@Freetrade_Team1 i was being facetious, but my initial take was in fact incorrect! Touche! I consider myself marketed!
1 Like
What a day. Appreciate all the updates and transparency from FT.
8 Likes
It’s been a frustrating day for me. I’m on holiday snowboarding in the French Alps and delayed my recreation to jump on this investment. Sad to say I missed out despite constant page refreshing and getting most of the way through several times.
BUT… I really appreciate the way this has been handled by Freetrade and how much effort each and every member of the team has put in today to try and make this right.
It’s refreshing to have a team who clearly has such passion and dedication to the brand and it’s just enforced my decision to be involved when the funding reopens.
Thanks Freetrade team 
12 Likes
I have been emailed a link to the Pitch deck. Can the Freetrade team also email investors the other two documents that were apparently listed on the crowdcube page before it went down (see screenshot):
Articles of Association
Financial Statements
1 Like
I would expand a bit more on this…
The level of interest was very clearly unusually high - it was pretty obvious to any thoughtful observer that there was going to be a huge spike, especially with only a 20 minute head start. Crowdcube has had enough experiences with Monzo raises that they should have taken a few precautions and prepped their systems accordingly. I absolutely lay the primary blame with CC.
However, there are lots of ways in which FT could have handled better too. In past Monzo raises (that have happened on CC, not last year’s one in the Monzo App), there has been user identification based on email, then CC reaching out privately to select users significantly in advance (hours, not minutes). Monzo have also experimented with a lottery system to try and make it fair, they have also massively limited the amount that could be invested.
I’m not saying that FT needed to do all of these things, just that some of them might have been a good idea. Consider £4m would be swallowed up by 4k users (less than 20% of the userbase) investing £1k per person. Considering there will be some £50k whales, and there is only £2m of EIS available, it would seem prudent to me to have had slightly different dynamics somehow as an initial rush was highly predictable.
Clearly FT has seen Monzo crash crowdcube and raise fast in the past and knows the PR value of that - I would not be surprised if this was all predicted and engineered as such. 
What is clear is that this kind of event really pisses a lot of people off, but that the FT team have handled the fallout pretty spot on to my view. 
Hopefully FT and CC can do a regain when it re-opens such that the irritated people get their investments (happy!) and FT still gets its PR bump. 
4 Likes
Non trading question. Is that Google analytics data being displayed with grafana?
1 Like
No it’s just the stats from the site statistics table on the about page being scraped.
1 Like
The way CHIP (savings account) raised on Crowdcube last year may have worked better. From memory this was (hopefully I’ve recalled this correctly):
First they had a private link for existing shareholders only. At this stage most investors were capped at investing a maximum of £1,200. This gave an opportunity for all existing shareholders to obtain shares, which could be EIS eligible. Because it was capped at this point there was no need to rush to invest.
Secondly, the pitch was opened up to the wider CHIP community with a similar £1,200 investment cap. Because it was still capped at this point there was no need to rush to invest either.
Thirdly, the pitch was opened up to everyone else and the cap removed, so existing investors could also top up their investment if they wanted and new investors could also participate.
16 Likes
An obvious argument with what’s happened is a refund of the 1.5% crowdcube fee 
Any idea if that will happen?
3 Likes
Do you guys know when the monies will be taken out from your bank account/credit card ?
Usually a week later. Possibly a delay with the problems until the crowdfund has closed
Read here
1 Like
My EIS allocation is zero per CC even though it is less than 2 million target so far. Do I get EIS allocation?
Hi Alex,
Can you please tell me how investors of your crowdfunding get their return.
Many thanks,
Jihane
We don’t get any return. It’s a high risk investment that hopefully will give us a huge pay day if someone else buys the company or it floats on the stock market. Many companies start out with one or two guys. Old way to get funding was go to a bank and slowly grow. Nowadays you go to the public and ask them to fund your (perhaps crazy) idea. Many fail. Some make millions.
Most people here hope that in 5-10 years the owners will float on the stock exchange and we all get a mega pay day. Maybe 100x our investment. Who know? maybe its money down the pan.
1 Like
Dear Ben,
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply to me. So if no one buys the company at some point and if it does not float on the stock market we will never get our investment back ?
Kind regards,
Jihane
Ways to get your investment back are probably:
- company A is bought by company B, and then your shares will be sold to B
- the company A floats on a market, and then you can sell your shares whenever you want
- you find a private buyer for your shares in company A eg here maybe
- company A decides to pay a dividend to its shareholders (nb FT has never said they’d do this!)
But yes, it’s harder to get a good liquidity event when investing in private companies, compared to ones that are already public.
4 Likes
Absolutely I was merely keeping it simple for someone who may have been a potential investor. Along the lines of you might lose it or you may never see it for years.
1 Like
Here’s a quick summary of the situation:
- We’re waiting for confirmation (aka ‘advanced assurance’) from HMRC of our EIS eligibility. We don’t expect any issues, but we just want to be transparent here.
- Crowdcube are still working through the initial investments & confirming how much has been invested so far - it looks like less than our potential EIS cap!
Assuming we get the good news from HMRC, & that less than £2 million has been invested by people who’re eligible for EIS (the latter looks very likely), you will get EIS allocation.
2 Likes
The way I look at it is you aren’t buying stocks or shares in the company or getting anything in return, but rather donating/giving money to Freetrade to help them grow.
In 10 years time (or however long) you may get some money back (by way of one of the ways discussed by @Rollingskies above), but this is not guaranteed.
1 Like
I don’t see it as a donation at all, I’m hoping for a profit. If I want to donate I’ll donate to a charity.
It is a risky investment and I could lose the lot, but I’m not “giving” them my money
6 Likes