Campaign Success: envoPAP

EnvoPAP is a sustainable material company that offers paper and packaging products from agricultural waste. The company is currently live on Crowdcube and has raised over £390k from 700+ investors. We caught up with Founder & CEO, Kaushal Shah, to hear their Crowdcube success story.  

What attracted you to equity crowdfunding?

We work with large corporations to help them switch to alternative solutions that are sustainable and provide the same features of what is currently in the market with a fraction of the environmental cost. Large companies widely support the design and uniqueness of our products, and therefore the only way to make it known to the end consumer is to crowdfund. We saw equity crowdfunding as an opportunity to show the public what we can do to replace everyday products that are made with plastic and wood-based materials with agricultural waste. And this is how our story about crowdfunding began.

Were there any resources or external support services you used for your Crowdcube campaign?

Creating a successful Crowdcube campaign was not easy, and required work internally but also externally; we discussed marketing plans with Crowdcube, did our own research and read articles about previous successful crowdfunding companies. We also attended every event done by Crowdcube, to learn from the fundraisers themselves and have them share their tips and strategies to make this journey a success. We also worked with Pangaea Television – an amazing video production company to create our video pitch. Although we had external help, the bulk of the work was done by the envoPAP team itself.

What’s been the most challenging part of the process?

To be honest, crowdfunding is a challenging process from beginning to end. The preparation, which includes mapping our network, writing our pitch, writing the script, shooting our video (we had nine edits!), writing a pitch deck and much more took around two months to be completed! Nevertheless, the most challenging part is raising the money. We were doing a lot but kept asking ourselves what more we could do. It was quite hard creating momentum and bringing people to invest in us. What made it even more difficult, was the COVID-19 situation. With all these bumps and challenges, we never gave up.

How has the Covid-19 crisis affected your Crowdcube campaign?

You can read Kaushal’s response, along with others in our dedicated Coronavirus post here.

If you could go back, what would you do differently?

One thing I would do differently: create a better plan for the private launch. I believe that if this stage were well laid out with a proper structure plan from our side, we would have entered the public launch with a very high percentage of target raised creating the momentum we needed to bring the public to join us.

What do you think has been key to your Crowdcube success and what would be your top crowdfunding tips?

I truly believe that this is key to everything: never give up. In our case, we had a situation that we could not control, COVID-19. The economic situation was disrupted, investors had to think twice before investing; some even suggested that we should remove our campaign and crowdfund when this pandemic is over. We didn’t. We kept going and did what we had to do: spread the news, talk to investors, send updates, publish articles… Today we are over 200% overfunded. It is true, we had to extend our campaign and reduce our target, but we made it. Therefore, I would say the key to a successful crowdfunding campaign is never giving up, putting all your efforts and staying patient.