Gocarshare is a great start-up I’ve invested in. It’s AirBnB for car journeys. When you consider how many cars complete journeys with less than full occupancy or sit in car parks and the growing number of people making journeys – you can see why this is a growth market. Here’s a blog piece from them:
Introduction
Drummond is the founder of goCarShare – a website that takes a novel approach to cutting transport costs. It matches you with people within your social network, so you can share car journeys through Facebook. Whether its a friend of a friend, or someone who likes the same music – it helps you find awesome people to split the journeys costs with.
goCarShare has recently started a crowdfunding campaign on the Seedrs crowdfunding platform to raise £50k in a bid to create a car share company truly powered by the people.
How does it work?
We’ve set ourselves a target of raising £50k. We have to get the full amount in just under 3 weeks. If we don’t make the target, then we don’t get a penny. We’ve passed 40% which is great, but we need to start upping the tempo.
What’s the money for?
We have got a really exciting proposition for a mobile app. We are on an accelerator programme called Wayra backed by O2/Telefonica and we are getting some great input to solve what is a relatively complex problem.
It will also enable us to market car sharing proactively, which is imperative to getting good uptake.
Why crowdfunding Is right For us
We built up a really passionate user-base of people who car share to festivals. We’ve got some great perks – people who car share to Reading or Leeds festivals get the chance to win festival tickets for next year and get the chance to park in special priority car parks.
We work at the festivals manning our priority car parks. As well as getting some really useful feedback about how to improve the site, it’s been great speaking to our users and hearing their stories – some are really passionate about the concept.
By opening up crowdfunding as an option to them, we are giving them the opportunity to share in the potential success of the company and increasing the chance that they’ll become awesome ambassadors that will help take goCarShare to the next level.
Why now?
Seedrs the crowdfunding campaign is just over a year old – when it first launched, very few of the companies got funded. There simply weren’t enough investors, this has now changed and over 30 companies have received investment on Seedrs.
Why it’s important For Collaborative Consumption?
I think crowdfunding works particularly well for companies in the Collaborative Consumption or sharing economy sector, as nearly all companies in the space are reliant on getting a lot of users in a similar space so as to get to critical mass. Getting investors who are users and vice versa will be a big help in getting this right.
What kind of people have invested so far.
We’ve had 79 investors already – everything from friends putting in a tenner to serious, experienced investors, one of whom has invested £5,000.
How can people get involved?
People can follow us on twitter (@gocarshare) and RT our Seedrs updates – that would be massively appreciated – getting the word out is key.
Anyone interested in investing can do so right here.
Take a look: