reading it want to then see like, who made this thing, right?
03:43 Oh, it's lemon, it's clearly lemon.io made this thing. But there's a secondary reason that is almost more important is like, we want to feel good working on this.
03:54 We want to feel like it's ours. We wanna put our soul into it. We wanna put our, our demonn soul into it sometimes.
04:01 So let's check this out. I want to create a start page first that has at least some branding on it.
04:10 And this, this message, I'm only going to use a few columns and a few rows. We're just gonna put that right in the center.
04:22 We're gonna use this. Where is it? Text wrapping. Hey friends. Actually we can put this on a whole, we can make this a lot easier to read.
04:33 Hey friends, we put together a list of vc, list of VCs, VC that are actively investing in. I hope it's helpful to you if you're ready.
04:42 Yeah, we can separate this a lot. Let's insert a row below. Nope, insert a row above. In case you are hiring, we are, we run a marketplace of vetted engineers from Europe and let 'em check us out.
04:57 And that just that check us out is not enough. Let's have a much bolder, more interesting called action and a button too, right?
05:08 We're going to use, let's say the blackest black. And for right now the whitest white here, but we want to get a really cool button.
05:16 I'm going to use my extension button styles. I need a three by three area. I'm gonna insert a few more things here.
05:25 I want to create a cool button. Let's just do that. Three by three. I need a three by three. That's it.
05:33 I want extensions button styles. Show sidebar. So here we're gonna use button styles. We're gonna be able to create our own button style.
05:41 We want a background, which is gonna be the button that people click is gonna be this yellow. This particular yellow.
05:49 Let's use that. We can usually put in just the hex code here. There it is. I can't D f f F Zero zero.
06:03 Okay, since I can't copy and paste it. Do D f f F zero zero. Perfect. Hit enter the font color.
06:13 We do want, ah, actually do we want it white? No, we want it black. Alright, I'm gonna close our original one.
06:20 Let's go to ours. Fun color. We want black. And we'll do the blackest black for right now. And the shadow color, that's going to be let's make it this purple.
06:34 Let's see what we got here. C five, eight. F, F, C, five, eight. Let's see what this looks like if we do it.
06:48 C five, F, f, f eight. That I don't think that's correct. No. C five, eight. F, F, F. Oh my god.
06:57 So close. C five, eight. Nope. Gotta delete that eight. Put it here. There we go. Alright. And now I'm gonna set the custom style and you'll see what happens.
07:12 We got a cool button. That's it. There was one click. I did not I did not pause this video. That's button styles.
07:20 It's three. If you want to grab it. I'm gonna merge these cells across three. So it's we're gonna do right here, merge these cells across so that way I think we messed up the text a little bit, but easy to fix by just merging these cells.
07:41 Do, do, do, do, do. There it is. Now we got a cool button. One thing we need to do is free view show.
07:51 Take away those grid lines. I wanna do that right here too. Before we do anything, get rid of those grid lines.
07:56 We're gonna add those grid lines back if we wish. Okay, so now we have this cool start page, right? We wanna start everyone here and we want this.
08:03 Check it out, right? Lemon, we're gonna just write it Lemon do io right there. I don't know what font they use.
08:11 Mm, looks like a pretty cool, bullish. Nice, nice font there. I'm going to use, I don't know if this is right, lemon.io with the press start.
08:22 Now that doesn't look right. Maybe Comforta, but it's gonna be all caps. Lemon.io definitely. Right? Because it's all caps here.
08:33 Ooh, maybe Oswald. Maybe Oswald would, Oswald would be cool. Yeah, that's nice. Make it really big. Okay. Not that big.
08:43 Yeah, that's cool. Nice. So now people can click here. Looks like a nice big button. Click lemon ao. Get right away there.
08:52 We might even add this somewhere else if we want, but for right now we can actually just grab this one thing.
08:59 Oh, we want to change this color back to black, I think. And do we want it to be underlined? We can take the underline out 50 50 on that.
09:10 This text white is okay, I do want to give it a little bit more room. So something like that. And vertical align.
09:22 I think that's okay. Also, much more room to write here. If they wanna write more stuff. If they want to introduce themselves, put a picture of themselves.
09:32 I would highly recommend if you are a service or an agency, put a photo of yourself in here, in your Google sheet, in your lead magnet.
09:40 Definitely. Like let people know you're a real human being behind all of this. Okay? Now what's cool is we can delete this row.
09:48 That does not mean that we have to get rid of all of our branding here, right? What we do want to do right now is change this all to black background change the text to all white.
