Case study: Roam raises over £1,8M on Seedrs
Dec 07, 2022“I knew we needed someone with exceptional ability to help guide us through the crowdfunding process. And Steph was exactly that. She fully integrated herself into the team, working cross-functionally with commercial and marketing to optimise the campaign at every single touch point. The ISQ course is extremely well structured, and if you follow it, you're gonna absolutely smash it. But Steph went so much further feeding back on every single asset, often multiple times until it was absolutely perfect. She was always available and on our weekly calls, gave us the confidence to move through the process with real purpose.” - Ben Taylor, CEO & Co-Founder, Roam
Client: Roam Care Ltd
Platform: Seedrs
Campaign target: £1,7M
Final amount raised: £1,838,235
Overfunding: 108%
Number of investors: 375
Pre-money valuation: £6M
Final equity offered: 23.44%
Business Summary
Reinventing the sexual wellness market with premium, 100% natural products proven by science.
Business Highlights
- +28% MoM revenue growth, from subscription (34%) & DTC (66%)
- Community of 25,000 growing at over +30% MoM
- Raised £2.3m since inception from VCs backing Zoopla & Deliveroo
- Founding team w 20 yrs industry experience at L'Oreal & Harry's
We sat down with Ben from Roam after the successful campaign to ask a few questions...
What was the best bit of your crowdfunding campaign?
The best bit of doing the crowdfund was getting the business back into a positive trajectory, it’s a very positive moment to take stock of what we’ve achieved to date and communicate those achievements publicly. One of the biggest value adds was increasing team moral around the brand. We had a plan and we executed it well, there was key accountability and delegation within the Roam team. Everyone was involved with the campaign and played a key part in achieving our success.
Another benefit of the raise is brand advocacy, as we’ve now got nearly 400 vested people within our growing community who will be supporting us along our journey.
What were the key challenges you encountered whilst crowdfunding?
It’s definitely a labour-intensive way to raise investment, although the broader benefits are good, we always knew it would be an uphill battle to reach our max overfunding target. Valuation plays a part in this as our pre-money valuation was determined by our VC lead investor, so any retail investor on the platforms looks at our revenues vs our valuation and sees a disconnect. I got a bit of a grilling in the discussion forum about this but I’m glad we landed in the middle of our expectations.
Do you think you could/should have done anything differently?
I would have approached the overall fundraise differently, maybe doing more on Linkedin in advance, it’s probably something I should have done from the inception of the brand rather than just from the start of the raise.
We’ve found that brands or founders that have a large, existing community tend to do better as they can realise that additional reach needed for crowdfunding. The general engagement and conversion from our network was OK, but our acquisition could have been be better.
How did the additional support you received from ISQ help?
I’m really pleased that we got support from ISQ, having the weekly calls and keeping us on track was invaluable. I’m also pleased we went with the additional Seedrs live campaign marketing packages as that paid for itself.
