Pavegen’s CEO Offers Advice on Crowdfunding Following Crowdcube Success

Last month, London start-up Pavegen successfully secured over £2 million during its equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. The company’s technology converts footsteps into electricity, making it possible to power services in high-footfall locations, as well as provide real-time data for analytics.

While discussing Pavegen’s products, founder of Pavegen, Laurence Kemball-Cook, told Business Insider:

“Each tile generate up to 7 watts of power. If you have 20 tiles around a street light, that light will be powered all night long. It needs to be in a high footfall area, it has to have a footstep on average every 10 seconds.”

Kemball-Cook then went on to give his ultimate crowdfunding advice:

• Set Up a ‘Mission Control’: “We went into it with a really professional attitude, and a huge amount of energy has gone into the campaign. We created a mission control in our office of just a team on Crowdcube all the time. You have to respond within minutes to every question. You’ve got to have a really professional view on it. People are really judging you, it’s a beauty parade. We had to create a really high-quality business plan and video.”

• Keep Up With Your Profile: “We also had to launch a lot of PR initiatives. It started with installation in Canary Wharf and it ended with us appointing Steve Jobs’ number 2 as one of our board advisers. We’ve made sure we drip fed the right news at the right time and had a whole comms plan around it. I did an event every single night for a month — I was completely broken at the end of it. I was a shadow of a man. We even did a TED talk on the final day.”

• ‘Seed’ the Round: “You need to seed the round. We seeded the round with £350,000 from our investors already. That allowed us to hit momentum straight away. That’s really important for people to actually pre-seed the round, it’s not just about putting it on there and the cash coming in. You’ve actually got to work hard with a group of investors.”