Content management startup Instant secured a 275.000 euro in pre-seed capital from a private crowdfunding campaign among peers in the Amsterdam tech scene.
Instant, formerly known as Teletext.io, offers drop-in content management services to any custom website in a blink. The business started early 2016, and is a Rockstart accelerator programme alumnus.
Incrowdfunding
Calling it ‘incrowdfunding’, the founders Sander Nagtegaal and Marcel Panse ran an exclusive, private crowdfunding campaign among their peers. Carefully selected developers, digital marketers and other internet enthusiasts from Amsterdam’s startup scene were invited to participate in the Instant Peer Fund. Minimum ticket size was 5000 euro.
Nagtegaal is pretty familiar with the Amsterdam startup scene. Next to being CEO of Instant, he’s also the co-founder of Peecho, the CTO of MyTomorrows and an investor in early-stage startups.
Instant aimed at a hybrid form of crowdfunding, Nagtegaal told StartupJuncture. “The idea was that our ‘peer funders’ will bring in knowledge and experience, just like VC’s. But they’re also carefully chosen on their capability to hands-on collaborate on the product. Every funder has access to our source code. So it’s open source for our backers. You can’t do this with just friends, fools and family.”
It worked like a charm. Within weeks, the founders raised 275.000 euro.
Serverless startup
The Amsterdam-based startup has a sense for doing things differently. It shook up the CMS game by being a ‘serverless startup’.
That proved to be an important part for the crowdfunding success. “As it turned out, fellow developers really liked the product ánd the technical implementation of a serverless startup. Access to the source code that powers such a serverless infrastructure, is interesting to them.” Curiosity wins, as it seems.