We thought the questions asked in the discussions area in our Crowdfunding Raise were superb so we wanted to replicate them here. Please let’s keep the discussions going and put forward your ideas to keep growing Crunch (and therefore your investment!)
Investor query (originally posted on Seedrs):
After reviewing the various documents, updates, and discussions, I decided to add my little contribution to the project, convinced by the current proposal and business plan.
I still have a few questions though:
1) I strongly believe in the growing importance of communities as a business driver. I feel like your Crunch Coins is a step in that direction. Is your idea to make use of your 68k-strong community and to create a marketplace connecting members? E.g. members could opt to appear in your “community” as experts/providers of X or Y services and market their services, and you could further monetize it by having paid “boosters”. Although obviously not your core business, I think you are sitting on a valuable pile of data and community
2) Whilst the major part of your Trustpilot reviews are positive (80%+), 15% are poor/bad. How do you address the issues your customers faced and do you have additional metrics on churn and customer satisfaction? Do you feel that your sales method are appropriate? I read a few reviews about people feeling pushed to buy add-ons or even one to remove the negative review and I wanted to know your thoughts and how it was dealt with internally
3) I’m sadly not based in the UK. Would you potentially have alternative perks for foreign investors?
Thank you and congratulations on both building this product and overfunding your campaign!
Our response:
Thank you so much for your investment.
- “I strongly believe in the growing importance of communities as a business driver.”
Thank you, we are utterly passionate about supporting the community and have a lot of experience in this area. We started with a separate site called FreelanceAdvisor.co.uk in 2008, before Crunch was launched in 2009 and it’s unification into the crunch brand some 5 year ago as the Crunch Chorus community. With the tax and accounting platform in place, we are ready to take the community to the next level to help people create the life they want, with a small business powering it. Facilitating allowing them to help each other is of course the dream and we’ll have a big announcement in early January what BIG step we are going to take. It’s really exciting and the culmination of over 10 years of thinking/hard work!
Note: the data in communities is extensive but we will never let it out of our sight (never to sell, rent, whatever it)!
- “Whilst the major part of your Trustpilot reviews are positive (80%+)”
Whilst a software business is easy to keep tuning and get fantastic reviews, a service business is much harder, especially in an area as complex as accountancy and tax. Over the years there have been a myriad of complaints that are not our fault. I’ll never forget a friend of mine receiving a letter from HMRC that highlighted an issue. We investigated it and found we’d done all the correct things and HMRC’s letter out of date or wrong. We were blamed and at the time our point back to this client and friend was that HMRC’s error rate was over 50%.
We’ve experienced considerable issues with a certain competitor of which has reared up again recently. We have ignored dirty tricks for 5 years and with a mass of customers angry that this competitor could be so unbelievably brazen even now, we now think it’s the time to show the world what they’ve been up to. We get many super negative reviews where we cannot track down that customer nor do they respond. Whilst trustpilot can be sympathetic, google reviews don’t care.
Then of course there are our mistakes. There was a period in time when I really wasn’t happy about some of the service levels in crunch. I reorganised the team, now the leadership team and looked at these occasional issues first hand. We created an amazing customer experience team (CX) and a client education team, overseeing problem areas, learning, addressing them as well as producing high quality training videos and live sessions. All key members of the leadership team meet monthly to look at what’s happened and how we can improve it so it never happens again. I can’t tell you how good client services and CX are and to add that final touch, I personally get involved. I talk to customers and there is nothing better for me to be that close to any service hiccups and we always learn and improve!
Some of our accountancy competitors have 5 star reviews throughout and that can’t possibly be true. I’m not saying they do, however Crunch will never ever ever pay for positive reviews and we’ll never enter into dirty tactics of paying for negative reviews to be placed on our competitors.
As I’ve described, however perfect your service is, in the complexity of accountancy and tax, a customer can always have a different perception.
Forceful upgrades, never. I’ve been clear that this raise will be used to fully tune the user experience on the upgrade process and we’re make it super slick but never ever forceful, why would we, we are a community centric business and the second we turn into a big corporate ‘don’t care’ monster, we’ve lost the most important part of us, the people!
3) I’m sadly not based in the UK. Would you potentially have alternative perks for foreign investors?
We’ve had numerous foreign investors and we’ve always worked something out, please send an email to invest@crunch.co.uk With crunch coins and our members selling their products, many of them have no issue shipping their products abroad.
Thank you Justin! It’s been an amazing journey and so pleased we could talk to so many in our community and new investors. We are super pleased with the result and more so we are so excited that people know there is an alternative to the big accountancy software providers. They also now know that they can source high quality accountancy and tax services from one easy location without taking a gamble. The power of software and service!
We’ve launched an investors lounge within the Crunch Community forum which you can sign up to and once we’ve grabbed a breath we’ll add investor badges to all our lovely investors. I’d love to bring over all this great content as well:
I’ve really enjoyed talking to the community and to new investors and the Investors Lounge will be our place to carry it on!
Thanks,
Darren. CEO and Founder.
