Acorn Collective - Crowdfunding for Everyone

The Acorn Collective provides crowdfunding that is accessible, transparent and more likely to succeed.

The Acorn Collective is using blockchain to help founders and startups find access to funding. We provide crowdfunding that is accessible, transparent and more likely to succeed.

It's a huge and growing market in the West and a largely untapped market in most developing countries.

Accessible Crowdfunding:
We are more accessible than any other platform by allowing all countries and listing any legal & ethical project. Where other platforms charge 5-10% just for the crowdfund, we’ll do it for free. Our flexible funding structure means founders do not need excessive seed capital. Accelerators will help to introduce, vet and mentor projects.

Blockchain Transparency:
Blockchain provides full transaction transparency, resulting in increased trust and a higher crowdraise for the founders. All transactions are done via OAK, an Ethereum token. Projects’ spending can always be tracked, in turn making backers more willing to support a campaign with more money.

Project Success:
Our Crowdfunding Engine improves campaign success rate. It provides the tools to execute successful crowdfunding campaigns, the statistics to make the right decisions and access to lists of backers with a proven history of supporting similar campaigns. Smart contract milestones can be used to release funds early.

Acorn Marketplace:
An integrated Acorn marketplace provides campaign services from Acorn and 3rd parties. Post-crowdfunded projects have immediate access to list their own service or project on the marketplace. Founders will have optional premium access to data about backer trends and past campaigns to make the right decisions about their campaign. This improves success rates in the campaign and post-crowdfunding delivery stage.

Acorn is leading the next generation in crowdfunding, creating a platform for everyone, everywhere. 

Existing crowdfunding platforms operate in a handful of countries and ignore the developing world, charge high fees, only allow a small number of projects on them, have very high failure rates and a lack of transparency. We are changing all of that. 

The platform would not be possible without blockchain technology. Not only does it provide transparency for project backers to be able to track and oversee the use of their funds, but it also allows us to fund raise via an ICO rather than by traditional equity, which means no shareholders - so no high fees to return profits to them.

We have just completed our fundraising and have raised over $10M USD in the last six months, growing our team from 5 - 30. The platform is being built and will be ready to launch in about 6 months. After that we are aiming for a 1% market share within 12 months and to open a number of regions in developing countries that are currently ignored by existing platforms. In tandem we will be growing our SaaS marketplace partners and accelerator partners.

To grow the platform to not only become the platform of choice in the west (due to the higher success rate and more security for backers) but to support entrepreneurs around the world in developing countries fund their own projects and businesses. With a market share of 5% by year 5, we will have 20 projects a day coming onto the platform (based on current market rates).   
This platform will allow people around the world to create sustainable business solutions to support themselves and create businesses which can employ more people within the region.

We have already built a community of tens of thousands across multiple channels and will continue to grow that with our marketing approaches: PR in particular has been very effective for us and we have been mentioned in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Investing.com, so we will look to continue with that. Also part of our fund raise is set aside for our project incentive fund to encourage early adoption of the platform.

For users of the platform a lot of our early success will also be due to the pipeline and support provided by our regional accelerator partners. 

No current customer base but we have an online community of around 50K

Year one we are predicting 4 projects per day, so 1460 in the year. Each project brings on average 79 backers which will result in 115,340 backers in year one. By year 3 we will have 3 -4 % market share, which at the low end will result in 12 projects per day, which is 4,380 per year and 346,020 backers. We expect to hit this based on our incentive strategies to move people from existing platforms and the fact we will be bringing crowdfunding to some regions for the first time so will be opening up new markets.

A wide variety of experience in start-ups and business generally, supported by an advisory board that includes figures such as David Ives who is the ex-CTO of Crowdcube, the worlds first equity crowdfunding platform. More on our team can be seen at aco.ai

Our revenue generating mechanisms include:

Acorn Marketplace - where founders can purchase support services on which Acorn takes a commission.

Anonymised data

Success Shop where successfully funded projects can be sold, on which a commission will be taken

Paid Featured Projects

Private Equity tooling

More about our revenue generating mechansims can be viewed in our whitepaper https://drive.google.com/file/...

I believe that Acorn and Solve share many similar ideas and values when it comes to sustainable innovation. With the strong brand and connections that Solve could provide us with, we can have a greater impact on a global level.

One of the key barriers is around ensuring our platform works on a local level in different regions whilst being globally effective. With the challenges Solve is currently looking to take on, they seem to have the right perspective and skills to help us discover how to deploy our platform in a way that benefits the communities it is in.