10:01 And now this is looking much more, very quick, right? Just <laugh>. This whole video so far is 10 minutes long.
10:09 But right now, just that couple of clicks, we've now turned this much more into what looks like lemon io, right?
10:17 And we're gonna do much more. So let's do this vc. They chose roboto. I might do something weird, like really big headers.
10:31 This Maybe call that activity and call this apply. And they did a really cool thing here, by the way, and I should have mentioned this earlier, is there is just enough information to be interesting here.
10:52 You have industry of the name of the vc, the industry, the stages at their at right now. So originally when I was like looking at this, I was like, oh man, there's probably a better way you could do this data.
11:05 But all of the ways that I thought about it were like way complicated. And sort of, if this is a lead magnet that's gonna be updated not every three months, but created a new one every three months or every qu every year you might just want to have a little bit of text here instead of having like a dropdown menu and status and columns and stuff.
11:27 So 50 50 on that. But let's get back to this header because I'm not done branding this. We wanna maybe bring the, we could do something like this is bring in some color, right?
11:42 Every other one could be a different color. That's it. Just three whites and then a pink and a purple. And maybe they're, maybe they want to put maybe make the apply a different color and VC a different color.
11:56 We, you know, honestly, we don't even need that vc. Like we sort of get that these are names who they are.
12:02 That helps a little bit getting into the information faster. But we are not done. We are definitely not done. I'm gonna make these in the middle.
12:14 I want to change the alignment of these. I want them all to be in the middle. I don't know if centered is correct for everything.
12:26 Actually it's not. But I do think that to the right is good for this left column. And there is a tiny little gap.
12:34 I don't know if you can see it. I scroll, you can see it, but I might wanna make that a little bit bigger.
12:38 So let's put a whole column there and make it a tiny little row, but just a little bit bigger. I don't know why, but this feels right that we have a little bit more room or I think we can do that freeze.
12:54 I think we can do that freeze instead of this. I'm gonna delete that column and just do that freeze. Yeah, it gives it a little bit more in this line.
13:04 Yes and no, I'm not, I'm not married to that at all. I think we do need that blackboard there, okay, to get more branding here.
13:16 The problem with adding more branding on the data side of it is that generally we want to be more useful than branded.
13:24 Yes, like 80% useful to 20% branding. But we wanna brand the hell out of this thing, right? We want to, we want our email, we want our contact information.
13:34 We want we can create a whole nother thing here called contact or hire because that's all what lemon does. It says hire devs.
13:48 So all of this text we can put right here for people to, let's see, let's see. So right there, boom, boom, boom, there.
14:05 Delete that row so we can have some more. I don't, I don't know what text they might want on there, but they can do some more texts.
14:12 We can call this VCs or database. I like calling it database or db, but maybe VCs let's do some more stuff here.
14:23 Oh, we, okay, so we need to get branding in here, but we don't wanna get in the way of, of the usefulness of this, right?
14:31 Usually people will freeze this row. And then what usually people do in branding is the add a row above and they'll say lemon io, right?
14:41 Contact us, which is what the original one was. But what I would do is I would have this row, I would, I would freeze it, but I would put an additional row just under the frozen row.
14:56 And this is where I would put lemon io lemon.io branding. I would put it across the whole thing. I might even add two rows.
15:05 Insert another one. So I have, might have two rows so that it can be like a nice, let's see. Just give it some I think we have some.
15:18 Yeah, we, we will do the borders soon. What do we want to do here? Let's take away all of, let's take a different color.
15:27 Maybe here's where we can add that yellow in or no, that purple, right? Maybe we can even make it a purple line so we can do it.
15:36 If it, we, we don't want it so thick, we can delete this row. Add a thick border with this purple.
15:46 Add a purple line there. See? And now we can say this list is brought, is was created by the folks at Lemon.
16:01 Now I'm saying this, I'm writing these words. The list was created by the folks at Lemon. But perhaps the people at Lemon will want to do will want to write this in their words.
16:13 We've created this list so that you can blah, blah, blah. Like I'm writing it about them, but they might run and write it about themselves.
16:22 I would do a completely different font as well. Maybe, maybe this maybe a bit bigger. Give it a little bit more room.
16:33 Center it. I think it's already centered. Yeah, maybe even give it a little bit more room. Why do I, and now the question is, why did I put it under the frozen row?
16:45 It's because the moment you scroll down, you now have all of the room here to use it. Actually, I will go to a hundred percent.
16:54 I usually have it much zoomed in now I'll unzoom it, it'll zoom it out. This is what it looks like.
