The main question of life, the universe and all that, or Time to start

“42 ?! - screamed Lunkkuol. “Is that all you can say after seven and a half million years of work?”
“I checked everything very carefully,” said the computer, “and with all certainty I declare that this is the answer.” It seems to me, if we are absolutely honest with you, the whole thing is that you yourself did not know what the question was.
- But this is a great question! The final question of life, the universe and all that! - almost howled Lunkkuol.
“Yes,” said the computer in the voice of a sufferer who enlightens the fool. “And what is this question?”

Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”

')
Exactly 42 days ago, Habr's audience learned about us, the VCStart collective investment platform, the first post came out in our blog, in which we told about ourselves and what we started. And most importantly, in it we announced the official launch of our crowd-investing platform in 42 days. Frankly speaking, the figure “42” didn’t carry any special meaning in itself - we just needed six weeks for a number of start-ups looking for investments to register on the platform, and then Adams’s unforgettable novel remembered. Time did not go fast or slow, startups were registered, investors united in the community, choosing objects for investments, in a word, everything happened as planned. And now six weeks have passed, and this significant day has come. Fanfare!

Further, in the course of the narrative, it is customary to recall, for the sake of which, we actually gathered here. If deployed, the fundraising mechanism on our platform was described in detail in previous posts ( here and here , for example). In short, in order for young promising IT start-ups to obtain the desired funding and please us with their innovative and necessary products, bringing them to mind thanks to the strong crowd-support that we provide to them.

What pleases, support already at the stage of work in the pre-launch mode, turned out to be really powerful. All these six weeks we have seen an active influx of new users, both from the founders of startups, and from the group of potential investors who are already investing their money in the most exciting projects.

And this, despite the complete absence of advertising - no one has heard about our project until today, except for the Hubrovites, for which many thanks to you are on behalf of all the startups who have settled on VCStart! Of course, Habr is not an easy audience, accustomed to try everything, there were questions and skepticism (which also stimulates development), but at the same time, there were thousands of registered potential investors, hundreds of startups who had placed their projects, and the first investments made in them.



Clearly, many of the startups that came to us are still damp, some, except for the idea itself, have nothing yet, but about a quarter of them are already working and profitable companies offering shares to micro-investors instead of co-financing.

At this stage, and on the collected amounts, and on the assessment of the potential, three startups stand out with a large margin from the rest: Cargo search, LeClick and CartPay. The first two, one might say, forwards, ready-made businesses with their own audience. Investments in which are associated with minimal risk and most likely will bring quick benefits to investors in the form of capitalization growth and dividends. The element of excitement (go - do not go) is practically absent here, but there is stability and a definite guarantee of success. The third, by contrast, is a very young project, currently in the Pre-Seed stage, but very interesting and ambitious.

The leader in this TOP-3, of course, information and logistics platform "Cargo search", which is a convenient tool for participants in the freight market. The project has been successfully operating for two years, bringing together more than 80,000 registered users. At VCStart, he has already managed to collect 13% of the target amount, which is $ 19,012 in money terms. And this is before the start of the round of financing. No need to be a visionary to predict successful financing with a significant excess of the target amount. And 38 of its investors also understood this.

In second place is the service of booking tables at LeClick restaurants, which we recently wrote about (7% collected) and in third place, a startup CartPay, suggested by which a smart shopping trolley caused a heated discussion in the comments , and the number of subscribers to the project in the community on our site one day after the article on Habré reached 64 people.



Of course, this is far from all start-ups worthy of financing, there are significantly more of them, and we will write more about many of our hubblogs. In quantitative terms, the interim results look like this: moderation has passed and 42 projects are already at the gathering stage of the community, they are supported by more than 3,500 investors. A total of $ 41,703 invested.

The numbers are still quite modest, but the matter is not at all in them. There are interesting and necessary projects and there are thousands of potential investors who are ready to support them financially. The main thing is that we have received for ourselves the answer to the “question of all life” in the context of a single crowdfunding platform, which united startups with high development potential and users from the middle class who are morally ripe for investment. Business remains behind small - officially to begin. And therefore, let's begin.

Buy a stake in any of the startups that interest you, you can on the collective investment platform VCStart . Go!