Crowdfunding has become an overly crowded space. The rise and rise of Crowdfunding provides investors with opportunities to buy into companies at an early stage, across a wide spectrum of sectors.
OFF3R is a simple concept, well executed, and actually quite elegantly designed mobile app that aggregates the offers from crowdfunding platforms into a tinder style swipe format. There are about a dozen UK platforms and another dozen non-UK platforms that can be altered so you can select exactly which platforms you want to see content from.
It’s probably the quickest way to gain an overview on the Crowdfunding industry in terms of companies endeavoring to raise funds this way, determining which tend to be more successful than others, which platforms are better suited to which sectors, and a range of other insights…
For potential investors in these companies, OFF3R is fundamentally a way of shortlisting possible investments, monitoring their funding progress, engaging with the process, reading the submitted business plans and documents and so on.
What you can’t do is invest through OFF3R, to actually put money into one of the companies it requires the user to go through the correct procedures on the actual Crowdfunding sites which vary considerably, platform to platform. For potential investors in these companies, OFF3R is fundamentally a way of shortlisting possible investments, monitoring their funding progress, engaging with the process, reading the submitted business plans and documents and so on.
For this reason, OFF3R is a support service to the platforms, and the companies on them, rather than a middleman between the investors and the platforms. It’s a reassuringly symbiotic relationship, with OFF3R keen to develop and analyze the valuable information and insight that this position allows.
OFF3R as a company will shortly nd itself in the interesting position of having detailed historical and real-time insights into the Crowdfunding sector itself, and the multiple sectors that use Crowdfunding to raise capital.
Over the next few years this may become increasingly significant, P2P and equity Crowdfunding are proven challenger systems for business funding, and having an understanding of success and the way success is both determined and achieved, is valuable.
It’s going to take several more years, at least, before we start to have sufficient data regarding the live or die rate of crowdfunded companies, and investors should be cautious. B2C business models are seemingly more common, building a user base as well as investors, but B2C apps for example can be dif cult to make a successful business from, requiring hundreds of thousands of users to reach viability in some instances.
Where as less familiar but more viable B2B models may nd Crowdfunding a more challenging experience. Horses for courses.
But these are just speculations. The power that OFF3R is aiming for is having the data, the facts, the statistical truth.
Until then, investors just have to follow their interests, insights, intuition, and sometimes the crowd.
[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]OFF3R is not a crowdfunding originator. OFF3R is an aggregator of publicly available information, you will need to register on each platform and agree to specific terms to access additional investment information. OFF3R is targeted towards investors who are sufficiently sophisticated and/or accredited and understand these risks and make their own investment decisions. Investing in early stage businesses involves risks, including illiquidity, lack of dividends, loss of investment and dilution, and it should be done only as part of a diversified portfolio.[/box]
