Thank you for your continued interest in Fundraise Up! Hope you had an amazing holiday.
2018 was a superb year for Fundraise Up and we are ready to take it to the next level now. Below, please find a summary of our first year of operations.
HIGHLIGHTS
- We processed $1.7M in donations
- Had revenue of $35K
- We raised $250K from Splash Capital
- We raised $265K from angel investors
- We have $400K in the bank
KEY METRICS
We continue to have a ton of momentum across every important metric.
- Multiple clients reporting x2 increase in their digital revenue.
- We brought on 4 key clients that are likely to process $1M+ each this year
- Our tech is embedded on 50 websites with an annual traffic of 4.5M visitors
- We are getting lots of love from our clients
FUNDRAISING — SEED ROUND
We are in active fundraising mode. This is super aggressive, but our goal is to close a round in Q1, 2019. The deck is still a work in progress but you can take a look here
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bDVoiebAHVAQaSyRRyMsmPfQpIcPMmpSyd3i5gUXmeU/edit?usp=sharing
LEARNINGS
We discovered how we can better convert website visitors into donors. We do it with embeddable UI elements that act as donor magnets.
Previously, we were focusing only on improving donation conversion rates for users who clicked the donate button. Now, we are expanding to include the users who did not click and are successful at getting them to click. This is pretty amazing as industry wide only 1 out of 100 visitors make a donation.
We also better understand our target market. Before we were targeting everyone, now we are focusing only on organizations with $1M+ in online revenues.
We've learned a lot from our client's feedback. Not a single feature that we built was not requested multiple times from our clients. Additionally, every donation or dashboard session is recorded and then reviewed to better understand donation and post-donation flows so we can improve the process based on real world user behavior.
CASH IN THE BANK
Thanks to Tihan Seale from Splash Capital's investment, we ended this year with a solid $400K in the bank.
MoM GROWTH
As we expected, half of all annual donations were collected in just the last two months of the year: November and December.
WHAT’S NEXT
We are now starting to focus on paid marketing channels and expect to acquire a significant number of new clients in the first half of 2019. We now have money to start experiments with paid channels, run ads and scale our marketing outreach.
We have a ton of new ideas for the next iterations of both the product and our marketing and sales.
We will gradually increase our burn rate from $20K to about $50-60K in the next few months fueling our goal of hitting $1M ARR in 2019.
Thank you all for your support. Now that we have completed our first year and seen our hypothesis play out, we are confident that we can make a billion dollar company and become a leader in the fundraising industry.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Yuriy, Peter & Anton