Crowdfunding success 'No More Filing' offer top-drawer Tips

by Startacus Admin

Few things cause the modern startup founder to sit up like an excited meerkat faster than the sentence “successful crowdfunding campaign”...it’s like the elusive holy grail of the enterprise world.  If you are planning to create a crowdfunding campaign, we have a free crowdfunding support package to help you reach your goal!

Crowdfunding has become a key component of business models the world over, as enterprising folks set about wowing as broad an audience as possible with their ‘groundbreaking’ business ideas.

It has opened up a whole new world of funding opportunities and given founders a lot more choice about how and when they secure investment for their business but, as with anything, with great opportunity, comes equally great challenges.

Crowdfunding investment for your startup might sound like the answer to your woes, but actually reaching your target remains an incredibly tricky thing to achieve.  It can be a great help to hear the first hand experiences, tips, and advice of those who have challenged the crowdfunding monster and come out the other side with a smile on their face…people like ‘No More Filing’ .

‘No More Filing’ is a groundbreaking app that manages all your utilities, insurance, mortgage, warranties and other paperwork, electronically in one place.  We caught up with Dan Jacobs to pick some entrepreneurial brains about their app and the process of running a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Who are the team behind ‘No More Filing’ and what are your backgrounds?

Myself and Simon Grice are the co-founders.  I've been working in startups and early stage businesses for 20 years, initially as an engineer, then CTO & COO.  The *biggest* thing I did was to co-found a bank offering consumer financial products.  I also spent three months at Lastminute.com when they were tiny and turned down a great job with options there.  My last startup,enthuse.me won many awards and was very popular with users.

Simon started off at CERN with Tim Berners-Lee et al and so has been involved in the internet since the very start of the web.  He has founded and exited businesses including Europe's first commercial web mail service.

What have been the biggest milestones so far in creating 'No More Filing'?

Each step is a massive milestone for us, from going from idea to prototype, then raising finance, building a team and now we have a beta version which is our latest milestone.

You have pretty recently completed a successful crowdfunding campaign through Seedrs, raising £40,000; can you tell us why you decided to seek funding in this way, over more traditional routes?

We actually raised £110k from some angels, we could have raised it all that way but we wanted to reach out to the crowd as they will hopefully become brand ambassadors for us.  These are people who liked the idea enough to open their wallets so they all have a vested interest in making it a success.

For many startups, one of the most difficult things to gauge is whether or not they are at the right stage to pursue investment. Can you offer any thoughts on this, having successfully done so?

It really depends on the product or service. In our case, we envisaged something that is very scalable so we were able to raise money with a well thought out idea, some designs and a very very basic proof of concept. Even for a highly scalable business you should ideally have an MVP to show for Seed funding. If you're a B2B business you’ll want to have a strong sales pipeline ideally with some revenues.

Are there any tips or advice that you would give to another startup that is considering equity crowdfunding through a site like Seedrs?

Seedrs and the like are great platforms for harnessing the crowd, however you need to expect most of the first 60% of the funding to come from your own network.  Investors you don't know at all will come on board when they feel the project has been validated by other investors.  In fact we had a rush of investors (from outside our network) when we hit 80% then 100%.

What is the plan for ‘No More Filing’ over the course of the next year or so?

We're launching a beta version of the product in April, then raising a second seed round to fully launch the service and scale the user base.

And with that Dan, we wish you, Simon and the rest of the No More Filing team well. Intrigued by No More Filing? We've added their Fundraising Video below for you to take a gander.

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Published on: 22nd April 2015