Inspiration
As a startup founder, it is often difficult to raise money, but the amount of equity that is given up can be alarming for people who are unsure if they want the gasoline of traditional venture capital. With VentureBits, startup founders take a royalty deal and dictate exactly the amount of money they are comfortable raising. Also, everyone can take risks on startups as there are virtually no starting minimums to invest.
What it does
VentureBits allows consumers to browse a plethora of early stage startups that are looking for funding. In exchange for giving them money anonymously, the investors will gain access to a royalty deal proportional to the amount of money they've put into a company's fund. Investors can support their favorite founders every month with a subscription, or they can stop giving money to less promising companies at any time. VentureBits also allows startup founders who feel competent to raise just enough money to sustain them and work full-time as well as their teams without losing a lot of long term value via an equity deal.
How we built it
We drew out the schematics on the whiteboards after coming up with the idea at YHack. We thought about our own experiences as founders and used that to guide the UX design.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges with finance APIs as we were not familiar with them. A lot of finance APIs require approval to use in any official capacity outside of pure testing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we were able to create flows for our app and even get a lot of our app implemented in react native. We also began to work on structuring the data for all of the companies on the network in firebase.
What we learned
We learned that finance backends and logic to manage small payments and crypto payments can take a lot of time and a lot of fees. It is a hot space to be in, but ultimately one that requires a lot of research and careful study.
What's next for VentureBits
We plan to see where the project takes us if we run it by some people in the community who may be our target demographic.
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