First Entrepreneur Café in London: "Round table about Crowdfunding" - Januray 29th, 2015

A big thank you to everyone who participated to the event, the audience and the speakers!

It was a pleasure to kick-start our first Edhec London Entrepreneurs’ club event around the subject of Crowd-funding.

Special Thanks to Chris and Eirik for their talks:

Chris discussed with us the history of Crowd-funding and gave us insightful data points on its evolution and how it compared with the rest of the funding world. Crowd-funding has seen a lot of growth in Lending, equity, social projects and even real-estate but there is still a very long way to go!

I tried to cover the main tips to follow to be successful with a crowd-funding campaign and also warned against the many pitfalls to avoid. Things like ‘building an audience and trust’, ‘perfecting your pitch’ and ‘getting funds pre-committed’ are essential steps before launching the campaign. Equally, having a reasonable fund-raising target is a must. Finally, be pro-active and keep your investors/backers involved, especially as you might need them for the next round!

Eirik took over to tell us more about Black Sheep Coffee’s Brand from inception to date and how they managed to raise on Kickstarter quite successfully. He mentioned also what parts of the campaign made it work and what segments could have been improved! Getting money pre-committed from friends and family before the campaign was definitely a must and things like the video … will be worked on for the next campaign!

Thanks to the audience who asked very relevant questions around success rates, how to tackle perks’ selection, crowd-funding platform selection (depending on the stage you’re at and what you are looking for), when not to go to a crowd-funding platform and so on.

 If you couldn’t join or want to ask more about crowd-funding, just shoot me an email at yoann.turpin@edhec.com

If you liked it, please recommend it to your friends so that our next meeting will have an even broader audience, an even richer discussion! As well, feel free to recommend a subject you would like to see covered.

We will run a similar event in March so stay tuned for updates on the theme and speakers!

Cheers

Yoann and Anne-Sophie