Success stories: Crowdlisting campaign by Cesynt

Cesynt Advanced Solutions is an ICT consulting and services company established in 2010 to offer efficient and innovative digital training solutions for professionals. The goal was to provide flexible and customizable paths and methods for continuous professional development and the achievement of mandatory professional formative credits in e-learning mode.

To facilitate time management and the organization of training paths, Cesynt has developed iSkilled, a learning management platform for companies, employees, freelancers, and specialized trainers and teachers. Companies can create and share their own training paths with staff or direct employees to courses by certified instructors already available on the portal. Freelancers, on the other hand, can choose from the proposed courses to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of professions today and complete them at their preferred times and modalities.

Just to further develop and expand abroad this digital learning platform, in 2019 Cesynt launched on Opstart a equity crowdfunding campaign as part of the Crowdlisting aimed at listing on the stock exchange: they were the first to complete this operation designed by Opstart to facilitate the listing of SMEs on the stock exchange.

We explored in a previous article how Crowdlisting works and why it represents an excellent opportunity for SMEs, which find it difficult to access the expensive and complex traditional listing route.

Crowdfunding Cesynt: the strengths of the project

The success of Cesynt's crowdfunding campaign was based first and foremost on a background full of strengths:

• Previous equity crowdfunding campaign already successfully concluded in 2018, followed by dividend distribution;
• fast-growing e-learning market, in which Cesynt and iSkilled were pioneers;
• database of more than 45,000 active users;
• High rate of digitization.

Cesynt already had experience with crowdfunding, thanks to the equity campaign conducted also on Opstart in 2018, with which it had raised about €250,000. After only 10 months of the campaign, the company had exceeded growth forecasts and had definitely won the trust of its investors by distributing a dividend in the amount of about €50,000, thus accounting for 20 percent of what was raised on the platform. They were pioneers in this as well: it was the first case of a company's dividend distribution after an equity crowdfunding campaign. It should be remembered, in fact, that while startups cannot distribute dividends in the first five years of their life (and even if they could, they usually take time to become really productive), SMEs can.

This made an excellent impression on investors, strengthening the community created through the campaign.

Also very important was the fact that the iSkilled platform already had a large active user base, as the best investors in a crowdfunding campaign are primarily the company's customers.

Turbo Crowd x Cesynt

Turbo Crowd supported Cesynt in preparing and managing marketing activities for the Crowdlisting campaign, drawing on the potential just described to amplify the resonance of the project.

To take advantage of the contact data already available, intelligent databases were built for use through CRM software to build automated interaction paths with potential investors, to whom they could convey informative and interactive content about the campaign and project.

The creation of advertising campaigns on social and search engines also allowed targeting and reaching out to all other potential investors, expanding the network of contacts already available.

The planning of marketing activities for the campaign, then, cannot be separated from the development of rewards for investors: for Cesynt, for example, the EARLY BOOKING bonus, which provided a 20 percent reduction on the premoney value.

Finally, the production and dissemination of press releases and the novelty of the operation ensured that Cesynt's Crowdlisting campaign received good media coverage, which accentuated its visibility.

Crowdfunding Cesynt: results

The Crowdlisting campaign of Cesynt Advanced Solution began in November 2019 and closed in about a month with rapid success. The campaign effectively replaced the IPO process required to access stock exchange listing, resulting in lower listing costs for Cesynt and avoiding the road show experience, which is highly risky especially for an SME.

Some data of the collection:

Campaign start: November, 2019

End of campaign: December 2019

Minimum goal: 250.000€

Collection: 1.191.645€

Listing on Euronext: November 2020

The campaign was also attended by major institutional investors, such as investment funds, who recognized the potential of the project and encouraged further interest in the campaign.

The price of admission to the regulated market and issue of Cesynt Advanced Solutions shares was set at €1.80 per share, thus registering a 25 percent stock appreciation for those who had acquired company shares before the listing.

Cesynt has thus managed to be the First Italian SME to list on a regulated market through the Crowdlisting route, saving time and money and finally making one's shares liquid: this last aspect is very important, because the liquidity of shares is an attractive factor for investors.

Turbo Crowd was the first Italian marketing agency to follow a Crowdlisting operation.