The more-news-than-you-can -chuck-a-stick at news update.

Featured image: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

It’s been ages since we did a public news blurt – usually we save the juicy bits for our users and start-up community.

The short n sweet

  • We are organising a summit around funding for minority led startups in the UK and Europe and additionally how we can help get more funding for African startups.
  • We’ve onboarded 700 more investors in the last 2 weeks and getting up to a sweet cadence of 150 a day. More investors = more opportunities for startups to get funded
  • Cool features coming – autosend on high auto matches, equity crowd funding readiness prep in collaboration with our partner – CrowdCube.
  • Community is the big focus, more events, more collaborations and more partners to bring value to the the community.

The scenic route

A summit on funding for minority led startups in the UK and Europe.

Given the momentum of the moment with the Black Lives Matter movement, we feel it is overdue to lead an exploration of how we can make a material impact to black and minority communities in the UK and Europe.

We know startups and funding and the startup ecosystem and so we are starting there.

So in early July – date to be confirmed – we will get together with black and other minortiy founders, investors who already invest and others who have never investor before but feel that now is the time. We will look at the the hurdles and opportunities and the necessary groundwork to remove bias from the system.

The goal is to leave with a compelling vision to change the story of minority funding and a plan for what we will do next.

If you feel you can add value to the conversation – please get in touch with Mike for an invite.

700 new investors onboarded and more coming – upto 150 a day!

I think the record for not doing something when being nagged relentlessly by one’s co-founder stands at 1 year and 3 months.

I beat that. Doug has been on to me nigh on 2 years to get more investors loaded and I’m delighted to say that we now have exactly that mechanism to load and verify their details to make sure we have relevant investors available to startups on the platform.

Steady as a rock and then boom!

With this new capability we will be adding verified investors at around 150 a day and I’ll be looking to make this even better. There are 100k more to go!

Cool features coming …

Photo by Oleksii Khodakivskiy on Unsplash

There are loads of things happening all the time on the Decksender product – we are a small team and keeping things break neck without breaking our necks is a fine art.

We decided to manage things a bit with the speed of development and try and get out output to 1 feature a week, starting on Friday.

Next Friday (26th June) we are releasing Autosend and beyond that we have a whole thing around preparing startups to crowdfund via CrowdCube – our equity crowdfunding partner.

Autosend is basically a fire and forget feature that lets startups flag one of their uploaded decks as their ‘autosend’ deck. So when we add new investors, or existing investor criterias change – we automatically re-run the matching algorithm. We’ll then send the ‘autosend’ deck to the new high match investors. This gives founders and even easier experience without compromising the effectiveness. We’re good like that 🙂

Next, we’ll work on the crowdfunding track feature – this is much more involved than simply code – so will likely take a couple of weeks rather than one. It is about automatically identifying startups that suit a crowdfunding model and putting them on a path to get enough audience, cornerstone investors etc to then launch a successful campaign on CrowdCube.

Job done – only differently.

If we get time in between all this – we’ll add hyper localisation for investors. Some have given us feedback that they have very specific locations that they invest in e.g. New York city or North West England. We didn’t get that granular and it often results in too many decks that aren’t exactly matching that location criteria. We’ve figured a simple fix and will be applying it in the next few weeks too.

Community is the focus

Photo by Elena Taranenko on Unsplash

We’ve built loads of cool tech. Funnels, services, APIs. We’ve used AI and all the trendy things.

But it always comes back to community.

So that is where we are now focusing most of our time – finding things of value for our community of startups and investors to help them achieve their goals. Our community site is https://community.decksender.com and is open to all users of Decksender. It has loads of community content on how real people are solving real problems, expert topics and conversation and deals that we are negotiating with loads of companies we use and respect like Hubspot, Stripe and others.

We’re connecting them to each other and to partners that share our mission. Creating events – we call them ‘mingles’ – that bring learning, fun and collaboration together.

Done. Have a lovely until-next-time.

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