Social Tip

Social Tip breaks the record for the most successful ever prelaunch crowdfund on Crowdcube. 🎉   At BrewDog we broke multiple crowdfunding records, and I am really excited to have broken another record with my brand-new business Social Tip as we raised an amazing £2.5m. This is in addition to the £1m of my own money that I have already invested into the business.   For those of you who like statistic, we had 22,000 campaign views, 5,000 campaign followers and 1,307 Social Tip investors with the average investment being £1,171. We also had Steven Bartlett join us as an investor and advisor.   With the crowdfunding landscape having changed so significantly since we pioneered community ownership at BrewDog here are the things I did differently with the Social Tip campaign:   1) I worked alongside a fantastic expert and advisor in Jonathan Keeling 2) We had around £1m of cornerstone funding from brilliant investors – Crowdcube investors invested on exactly the same terms. 3) Throwing cats out of helicopters was replaced with 1-1 zoom meetings with potential Crowdcube investors. 4) We hosted an amazing in person Social Tip breakfast in London where investors could learn more about the company. 5) We prioritised answering investor questions promptly and we were very active on the Crowdcube forums.   Thank you to everyone who invested in Social Tip. With your help we are focussed on building a UK based business that scales quickly internationally.   If you would like to learn more about how Social Tip could help grow your business, please comment ‘Social Tip’ below or send me a message entitled ‘Social Tip’ to discover more!

5 Reasons Not To Invest In Social Tip   1) We might not get enough users.   Social Tip’s viability is dependent on getting tens of thousands of users to the platform.   If we cannot do this, the business fails.   To grow our user base, we are going to encourage members to make their first qualifying post about Social Tip which should help create a flywheel. Additionally, we are working with partner brands to promote Social Tip to their audiences.   Plus, we have a few interesting marketing concepts up our sleeves too!   2) We might not get enough partner brands.   We also need to sign up thousands of partner brands.   Despite not having launched, we already have over 50 brilliant brands signed up which will enable up to build compelling case studies to share with additional potential partners going forward.   Furthermore, we are swimming with the tide here. More and more brands are frustrated at how ineffective their marketing dollars are and are looking for new ways to deepen their connections with their biggest fans.     3) Posts might lack authenticity.   Because our members are being paid to post there is a potential criticism that the brand love our members show will not be authentic.   I would strongly argue that the inverse will hold true.   With Social Tip, our members have to buy a product first and foremost before they can make a qualifying post about it. Thereafter their payment is capped at 10% of the purchase value.   The fact that our members have to spend their own hard-earned money on the brands they post about should ensure all of the brand love we showcase is genuine.   4) The lack of control scares brands.   Many legacy brands are still coming to terms with the lack of control they already have on social platforms and these brands will need to take an even bigger leap into the unknown and trust that their loyal customers are indeed those who are best placed to create content for them.   However, whether Social Tip is successful not, every brand owner needs come to the liberating realisation that their brand does not actually belong to them - it belongs to their customers and their community.   With that realisation in place, lack of control changes from being scary to being both empowering and a key growth driver.   5) We are heavily regulated.   Because we pay our members in real cash we are regulated as a financial service provider.   This means extensive compliance not just in the UK, but in every country in which we operate.   Given each country has different rules here and that we are going to look to scale Social Tip internationally at pace,  we will need to ensure financial compliance in dozens of countries internationally.   This is not impossible, but just difficult, time consuming and at times expensive.   There are of course lots of reasons why I am incredibly excited about the future of Social Tip. But I also wanted to share the very real challenges that I spend a lot of my time puzzling over.   Links in comments.

Welcome to the Social Tip team Steven Bartlett Really pleased to announce that Steven Bartlett will be joining Social Tip as an investor and advisor. We are launching a Crowdcube fund raise later this week giving everyone the opportunity to own part of Social Tip. If you would like to see the full investment deck please send me a DM saying 'invest' or leave 'invest' as a comment below.