Seedrs vs Crowdcube – Our crowdfunding campaign: Part I

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Update on the 24th of April 2017: We’ve finally achieved our goal and raised £100,000 for our first round of funding, if you need advise for your crowdfunding campaigns you can find me on clarity.fm

Update on the 28th of February 2017: Part II of this article is now released, find it here Seedrs vs Crowdcube Part II – Key lessons for UK crowdfunding campaigns.

I’ve meant to write this blog post for a couple of weeks now, but things at Chessable have been very busy (good busy!) Many of you may be aware that we launched a crowdfunding campaign at the beginning of this month. Some of you may also know that it was promptly taken down. If you invested non-anonymously I got in touch explaining the situation. I also promised to reveal more detail about the decision in the blog. This is the first of two posts that aim to do so. Due to time constraints, I’ll save the details for Part II. I expect Part II to be very useful to anyone asking the following question: For my UK based startup, should I crowdfund with Seedrs or Crowdcube?

This is the question Chessable faced around July this year. After conducting research to attempt to answer it, we decided that both platforms are just as good. It was 50/50. At this point, Seedrs just edged out Crowdcube because we thought that the “nominee” structure was a nice little perk for investors. While that remains true, it only took one day of being “live” on Seedrs for us to realise that we made the wrong choice.

The next few days would confirm this realisation. For reasons to be explained in Part II, this led to an in-depth conversation with Seedrs and with Crowdcube. It rapidly became apparent that Crowdcube is not only the right choice, but is the only choice for a crowdfunding campaign like ours.

We worked hard to be able to swap crowdfunding platforms, and we were able to do so successfully and very quickly. At this point, it’s worth noting that only 2% of campaigns that apply are approved to go live on Crowdcube. I am happy to announce we are one of fifty campaigns that will launch with the largest UK crowdfunding platform.

Dropping Seedrs for Crowdcube was not a decision taken lightly. We invested a lot of effort to be listed there, and many of you took your time to support our campaign. We also appeared on the BBC during this time, meaning that leaving Seedrs would be seen as a huge sunk cost. Since Chessable is still a bootstrapping startup, our resources are extremely limited. Time is always of the essence. Therefore, I am leaving the details out for the time being and will share my full experience once we conclude the Crowdcube campaign. This new campaign is our primary goal and is set to launch mid-November. I will be able to offer a detailed comparison between both platforms, one of the few (or the only?) crowdfunding campaign that can do so.

To conclude, I’d like to say that on Crowdcube we will be able to give back more to our supporters and investors. When we launch we will have a nice little surprise in store. We think you will love it. The Crowdcube “Reward” structure allows for this, and I look forward to telling you more about this soon. Of course, in the meantime, Chessable continues to grow as measured by all metrics. This is exciting because we really have just begun!

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