FundYou has been our first client. Before the founding of Codistan our CTO, Monis, has been employed with FundYou and has built the Crowdfunding platform from scratch by himself. Since then Codistan has been maintaining the platform.
FundYou was founded in 2016 by Anders Lindberg. During the first year Monis has built the platform and the FundYou team has run several first crowdfunding campaigns. While maintaining the platform, we noticed that little qualified feedback reached us from the operative side and that the platform did not gain more than MVP status. Anders was very busy with his main professional career, leaving him little capacity to advance the FundYou platform after the initial starting period. In early 2019 we suggested developing the platform further. While building new features, Johannes Bohren is developing the business side.
The project started with a research of the crowdfunding ecosystem in Finland, the Nordics and beyond in order to define a strategy for Fundyou: Crowdfunding experienced a hype about a decade ago. Many platforms competed with different service levels and features for campaigns and the innovation level was high. This innovation persisted, when it comes to equity crowdfunding, where we have a range of platforms offering innovative services. Also banks and other solvent players are crowding this market and campaigns tend to raise higher sums. At the same time a market consolidation has happened in reward-based crowdfunding. The major players nowadays are Indiegogo and Kickstarter, leaving only space for small niche players. In Finland there is one local platform and other international platforms focus on niches like social entrepreneurs, music projects a.o.
We have defined three main components, which allow FundYou to find its niche and eventually compete with incumbents.