16:59 So now we have much more room to actually use this list. Of course. I understand that in order to use the maximum length and also in order to sort this, if maybe you wanna sort it alphabetically or you want more sortable da, maybe there's more sortable data and some other kinds of things, people will delete this.
17:17 It's okay. We wanna add that branding just in case. But we wanna add, we don't ever wanna brand add branding one place.
17:24 We have it on the start. Lemon io. We have it here. VCs, we have higher here. We'll even, I would even put it here.
17:32 100 vc, 150 VCs that are actively investing by lemon.io. I would add it right up at the top right here on higher right here at start.
17:45 Know how to, I would have links back to those pages of like, you wanna hire like maybe right here. I put, wanna hire a dev?
17:55 Let's make this way smaller <laugh>.  Maybe make it centered. Centered. Yeah, it's all good. And maybe even make it like that.
18:06 That looks cool, right? <laugh>, that's pretty weird. Wanna hire dev and then put a link here to higher the higher page.
18:15 So now this is just linking to this page here. Higher we can even make this a little less like that.
18:24 And when somebody just scrolls over it there, oh, higher, maybe this industry and this activity are a little much, it's okay, we can bring it back down and have this nice purple across.
18:40 Okay, now this data, what do we wanna do with this data? It's all 10. I don't like that it's 10.
18:44 I would keep, I would get it at least 12, maybe even 14 or 16 font size. People can always make it less.
18:52 It's, I see people way less making their font larger. And this just makes it so much easier to read. Like, ah, you, yeah, you wanna see that it's a long list.
19:04 It's okay, but we also want to actually read it. These all have links to them in the name. And then there's apply.
19:14 So I like this. I like that there's an apply column. What I might do is add a column here, merge these two.
19:24 So this is both apply. I think you'll see what I'm doing in a hot second. I'm gonna copy this over.
19:30 And what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna equals hyperlink. The URL is going to be G three, the the cell to the right of it.
19:41 And the link label. I'm going make an emoji, I'm gonna make an arrow. There might be some other cool things like dev, like apply, like this might be a cool thing to do.
19:56 This little emoji. Or let's do both. Let's do a, an arrow and this let's center it. Let's make it way bigger.
20:09 No, I mean like way bigger. Double. Yeah, that looks cool, right? We can even un underline it. So if somebody scrolls over, it's at our offices now.
20:21 We've copy pastes all the way down. Ooh, cool. Right now we have not just this like link that's a text.
20:29 We've now made a sort of button, right?  I might do a little bit of alternating rows here of colors. Oh yeah.
20:43 And then I would get rid of those borders for right now. We might add more borders later, but what this is doing, wait, where?
20:52 Let's do that again. Let's go here. Paste this or make it here. Oh, is that border still there? Hmm. Think we need to do that.
21:08 There we go. Okay. I would do one less, right? Maybe there might be a way to do it. Not one step less, but let's see if, go back to the black custom and I want like just a little pip over.
21:28 Is it gonna be just 0 2, 0 2, 0 2 maybe. I think that's almost the same <laugh>. Maybe we need to just a little bit more.
21:45 Oh, that's because it's, we wanna go up, let's do seven. Okay. That is no difference, right? Am I going crazy here?
21:57 This is different, but it's not different. <laugh>. We want j just barely different. <laugh>. Maybe go there. Okay, there it's old.
22:08 Oh my god. It's very hard to tell. But here's the cool thing that it will add a subtle line in between each one.
22:15 So we're gonna take two of them. I'm just gonna copy and then we're gonna paste the value not paste value.
22:21 Sorry, paste. Special format only. Now that's cool. It is just barely noticeable that there is an alternating color here. We're not taking a full step across.
22:32 We're just like a little bit that's not, that's much nicer than adding those borders. We could do some cool things with maybe like purple and yellow borders, but we wanna leave yellow.
22:44 Maybe actually change this text to that yellow. Yellow means action. I know earlier I had the industry as yellow and the activity yellow, but let's try to keep that yellow as action, right?
22:57 I think they do a what? Good job here with this yellow here. The buttons are this yellow. Yeah, that's cool.
23:05 So like, this is a, this is actually could be yellow as well, right? Cuz it's a button we can press.
23:12 We can go to that hyperlink. I'm seeing this text is a little, that's why I say 14 or 16. Or what we could do is keep the name of it as four 16 and maybe take this down to 12.
23:30 Yeah. Noise. And maybe take the activity column two down to 12, right? So we can fit in a lot more.
