Case Study: Sourdough Sophia raises £500K via SeedLegals & Odin

“It was such a pleasure working with Steph and the team. I’ve had fantastic support, advice and even when my course of action changed they were able to help me navigate through any challenges so well that we exceeded our expectations. Fantastic course, fantastic service and a passionate team who clearly know what they’re doing. Highly recommended.” - Sophia, Co-founder Sourdough Sophia

Client: Sourdough Sophia

Platform: SeedLegals & Odin

Campaign target: £300K

Final amount raised: £500K

Overfunding %: 166%

Pre-money valuation: £1.5M

Tax relief: SEIS

Sourdough is for life - not just for lockdown

ISQ recently supported Sourdough Sophia to successfully launch and fund a private crowdfunding round using both Odin and SeedLegals. Odin helps founders, angels and VCs globally to raise and deploy capital in a few clicks; and SeedLegals supports founders to create and negotiate their investment documents in one powerful, streamlined workflow. When used together, it's a great way of raising investment from your own community, quickly and with a nice clean cap table.

We interviewed Sophia from Sourdough Sophia, to ask about her experience of raising through these platforms and what tips can she offer to others looking to crowdfund.

What was the best bit/what went well?

“Speed! Getting the first email out about our crowdfunding round and receiving an insane response within 24hrs. Everyone was a customer and our inbox was full!!”

Sophia’s Top Tips for private crowdfunding raises

• Do it sooner rather than later, it took us 6 months and we really could have done with the money sooner
• Send plain text emails, nothing too fancy, and just get going, it’s good to test interest from your network
• You will be surprised by how much you can get out of your customer base
• Set a low minimum investment threshold to attract a crowd that will invest, e.g. £1K
• Use SeedLegals Instant Investments - no video, simple marketing campaign and took just 2 weeks to set up and be able to start collecting investments
• Get yourself a Calendly and only block out certain times of the week to offer calls - 30 mins max
• Don’t put too much financials in the deck, we included too much info at first and it scared people off. For investors under £5K I wouldn’t provide any financial info at all.
• If you get silly questions - don’t answer them! If you receive personal questions, for example about your salary, be bold in saying “NO I’m not going to divulge that info”.

How did you find working with ISQ?

• "I’m very grateful to ISQ for helping us change our approach and use SeedLegals when we couldn’t use Seedrs."
• "It was great to be able to chat through things with a member of the ISQ team whenever we needed."
• "Level of material in the ISQ programme is overwhelming in the beginning, but it’s all so important that it’s tricky not to have that material if you’re going down the full crowdfunding route."

Would you use crowdfunding as a way of raising funds again? 

"Yes 100%"

What is next for your team/growth?

With the funds raised, the Sourdough Sophia bakery plans to convert its existing 650 sqft bakery to triple its capacity, launch a 2nd Sourdough Sophia store by the end of 2023, then a 3rd store by 2025, and grow revenues to £3M by 2026.

We're hungry for more sourdough already!