In the summer of 2023, the 4 co-founders of Joppy embarked on a quest to secure a €300,000 funding round. We decided to devise a plan for the consolidation and growth of our business, which necessitated raising capital. We internally communicated this to our team to let them know we were getting down to business.
Our initial step was the most straightforward and customary: presenting the plan to our current investors and offering them, before anyone else, the opportunity to join us in this new phase. The results were positive, and with the current partners (plus the co-founders), we secured €85,000. Our partners are entrepreneurs/business angels, so this was already a substantial amount and instilled confidence to approach new potential investors. If external investors see that current investors/co-founders don’t believe in the project, they won’t take the risk. By late summer, we had reached €215,000 towards our target.
In parallel, we also applied for a €230,000 ENISA loan with the help of APTKI, and they promptly confirmed the loan was granted, provided we closed €300,000 in equity.
The challenge arose because the timing of this round was not ideal in terms of the financing sector. With the conflicts in Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine, and the looming economic crisis, caution and fear among investors grew. This is the worst-case scenario when seeking funding: if investors are not in a hot mode, closing the round becomes much more complicated. It’s true that we are more suited for business angels than for a classic VC because our idea is not so much about conventional growth, but rather about creating a unique service in the Tech Recruitment world combined with a focus on EBITDA representing over 40% of revenues. We’re not rounders, nor do we want to be; it’s not in our philosophy, nor is it what the project needs.
From there, in early Q4 2023, we redirected our focus to our environment in the startup world, business angels, and CTOs. We got in touch with several business angels who decided to join Joppy, close supporters who are helping us tremendously, and CTOs because we believe no one understands the market’s pains better than them. Nothing beats a potential new partner who understands the market’s pains and knows you can help (and a lot) to solve some of them. They understand what you do in 2 minutes, and beyond money, they will be extremely helpful in our reflections on improving our service and better understanding our customers.
But in parallel to all this, the co-founders sat down and said to themselves:
Isn’t our DNA about having the best service for tech candidates? We created Joppy with the idea (and still believe in it) of solving the pain of tech recruitment starting with the candidates. Joppy is created by and for developers. Wouldn’t it make sense then for them to invest in Joppy?
And of course, at that point, you think about creating a #crowdfunding campaign. We started talking to several platforms for this (Kickstarter, Dozen, Startupexplore,…). These platforms are very interesting, they help a lot in the ecosystem, and they also have their own network of investors. We managed to close a pre-agreement with one of them to get started, but we sat down again to discuss it because we wanted to do something more personal and direct, something 100% Joppy.
That’s when we thought about our community; we knew it was a risk to focus only on them (they may not have a high purchasing power, and it’s very likely that they have never invested in startups). The next question was: okay, but how do we do it?
It was a great coincidence that I saw a tweet from Claudia Giraldo announcing that they were opening a round for their company CommonSense through their crowdfunding. And what seemed great to me was that with 2 landings and a few automations, you could create your own crowdfunding without too much complication (thanks Claudia and Edu for the advice!!).
So we saw it very clearly: let’s do it now! In 2-3 days, we had set up the crowdfunding with a luxury landing page for it (with automations with our CRM) and having validated the key legal elements with our lawyer.
The most important thing is that we have a community of over 53,000 Techies and 2,200 Recruiters. Without that, it would be unfeasible. And of course, that’s wowwwww to do such an action.
But of course, with all the desire in the world to do this, if we did our own crowdfunding, we would discard the opportunity (due to timing) to do it with the investor platform (they said we could raise at least €125,000 with them). On the other hand, we had two last-minute doubts:
- Will this crowdfunding work? We’re asking for money from our users! How much do we think we’ll raise? Our initial hypotheses were that if it went well, we would close €50,000, and if it went very well, around €70,000.
- What should be the minimum ticket amount? We debated, and we were between €500 and €5,000 as the minimum ticket. On the low end, it was crazy with small tickets, and if we went high, we would lose many potentially interested people who would consider that ticket too high. So we decided on neither extreme, €2,000 as the minimum ticket.
Preparing a campaign in 2-3 days is not easy because, whether you like it or not, you have to think about several key points, and there was one that we had to finalize:
Okay, we’re going to ask for money from our candidates and recruiters, but we also want them to feel closer to the project and help us.
Nothing better than our users, who experience the pain of tech recruitment every day from both sides, to criticize everything and help us continue to evolve Joppy with their ideas and experiences, feeling the project as their own. For this, our idea is to show them the guts of Joppy quarterly and how we want to evolve.
With all this resolved, we were ready. We started preparing the first emails with a clear funnel:
- First, generate interest by collecting the emails of potential interested parties so they can download the deck (being as transparent as possible, knowing that more than 1 competitor would logically also download the info).
- From there, work on those leads.
- Finally, close with the interested parties via a convertible note.
We launched the first email on December 14th (not a very good date, to say the least), and I think we can only be more than happy with what we achieved. Over 100 people downloaded the Deck, and we closed almost €100,000 with our community of Techies and Recruiters. Thanks to all of them for trusting Joppy! It’s been a tremendous joy to have your own users accompany you in growing the business. Trusting you is the coolest thing there is.
Beyond being able to make money in the future is because they like what we do and how we do it, and they want to help us. As simple and as wonderful as that. But it’s clear that we will do everything possible to make it go great for them ;).
All this invites deeper reflection on the community and what they can do for you. The community is not a quantity of emails, likes, or whatever based on what you do as a business, but it can become a feeling of belonging and/or even empathy in what you do. In the end, communities can add much more than you would ever expect.
Maybe someone might think that €100,000 is not much, and if you look at it in absolute numbers, you could say: it’s only about 50 people who have trusted you (50 x €2,000 = €100,000). To me, it seems great even if it had only been 5 people. I would never expect my community to give me €500,000 because it would even seem offensive to ask for it. The important thing is not the amount but the interest and the desire to participate. There have been a few who have told us that they couldn’t because economically it wasn’t a good time, but they would have loved to be able to do it.
We already have the round about to close. Already talking to the last potential investors to close the remaining €30,000. In 1-2 weeks, we will close it. But this would have been impossible without our people, our candidates, and recruiters (in addition to all the other investors who have trusted us, both current and new). Thanks, thanks, and many thanks. And as Felipe well says to each person who has joined the business:
🎉 Thank you very much for joining the project. We promise to give everything so that Joppy doesn’t stop growing 🚀
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