23:42 This stage one might be very important cuz you're gonna probably like scroll through this and wanna read this first. Maybe industry first.
23:50 I'm unable to really get gauge where the hierarchy is. Whoever wrote this will know what is the most important pieces of information.
23:58 So what I would make those bigger and bolder. And oh, one more thing I just remembered. Let's add this. We don't want the header to be exactly the same font as the text.
24:13 We want it actually a little less. So before the sheet was like bold header and then pastel data. But what we wanna do in this is bring up more black into the text.
24:27 So meaning gray, let's see how far we can, that's pretty cool, right? So now it's, it's a little subtle hint, but it takes your eye from like seeing it all the time, even though it's big and it's bold.
24:41 And we might even make these like all caps industry. We might take these down to like 22 maybe to make it a little less in your face.
24:52 But also maybe you wanna be in your face like this <laugh>, you know, behold mighty tabs you're searching for. I would take this, this kind of text and put it on higher.
25:03 I would also add that this guy, this guy's great. Let's get this guy onto the sheet so that there's some kind of messaging that's similar.
25:17 We're gonna add him over here. Let's add some more. Let's insert a image over sales. Yeah, let's get you in there sir.
25:33 Love your look. Love this illustration, right? Ooh, we need to add some more lines. Great. Thanks. I have a little issue.
25:43 I think we can crop this in some way. It's okay for right now. <laugh>. I'm gonna move him here. Great.
25:54 I hate that little <laugh>, the little yellow thing there, but it's okay. For now. This is just to test. Get it rid of aerial.
26:03 I don't know if we want Oswald here. Maybe Comforta or co. Ooh, this is nice. Codeine. Make that bigger. I want to merge horizontally.
26:14 Yeah, this can even be bigger. There we go. Nice, right, big button. This looks like their homepage, right? So it looks like a lemon io thing.
26:28 It feels like a lemon io thing. Want a hire dev? Nice little. I think sideways font here was really cool.
26:38 We don't need this industry al caps. We don't even need all these big, but I think it just makes it look different, right?
26:47 We still have all of these as roboto. We end, we ended up putting the font up higher. We added a little button here to apply so you can click here.
26:59 Nice. Really, really like the look of this, right? And like I said, we'd spend 80% of this time on branding, even though you really definitely wanna make sure that a sheet is useful.
27:11 I thought this was really good sheet. I thought this was well done. It had just a right pieces of information to make decisions, right?
27:19 People who need it want it right now. They don't want to be sifting through a lot of filters and things.
27:25 There's some lead magnets, magnets that are great for tracking an industry. This is like, hey, here's a list of industry VCs that are funding right now.
27:35 Go through this list. I mean, someone who's gonna use this wants 150 items and will go through each and every one.
27:41 So I was wrong in saying they won't sif, they will sift through it. They will go piece by piece, whereas there's other lead magnets and lit, literally other sheets you can create that are like more filterable, indexable an annotated.
27:58 You can add more tools to it. I think the best thing I did here was just take a little bit of text away with this url.
28:05 Make it a little bit to the right and have some iconography. You can also change this, right? Maybe this emoji is based on something here, right?
28:16 Like based on what stage they're in is what this emoji is. Or based on where, where is, you can also, oh, let me, I will suggest one thing.
28:28 If you're a better sheets member I watching this, there is a video about bringing do domain icons, getting a company's icon just from their, their domain.
28:37 I would do that here. There's a whole different video on that. That would be really cool because a lot of these URLs on the apply are the VC's the VC's website.
28:51 So you can get a lot of cool icons that way and make this little bit more icon I graphic. Alright, hopefully you enjoyed watching this video and got something out of it.
29:03 Thanks to Alexander for sharing this, this VCs list. I hope this is a better version. I hope you feel better about this version, or at least even if you don't like this exact version, you took the direction that I was sharing with you and did that, right?
29:19 You have this great illustration, these great bold colors on your website. Bring them into sheets, put your fingerprint on this, put your soul into here, and then people will really feel it when they're going through this data and they'll really feel like, oh, I, I owe you one lemon, not lemon Alexander and Lemon.
29:34 Again, photos, faces are gonna be great here just to make sure. Oh, cuz gosh, we do this all the time, right?
29:43 Google sheets is so inhospitable. But we wanna see a face. We wanna say, we wanna know that a human was behind this.
29:49 Someone else was here at this sheet, was on this place at this time and helping us, giving us this information in this particular way.
29:59 Thanks so much. Have a have a good bite.