You hear stories all the time about how "the crowd" is solving issues and challenges of all kinds; so I wanted to share three recent experiences (past & present!) that made me love the power of the #crowd!

First experience - Richard Branson

My first experience with the power of the crowd came when the start-up I founded, DiscountIF, was campaigning to pitch to influential entrepreneur Richard Branson. We started sharing our story through social media and with our friends, expecting to get a few hundred votes.

However little did we know it would go 'viral' and reach a tally of approximately 3,000 votes taking us all the way to the Semi-Finals of the competition. The support of the crowd empowered us to do things we never dreamt of. We went on TV, we dressed up as bananas to attract attention in the streets (Yes!), we even asked the Prime Minister of Malta for help (& got it!) to name a few.

We also featured on The Malta Independent when we first started up. The experience was one of a kind, exciting, stressful, you name it. I guess for a few weeks we got a brief insight into the life of a political campaign!

Second experience- Reddit

Getting your landing page to look how users want it on your first attempt is a lot harder than it sounds.

Tens (or possibly hundreds) of edits later we decided to seek help from a start-up community on a large forum styled website called Reddit. We simply told the community we were having a challenge with our content and that we're seeking advice.

We got over 50 constructive suggestions from the community, making our post the highest rated entry in the community for that day. All comments were organised as action points and we weighted each one based on the number of times it was mentioned in the thread.

This gave us a crowd sourced action list to optimise the content for our new landing page.

Third experience - Seedrs

And now we come to the present... So far the crowd has helped us get recognition and has helped us improve our landing page; so we asked ourselves... Why not get the crowd to be part of our growth plans?

We asked some of our existing customers and peers what they thought and the response was a clear "YES!" We therefore partnered up with Seedrs, the largest crowdfunding for equity platform in Europe, to launch an investment campaign for our next phase of growth. They have the likes of Andy Murray as one of their investors and we'd like the same people who supported us in previous stages to back us now too.

After just two days of the campaign going live we had90 investors and reached over 57% of our funding. To top it all up we're one of the most trending campaigns on the platform.

During the campaign we plan to re-launchDiscountif.com, with a new technology to enable customers to earn up to 100% cashback on any Amazon.co.uk product purchased through our site. Our aim is to revolutionise the way we shop online forever.

The proposition is simple, when purchasing through us correctly predict the outcome of any sporting or TV event and you'll receive cashback on your purchase. Get it wrong, and you've still received your product at no extra cost.

With the crowd behind us we're confident we can revolutionize shopping together.

 

Andrew Sammut Alessi, Product Analyst and Manager Discountif