Campaign Success: Locket

Could you tell us more about your Seedrs campaign?

From what we gather, our campaign was the fastest insurtech raise in the history of Seedrs. However, you do need to take this with a pinch of salt as we had secured lead investment from a VC and a handful of angels before going live (approx. £1m). One piece of advice I would give is to think strategically about your campaign target so that you can hit it quickly and go to overfund. Our campaign target was set at £1.2m but the goal was to hit £1.5m. We launched our campaign in private mode on Thursday and within 14 minutes had hit our target, three hours later we reached £1.5m. Since we had not yet opened our campaign publicly we had to go back to our investors to make sure that they are happy with us accepting more money than we really needed. We then launched publicly on Seedrs on Monday and stayed live for just a week, raising over £2m in total.

Why did Locket decide to launch an equity crowdfunding campaign?

We’ve been inspired by the likes of Revolut, Monzo and Chip and knew we wanted to incorporate crowdfunding into our go-to-market strategy. All of these companies have done extremely well, leveraging crowdfunding to build a community of brand ambassadors. We actually had a couple of investors we had to turn down during this first round because we want to reserve as much as we could for the crowdfunding campaign – so for us, launching a crowdfunding campaign was so much more than raising money.

At the time of launching your campaign, Locket was still pre-launch. Did you have any concerns about how this might affect the success of your campaign?

It’s certainly rare to see pre-launch companies successfully launch crowdfunding campaigns and we were advised that we’d be in a stronger position to succeed if we waited till our next round when we had some traction. However, we decided to take the risk as we wanted to start building our community of investors early on to gain feedback and help us shape our product.

What made you decide to choose Seedrs over Crowdcube?

We interviewed both platforms and have to say, both have their advantages. In the end, we decided to go with Seedrs, mainly because of their partnership with Insurtech UK, and the strong insurtech case studies including DeadHappy, Wrisk and Honcho. The other benefit was Seedrs additional marketing services which allowed us to target specific Seedrs’ investors and build up a really strong pre-registration list ahead of launch. I’m told that Crowdcube has more powerful tools to manage your campaign once live, including a really good analytics platform, which I do have to say Seedrs lacked in my opinion.

How long did you spend preparing your Seedrs campaign?

We started working on our campaign in December and launched in mid-January. Crowdcube and Seedrs did advise that preparing for a campaign should take at least two months but we just didn’t have enough time. During these six weeks, we shot our video, built up our pre-registration list and prepared email sequences and social media posts. If we had the time, we would have certainly stretched this process out over a longer period as it was rather stressful.

Did you have any external support for your Seedrs campaign?

We used a video agency called Perspective Pictures to help us shoot our campaign video but outside of that, everything was done in-house.

What would be your top equity crowdfunding tips?

1. Secure lead investment

Don’t be any illusion that you can just go out and crowdfund without having lead investment. If you don’t have at least 70% of your initial target secured before launch, you will probably fail. It’s a bit kind of smoke and mirrors, in a sense but without it, your campaign won’t gain traction and you’ll struggle to convert Seedrs and Crowdcube investors.

2. Build your pre-registration list

You have to start engaging with potential investors early on and building a pre-registration list to assess appetite. I think we had around 800 people sign-ups from our own network before pushing this out to the Seedrs network ahead of our private launch. Typically, you can expect between 10-20% of this list to convert.

3. Prepare FAQs

We spent two whole days going through the investor forums of other campaigns and coming up with our own list of Q&As. We then created a private FAQs page on our website for pre-registered investors to access before our private launch. This really came in handy when we launched our campaign as it meant we could quickly answer the majority of questions that came through on the investor forum. We were live only for a week, but had in excess of 100 questions on the forum, despite us having a dedicated FAQs page.

Will you be launching another equity crowdfunding campaign in the future?

We will be, yes! Over the next few months, we will be focused on gaining traction and growing our customer base. We plan to raise again just before the summer break or immediately after and will look to incorporate crowdfunding as part of the raise.