Guide to Crowdfunding, Part Four

Iglika Ghouse, the founder of USPAAH, describes crowdfunding and explains how it can kickstart a business, taking a business from motivation to market.

Previously, Iglika has given an interview about her career journey, which has left her with a wealth of experience. Having gone through the crowdfunding process successfully herself, she explains why people should consider crowdfunding, has given help on how to prepare for it and how to shoot a campaign video.  This article covers what to do after you've put these preparations into action and have launched your campaign.

Launch! Now what?

Finally, your crowdfunding campaign is officially live with at least 30% of the funding already raised. Let me tell you, now the hard work starts.

What you need to do now is go on an all-out self-promotion craze for the next 4-6 weeks, especially if you didn’t have much capital pre-committed. Each day passed is a day closer to the deadline, and remember if you don’t hit the target, you don’t get anything! Post updates on social media every day or every other day, have highlights of the business prepared to send regularly. This can be PR pieces, customer reviews, or any other good press; or business results such as record sales month or week, etc.

Be shameless in contacting anyone and everyone in your LinkedIn list, any old colleagues, friends of friends, mom’s neighbour’s uncle. Seriously, there is no such thing as too much promotion when it comes to crowdfunding. You have nothing to lose, the worst people could say is No, you’ll live. Launch paid campaigns if you have the budget for any. We spent £500 on promoting our video on LinkedIn and got about £10-15k of investor demand from that.

Crowdfunding is a challenging, but ultimately extremely rewarding, process. It allows entrepreneurs to raise funds with no upfront costs, to test the public's reaction to their product while receiving constant feedback throughout the entire process. Anybody considering embarking on this journey will find this series beneficial!