Spark XYZ Tutorial
How do I get to Spark?
Whether on a computer/tablet or your smartphone, open a browser and go to sparkxyz.io. Sparkxyz
No separate app is needed for your phone. Spark should adapt to your phone and have all the same capabilities as when you use it from a regular web versus a mobile web browser.
How do I login?
As shown above, click Login in the upper right. Enter the email address you use with your respective groups (angel, incubator, etc).
If it is your first time logging in, click Forgot Password. You’ll be sent a link to reset your password. Once you log back in, you’ll need to provide some minimal profile information.
How do I create a full member profile?
New members will create their profile when they apply to a collective (angel group, incubator, accelerator, etc) using Spark. But whether you are a prospective member applying for membership or an existing member wanting to create a profile, there is a very simple way to quickly create a profile.
Once you’re logged in, click on the person icon in the upper right corner. Select Profile. Midway down the right side of the page, you’ll see Upload Resume.
If you have an existing resume, just click on the Resume button and select your resume from wherever you have it stored on your computer or cloud.
If you don’t have a resume but you have a LinkedIn profile, here’s a tip: sign into LinkedIn and go to your profile page. Under your name and headline, you’ll see a More button. Click that and select Save to PDF. Once you’ve saved your LinkedIn profile, you can use the Spark Upload Resume feature to parse it and create a Spark profile that looks almost identical to the one in LinkedIn. Then you can change and add to it if/as you want on Spark.
How do I find my Collective (Incubator, Accelerator, Angel Group, VC Etc.) on Spark?
When you’re logged in, click on Collective in the top menu bar and then select Manage
You will be directed to a page that shows the collective (as below).
Pro-Tip: From this page you can create a browser bookmark to reuse to get here directly in the future (sparkxyz.io/collective). As indicated by the vertical blue bar, when you go to your Collective it defaults to Applications for Startups (Deals), but you can also get to People Applications (more on this later).
How do I find a specific deal I’m looking for?
On the left side under Global View, click on Deals.
That will open a page (as shown below) with the running list of all deal applications to the collective. They’ll be in the order of newest to oldest (unless you change the sort selection as indicated to the right).
Summary: Click COLLECTIVE → MANAGE ⇒ GLOBAL→ DEALS and you see all deals as shown below.
If you want to find a specific deal, just type the deal/company name in the Search bar. A new page will open with that deal shown.
To see a brief summary, click on the name of the deal/company.
You’ll see a summary profile like this one:
To see the full Deal Room (all information available on the Spark platform for that company), click on the blue clipboard under the heading Deal Room.
Deal Room
The full Deal Room (shown above) includes the general Venture Profile that every company created for their Spark application.
If you click on Q&A instead of Venture Profile, you’ll see the responses to several additional questions specific to a deal application.
Comments allows you to share comments about the deal with everyone in the group.
Media is for videos.
Files is like the Deal Documents section of Proseeder/ Gust, where all the deal documents can be found for due diligence and where we can post internal documents that we create for the deal, such as Pre-Screen or Screening Notes and the DD Executive Summary. Members is where you see the list of members who are Followers, Committed Members or Investors in the Deal.
Tip: On the Venture Profile page, you can get to the Pitch Deck by scrolling down. If you click on Download Pitch Deck it will open the presentation in preview form, and you can also choose to then proceed to download it if you want a full copy to view on your local device/offline.
How do I find all the deals in a specific stage of deal flow, like Pre-Screening or Screening?
If you click back to Applications at the upper left, you’ll be back to your Collective’s Application page and you’ll notice once again the blue vertical bar is on Startups by default. [Note: If you click on People, it’ll toggle to new member applications versus deal applications].
In the case of either Deals or People, you can get to the applications that are in the various “buckets” for each stage of the workflow by clicking on the View Applications button.
It’ll open a page (as shown below) with the workflow stages shown on the left side. It defaults to the first stage, Application Review. The below screenshot shows an example of what it would look like if you were not assigned to application review (contact your admin if this is a mistake)
But if you click on Pre-Screen as above, you’ll see all the deals at that stage of the deal flow. The same goes for Screening, et al. All shows the complete list, Unscored only those awaiting review and Scored only those already reviewed.
How do I find events?
From the Collective page, click on Events instead of Applications.
What is E-Learning?
This is where collectives put things like standard due diligence materials, the member skills inventory form and other documents of interest (in the Library).
What about Portfolio and Perks?
Portfolio and perks is where collectives can list their startups and perks that their startups have access to.
Video Demos
Admin Creating a People Application
