Adam Rogers, chief executive of London-based DeskBeers, explains why the business should win the innovation in funding category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
DeskBeers started life as a venture inside the agency Mint Digital, with the goal of delivering great craft beer to workplaces in London on Fridays. After almost a year trading, we decided we wanted to spin out DeskBeers into its own company and try to build it into the next big thing.
We turned to crowdfunding to raise the funds we’d need to set out on our own. We felt that the product (delivering beer to offices) was something people immediately understood and could get behind. Also, with 100 companies on our books at the time, crowdfunding gave us the chance to leverage our existing customer base.
We launched our campaign with a target of raising £70,000. This was the minimum we’d calculated we’d need for two full-time members of staff to take the business through to profitability and beyond. We produced a video, put flyers in all the boxes of beer we sent out, attended investor networking events, sent our business plan to hundreds of high net-worth individuals and pitched in person to Mint’s wide network of investors. We ended up raising a little over £120,000.
These extra funds have given us the chance to tackle our ambitious roadmap more vigorously. In 2015 we launched UK-wide deliveries and are poised to ship next day deliveries any moment now, with some really exciting features just around the corner.
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.
