@Viktor must be writing a novel, keep seeing his face pop up in this post for ages but no message - what chapter you up to now? 
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Maybe he is just trying to find a way to write “don’t worry folks” in a polite, none influencing way?
Surely not a troll post?! Or is this a deeper conspiracy trying to disrupt everything the day before…
Ooooo the tension…
I’m still investing.
On balance I feel that as a group investors know better than an individual. I feel that while there are valid points that is always the case with every company.
I am still waiting for Follie81 (funny name btw…) to reply to my private message too.
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Hey @Follie81, since you never posted here before, we tried to verify you as an investor and assign your investor flair. In the interest of community health, we have to disclose we’ve now established you are not an investor.
There is not a lot to add to Kenny’s post, but I thought we could talk a little bit about the challenges we do face.
Yesterday at the community meetup, someone asked the smart question ‘what are the top 3 things you are worried about’. All three of us in the executive team fielded that question, and we agreed on:
- Hiring engineers. The market is extremely competitive when it comes to top-notch engineering talent. An engineer that can work at Google or Facebook has compensation we can’t compete with on pure financial terms. We offer different things of course - being part of an early team and building a product that genuinely will have long-term positive impact on the financial wellbeing of millions and addresses at least a few of the negative trends we see in the world. Recently, we’ve started to see a trend of engineers that are users of our product started reaching out. One of our new joiners this week, a Senior iOS Engineer simply pinged Adam on LinkedIn! We have also started sharing more about our engineering work (such as Ian’s post about ‘Killing Kubernetes’ that went viral shortly after publishing). We hope we can build an engineering brand, but it is truly challenging.
- Scaling correctly. Ever wondered why it’s taking years for competing fintechs to launch in various markets? It is complex. We are actively planning to expand into a Northern European market as a first step. We will use this market as the testing ground to refine our expansion playbook for the second half of 2019. Core to how we expand is making Freetrade really local to these markets, which is work that is more in the background and you may not see (other than local waitlists before we launch), so we’ve been a bit quiet around this. We already have quite a bit of expertise on the team when it comes to market expansion (a few team members did expansion work across Google / Snap Inc / Uber), but it is not something to underestimate if we want to do it right (which we do)!
- Growth, growth, and growth could have been all three top concerns. As a startup, we live or die by our growth. We have initial product/market fit, but that is merely the starting point. Currently, we have a compound weekly customer growth rate of 12%. For context, according to Paul Graham, “A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you’re doing exceptionally well.”. We have 18% compound weekly deposit growth rate, too. Now, these are attractive numbers, but no growth channel scales forever. They all decay over time. We are planning to take our growth to the next level by introducing free share rewards for referrals in a months’ time as well as investing heavily into another scalable channel: SEO.
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I so suspected this might be a bit dodgy when I noticed the account was created only an hour ago (at the time) and the facts were a bit off slightly.
I wonder if Follie81 is Mr Bell/Hargreaves user id 
… could be ligit
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Bravo, guys! Your upcoming raise is such a threat to the incumbents that they’re resorting to sabotage.
Full respect to FT for keeping the topic open. I think the temptation to remove it the day before a crowdfund is extremely high. The poster obviously hoped it would probably stoke a conspiracy or something dodgy underfoot by removing it and baited it with that intention.
Well managed FT team.
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I somehow doubt it was one of the established brokers. Something something Get shit done
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Is it that guy from Revolut? He mentions them a lot 
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I concur it’s great you have the confidence to keep the topic open. I actually really enjoyed the discussion and reinforced my decision to still invest! It wasn’t the old CTO was it? (which company did he go to again? 
)
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Follie81 right now
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I’ve just removed a post from this topic which didn’t meet our community guidelines. I understand why some users might be frustrated by some of the comments in this thread but please keep the conversation polite 
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25,000 customers accounts & 12 million in account funds, so average balance is £480, this is a win 
it shows people trust Freetrade.
Looking forward to growth, growth, growth 
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6 reasons I’m investing again, from someone who has invested in previous 2 rounds.
- 0 to 25K customer accounts in just over 6 months (this was achieved without aggressive marketing campaign).
- 12 Million in Account Funds.
- Android and IOS app launched.
- ISA launched (along with standard share dealing account).
- Growth opportunities - multi-asset class, European expansion, SIPP, JISA, app iteration.
- Awesome FreeTrade team.
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I was going to invest again but after much thought, I have decided not to.
Only one reason - I want to try to max out my ISA with Freetrade so that’s where all my free cash is going! 
Am happy with the investment I got from Round 3.
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@Freetrade_Team1 regarding this notice at the start of this topic:
Please remember that if a user doesn’t have an investor badge displayed on their profile on this site, they are not on our shareholder register.
How does Freetrade correlate community account with shareholding? How do you match it up?
If I created a new community account with a different email would I still get the flair?
Really interesting questions, I’m hoping their business plan or investor deck released on crowdfunding will cover some of this.
I have this dilemma too. I’m going to put in some more this round I think though - we’ve seen good progress in the last year.
I do think the title of the post should be edited as it is a bit long anyway, cut to just 6 reasons I’m NOT investing this time, if you’re fairly confident they are not an investor.
Nice reply Viktor and there is lots of interesting info there. It has at least triggered some interesting discussion
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We generally match investors with the shareholder register based on the email address that they signed up to the community with or an email address that they supply.
If you let us know which address you used when you invested then yes you could
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How do you prove a negative though? what if they used a different email address?
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