Joseph Munns, managing director of Basingstoke-based BakedIn, explains why the business should win the innovation in funding category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
Myself and my co-founders started out with a few hundred pounds of savings to put together unique home baking kits and start selling them at school fetes and market stalls.
When it became obvious we had created a product that people really wanted, we took a £5,000 startup loan from the government to get our first run of labels printed and get our products ready to be sold in shops.This helped our turnover move from hundreds to thousands, and enabled us to get our products into around 150 stockists including Selfridges and Wholefoods. As a high performing startup loan recipient, we were fortunate enough to receive an invite to Downing Street to present our business to David Cameron.
As we grew, cashflow started to become a real challenge, and we prepared a crowdfunding project to go live to help take us to the next step. Just a day before launching the campaign, a family friend who had read our business plan asked if we could hold off the launch until he had spoken to some people he thought would be interested in investing. Just two days later, we had raised the full £160,000 required as well as an introduction to Michel Roux, who is now developing a range of recipes for our next project - the Bakedin Baking Club.
We have just created a Kickstarter campaign to launch the Baking Club and are consider another round of investment using Seedrs in the next few months.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
