How to carry out a winning crowdfunding campaign

On January 13th our Pivotal Tribes meetup group held the latest of its events at Google Campus which featured a panel comprising representatives from equity and rewards based crowdfunding platforms, as well as entrepreneurs who have successfully completed both equity and rewards based campaigns.

The panelists were as follows:

• Nick Levine, Business Development Manager at the UK’s leading equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube;

• Simon Dixon, CEO and Founder of BankToTheFuture, an online equity, debt and rewards-based crowdfunding site which is currently carrying out its own hybrid rewards and equity financing campaign;

• David Kitchen, Founder and CEO of Microcosm, a tech company focused on building a platform to provide communities with better discussion forums and which has raised two rounds of equity finance on Seedrs totalling £150k; and

• Andrew McDonough, Founder and CTO of Tribesports, the social network for sport lovers, which raised £120,000 of rewards-based (or pre-order) financing on Kickstarter to produce a new sportswear range.

The event was kindly sponsored by Gannons Solicitors, a law firm specialising in the representation of entrepreneurs, and Jenson Funding Partners, who operate the Jenson Seed EIS Fund for startups and who also posted a nice write up of the event on their blog.

Several weeks ago I also wrote this longer post on running a successful crowdfunding campaign which partly prompted me to organise the event at Google Campus.

Here are some tweets that captured a few of the key points made during the evening:

 

Andrew launched Kickstarter to take preorders. £30k target hit in 1.5 days… #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@SimonDixonTwitt says you should ask for how much money you NEED. Set minimum & maximum. #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@Buro9 spoke to about 50% of the people who gave the money.

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@buro9 you need to work on the campaign full time for at least two months ahead of the campaign #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@SimonDixonTwitt offers equity & rewards. 90% of funding comes from equity! #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@buro9 not missing advice that one big investor might add. Gets a lot from his crowd! #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@SimonDixonTwitt you have to look after investor relations. You have their money! #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014

@SimonDixonTwitt crowdfunding is the deinstitutionalisation of finance. Massive! #crowdfunding

— Jonathan Lea Network (@jonleanetwork) January 13, 2014