Quest-tour service Questcity
The many letters in this article will help those who are preparing to go out or organize a crowdfunding campaign. All the following description is my-our personal experience and a real example of how the whole crowdfunding procedure took place with us.
Essentially. He was engaged in various businesses before they got to the crowdfunding campaign. There was also a daily rent and several quest rooms, but it was from the quest rooms that we decided to move on with the team and transfer this experience (quest rooms) to the digital sphere. Thus, the Questcity project began to emerge.
At the time of writing, the service is already dead 🙂 we closed due to the pandemic in 2020 for obvious reasons. The lion's share of user-customers were tourists, and therefore had to close. But if you add a little description of the project, questcity was a service for creating and completing interactive and educational quests or routes through mobile application and also the marketplace. It could be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store (the app has already been removed).
As the project developed, we had to invest about 40k euros with the owners (20k from each owner). It was all the money we could afford and we hit the ceiling. We launched the first version of the application (MVP - minimum viable product) and already began to receive the first customers, but the turnover was still quite ridiculous (no more than 500 euros per month).
We wanted to move aggressively. The solution we had allowed us to scale and capture new markets. But we did not have the resources, so we came to the conclusion that we need crowdfunding. It was ideally suited to the fact that you can get the attention of both users and investors at the same time and at the same time not lose a significant share of the company.
Kickstarter
The first and very obvious thought was to immediately go to Kickstarter. But there is a very sad history of app funding. There are few digital-mobile projects that have received good support there. Plus all sorts of features and requirements for registering a company, having an account in the UK. For the Estonian company, in principle, there were no problems, we even prepared and opened a business account with Revolut (UK) specifically for this purpose. But in the end, they paid a commission for the “maintenance” of the account for a year and closed it without using it.
Other alternatives - Fundwise
As we discussed which venues we would use, we looked for a list of local Estonian alternatives. We talked to Fundwise and got acquainted with the Funderbeam offer. We immediately found a common language with Fundwise and a very pleasant curator. We managed to please the managers and we began to get acquainted with the conditions.
Conditions and prices
Wow, the prices here are very bad. At that time (and this was 2018), the conditions were as follows:
- 1200 euros had to be paid to start the campaign
- 1200 euros after a successful-completed campaign
- 1% of the collected amount. (at that time they had such a price tag, now, of course, it has changed)
I don’t know what we thought there, but the desire was very great 🙂 and Fundwise seemed like a good card, good relations, everything seemed to go like clockwork, yes, expensive, but if they have investors, then why not.
An important point. Fundwise is a non-standard crowdfunding platform. During the campaign, it is proposed to become an investor - to get a part of the company, and not to buy a service. Fundwise position themselves as a co-financing platform for entrepreneurs and investors.
Prepare
We started working with our manager Fundwise. Received pre-approval and paid the first invoice of 1200 euros. Then the hardest part began. Namely:
- bookkeeping check
- transformation of the company, change of articles of association
- preparation of all documents:
- project description
- drawing up a business plan: where will we spend all the money?
- business model
- marketing plan
- financial plan
- quick pitch, a short presentation for publishing on the site.
- video creation
Rereading all the letters with the manager, I came to the understanding that all these processes took a lot of time. We started at the end of February and launched the campaign in May. As I found out later, we still turned out to be quite smart in preparing all the documents and always responded promptly and corrected all inaccuracies.
And now for the most important
Back to preparation! 🙂 The previous paragraph talks about “input” documents. Without them, nothing will move at all. With them, we did a titanic job and pretty exhausted. But here is the most important point. You can't breathe! Must not start a campaign, just for the sake of starting it. Magic won't happen. You must first find an investor-audience, no matter how absurd it may sound. And here probably was our main mistake.
- Starting Audience
Now, of course, from the position of the future it is already easy to judge what happened in the past. However, you understand what they are talking about. other article authors and campaign owners. Important before the campaign gain an audiencewho will support you. Better yet, leading investors. This is the paradox, you seem to come to the site for money, because they have investors and hope that they will pay attention to you, but in fact you need to do everything yourself. And this is certainly very strange.
If you give out some advice, then, as always in the start-up movement, it is fashionable to talk about the three Fs - family, friends and fools. It is they who will be your first money: family, friends and “fools”. If you can't convince friends and family members to invest at least some of the money, then something is probably wrong with your idea.
Looking ahead, it was the well-established 2F > family and friends who supported the lion's share of the crowdfunding campaign.
Well, the obvious things. Thanks to the initial audience, the product will not get lost among other campaigns. You need to think about the story, maybe already do a PR campaign that you are going to go on the court. Make a separate landing page, launch a launch counter and other tricks. You need to create a beautiful story and get an audience that will be interested in following your successes or failures :), do not hesitate, they will definitely be!
- Starting investment
In addition to the prepared documents, we also managed to talk with all our friends, relatives and friends. The project was really good and managed to find the lion's share of investments among close people even before the start of the campaign. Without them, the campaign would have been a failure, as all other funds raised were only about 30% of our minimum target. So draw your own conclusions.
- Working with journalists
I have already said that the marketing plan and its implementation must begin even before the campaign begins. Participate in conferences, publish on different platforms, create newsbreaks. You should be on the receiving end, if someone tries to Google your company name, he/she should find some interesting articles about it.
In our case, we've published on various local venues, been featured on TV shows, and been a key partner at a mobile gaming developer conference.
Start Crowdfunding Campaigns
It seemed that we did everything perfectly! All documents, description, worked with investors and friends, made several articles, stirred up interest and used the popular investment platform Fundwise. The launch of the company was scheduled for an investor day organized by Fundwise.
By the way, if you want to see what ours looked like application, she is still active on Fundwise.
The moment seemed perfect. Investor day, we are making a presentation and right during the presentation we say that we are launching a campaign! Euphoria knew no bounds! 🙂
But! As always in all beautiful stories there is a huge fat But :). At the start from the desired minimum 30 euros we get only 000 euros. You can find many other articles on the topic that for all crowdfunding campaigns the most important are start и end campaigns. It is at these moments that the main investments in the campaign and this is true! 🙂 ADVICE! You should not underestimate this factor, which is why all the preparations for the start of the campaign are of such tremendous importance.
In our case, it turns out that one of the two cartridges (beginning and end of the campaign) was used. Our result is 5000 euros and, as in the classics of the genre, this amount remained unchanged almost until the very end.
Campaign end
The next bullet came at the very end. We worked hard once again on communication and urgently began to try to fix things. Fortunately, we managed to do this and, thanks to preliminary developments, we received another + 32000 euros (our 2F) + at the end we still managed to get +2 euros from other investors.
In the end, the story turned out to be successful. We collected 39 euros from the minimum desired 360, although our fuse was for a higher amount.
Lessons learned. Or what did I take away from this whole campaign?
It was a wonderful experience. Heavy, stressful, requiring lightning-fast response, readiness to be constantly in touch at any time of the day, but it was interesting and useful to go through it. Our campaign has been successful! Super! But business? Business - no, it's dead 🙂 (you can read the article about the sale of Questcity here). You will also need to be prepared for this. You may feel incredibly motivated by what you are doing, but do not forget that after the crowdfunding campaign you will need to continue to work hard and perhaps your business will die altogether (like ours) in a few years, or maybe not 🙂 who is it knows, but it's always worth a try!
And if you have additional questions regarding our experience, I will be happy to answer in the comments. This topic could be written for 30 minutes of reading 🙂 there are a lot of nuances, as always.