Episode two of the UKTN Podcast is out now. This week’s guest is Alex Latham, co-founder and CMO of digital savings app Chip.
During the show, Latham shares the story behind raising £30m in crowdfunding, earning him the moniker “crowdfunding king” from UKTN Podcast host Mark McDonagh.
In September 2020, Chip raised £10.7m in a series A round in which the company received capital from 6,420 individual investors via the Crowdcube platform, along with the government-backed Future Fund.
A year later, London-based Chip did it again. It raised £11.5m from 12,954 Crowdcube investors, making it the biggest equity crowdfund of all time on the platform.
Lantham explains how these rounds were “in response to lockdown” and recalls what it was like to smash crowdfunding record after record.
“The general rule of thumb is whatever I say I’m happy with, we raise double that amount,” Lantham said. “That’s always a nice place to be in – although I’m always worried I’m going to jinx it.”
Beyond funding, Lantham talks about the unique challenges and opportunities of 2020. On the one hand, more people staying at home and saving money during lockdown created the perfect conditions to help Chip grow by more than 500%.
But, like many other companies at that time, Chip decided to pull back on paid marketing at the start of the pandemic due to the uncertainty.
Lantham tells the UKTN Podcast how he balanced the business and marketing needs of Chip to pour “more petrol on the fire” and capitalise on the “perfect market-model fit”.
He said: “I would love to have gone harder [on marketing], but I’m a businessman so I’ve got to protect the business at the end of the day.”
Lantham goes into more detail about the economics of advertising during a pandemic, shares his three pillars for successful marketing and reveals how Chip grew its user base to 280,000 while tripling the size of its team.
You can listen to the latest episode and all previous episodes of the UKTN Podcast here.
The post UKTN Podcast Ep2: Chip co-founder on becoming the ‘crowdfunding king’ appeared first on UKTN | UK Tech News.
