Success stories: Mosaico Spirits' crowdfunding case study

Mosaico Spirits is an innovative startup that has patented a new gin production technique allowing for the creation of personalized gin even for small batches and precise replication of the recipe anywhere. This technology manages to reduce production costs and eliminate transportation and exportation costs of the product: once the perfect blend is achieved, with Mosaico Spirits' patented gin machine and corresponding software, it's possible to replicate the product anywhere, thus reducing environmental impact as well.

The company was founded in 2019 as a B2B project, but it had long been the parent company of the successful online B2C project "Il Tuo Gin" (Your Own Gin).

In November 2022, Mosaico Spirits decided to launch an equity crowdfunding campaign to accelerate the development of the B2B brand through the standardization of business processes, internationalization of the brand, acquisition of new production sites, industrialization of the patented machine, strengthening of the sales network, and marketing strategies.

The choice of crowdfunding as a capital-raising tool was motivated by the awareness of a very broad audience: the success of "Il Tuo Gin" is one of the indicators showing how gin is now a widely consumed product appreciated by a continuously growing audience, potentially interested in participating in the Mosaico Spirits revolution and capable of making the opportunity evident to producers and aspiring ones.

Before the campaign: strengths and weaknesses

Mosaico Spirits was a well-established online presence with a high level of technology and a certain experience in digital operations. However, its online presence was primarily associated with the retail website "Il Tuo Gin", which followed B2C dynamics, differing in many aspects from what Mosaico Spirits would require.

Strengths::

• online presence;
• database of users and newsletter subscribers;
• familiarity with digital tools and CRMs;
• uniqueness of the product/service. 

Weaknesses::

• the need to differentiate the B2B brand from the B2C one;
• retail-focused database of users;
• lack of specific graphic material;
• time.

Crowdfunding Mosaico Spirits: critical issues 

The last weakness highlighted was the one that made Turbo Crowd's activities more complicated and crucial, as they began after the campaign had already started, thus without the possibility of structuring the fundamental precrowd phase.

The challenges that Turbo Crowd and Mosaico Spirits had to face together to make the equity crowdfunding campaign successful can be summarized in 3 points:

• campaign already underway, thus little time available and inability to structure precrowd activities;
• difficult minimum threshold to reach without having a pre-committed target audience and without collecting expressions of interest from the pre-crowdfunding phase;
• Christmas period, hence difficulty managing and organizing sales operations;

Turbo Crowd x Mosaico Spirits: solutions

To address the challenges listed above and overcome the initial weaknesses, the professionals at Turbo Crowd and the team at Mosaico Spirits implemented targeted solutions:

• creation of an expression of interest form on a dedicated landing page, where directly target individuals reached through advertisements to initiate the sales pipeline;
• immediate involvement of the company's team in the sales pipeline to verify the quality of the contacts reached;
• Facebook advertising directed to the landing page;
• sending automatic emails and newsletters to the databases of the portals Il tuo Gin, Ginshop, and Mosaico Spirits to obtain expressions of interest or call reservations;
• utilization of Hubspot for organizing sales processes, sorting deals based on the declared investment amount in the expression of interest phase and estimated investment availability;
• Management of negotiations based on a system of recurring activities to have maximum control and minimize dispersion, both through marketing automation actions and through direct contact by Mosaico Spirits via personalized emails, messages, and calls;
• Setting up differentiated rewards based on investment size.

Equity Crowdfunding Mosaico Spirits: results

The operations described were effective in overcoming the initial challenges and neutralizing the weak points: the crowdfunding campaign closed successfully. Let's look at the data.

Campaign start: November 28, 2022

Campaign end: March 31, 2023

Minimum target: 200.000€

Expressions of interest generated on the landing page: 313

Average cost per expression of interest: 38€

Call bookings: Over 26% of people who visited the page to book a call with the Mosaico Spirits team completed the booking.

Collection: 257.622€ 

In addition to the capital raised, Mosaico Spirits has built a community of approximately 100 investors ready to follow and support the business developments and has obtained a valuable contact database representing an asset for the future. This experience shows that everyone can do crowdfunding, but each experience is unique and there must be some basic conditions: skipping the precrowd phase is a problem that for a less structured and less digital company could have been an insurmountable obstacle, while in this case, it did not preclude success, although it required a tighter and more challenging work during the campaign and affected the chances of reaching the maximum goal.

To find out more behind the scenes of the crowdfunding world with those who actually do crowdfunding, enter the Turbo Crowd Facebook group, where we hold webinars with industry professionals or businesses.