Campaign Success: monva

Given the early stage of monva, and being a new consumer brand, we wanted to build an audience of investors and advocates who believed in our mission to re-imagine comparison for today’s consumer, and could genuinely say they were part of what got us to launch and beyond.  As a result, Crowdfunding became an important part of our investment structure alongside private and institutional investors.

Were there any resources (blogs, books, guides, podcasts etc.) or external support services you used for your Crowdcube campaign?

I think we can safely say all of the above! And even then, we didn’t know enough. We started by exploring the key UK crowdfunding platforms, shortlisting them for suitability and holding initial discussions to understand if they would be a good fit for us. While this was happening, we continued reading around the subject and reached out to a couple of companies we had been monitoring to ask for their advice and insights. Those early calls were hugely helpful in making us aware of how much work was involved in getting ready for the Crowdfunding campaign itself. We eventually chose Crowdcube as our crowdfunding partner as they seemed to be the best fit for us and worked super hard to win our business.

In terms of support services, we hired Raising Partners who have been fantastic in helping us prepare for and manage the campaign. Their main role for us was ensuring we were structured and ready for the campaign, including reviewing and validating our financial model and valuation, and assisting through the due diligence phase with Crowdcube. They have then worked with us on a daily basis to support our activity on Crowdcube. Our video was produced by Visaura after a recommendation from Alan Small at Paperclip. The team did an awesome job of producing our investor video that you can see on Crowdcube. We already had a marketing agency, Rowan Creative, who had helped us with creating the monva brand.

What has been the most challenging part of the process?

You have to give Crowdfunding the time it deserves. At monva, we’re a small team with a big story to tell and deliver. Crowdcube informed us we had been one of the most active campaigns in terms of user engagement and it has certainly felt that way. Before launching on Crowdcube we needed to ensure we met their due diligence and get the investment structure aligned with our existing investors. This was pretty time-consuming. We are lucky to be able to run our operations remotely, and one of the main challenges has been ensuring our team communication, focus, awareness of performance, and enthusiasm are maintained, and consistency has been a key to this. We have a great team with a will to succeed, so it has been more a case of who picks up what, rather than picking up any slack.