How CornerDrop raised £75k crowdfunding Part III

If you’re looking to launch or grow and expand a business, crowd funding is an alternative to both traditional bank lending and the more innovative small business finance loans available.

This is the third of a three part series by Andrew Lasota, CEO of CornerDrop on how they raised £75k in just two days! You can read the first part at How CornerDrop raised £75k crowdfunding Part I with the company background and Part II which describes the preparations for the crowd funding launch.

How CornerDrop raised £75k crowdfunding Part III

The build-up

You are given a ‘private’ launch several days prior to the email going public on a Monday Morning. You use this link to the campaign to start the ball rolling for ‘friendly’ investors. I asked a few of these people to place around one third of their amounts during this period.

Questions from potential investors are asked within the website. It is important to get these answered quickly. I cleared my diary as much as possible to make sure I could address any concerns immediately.

The unexpected thing was that this link then started to appear on our friends social pages, and people started to see the campaign on the Seedrs site that we did not know.

The Launch

So, after going ‘private’ live with a minimum target set at £60k and a stretch of £75k, we accumulated almost half by the Sunday night (after about 4 days ‘private’), then Monday morning came and our site was highlighted on the Seedrs weekly email.

By close of business on that Monday, we were pushing our £60k target limit. I instructed all our family and friends to place their investments now or it may be too late!

By Tuesday, around 2.00pm we had hit our £75K, but it did not stop there. Eventually, by close on Wednesday, it was pushing £95k and eventually settled just under £100k by the Friday – even though it was clear we had closed the funding campaign!

All our social plans went out the window! The 6 week plan also disappeared as this meant we would get the funding in our accounts well within that period. All hands on deck then!

The Finale

Of course, it is not the end, only the beginning!

There were some small delays in getting the funding into the account (primarily, being a pragmatist, I did not open a company bank account until I was sure we had funding in place), we thought we could do something by Christmas. Unfortunately not. But that’s another story altogether!

The funding process for us was relatively painless. We made sure we were investor ready. Had a great team, a good story and a business idea that really resonates across many avenues. Seedrs can help you as much or as little as you want, and interestingly, several members of the Seedrs team invested in us as well!

Would I recommend it? Most certainly yes! In fact, we are doing another raise hopefully this week for the remainder of the £75k SEIS allowance, take a look seedrs.com.

The SEIS/EIS scheme is invaluable. It is a fantastic incentive. We had individuals who invested over £10k who we did not know! That is a massive chunk of money to invest, from essentially, strangers.

We take this responsibility very seriously and are extremely grateful as a result, but to have a chance of success, make sure you have everything in place. The above is no-where near a complete list, and took several months to make happen (in fact, about 8!), but it is a starting point if you are thinking of raising funds for an idea.

I would welcome any comments and questions. In the meantime, please visit www.cornerdrop.com and ask your local shop or business to register online and become a CornerDrop!

Let’s make missing parcels a thing of the past!!