Fairmint’s rolling offering began two years ago, as the first 100% online and on-chain Reg D 506c offering, without any intermediaries, at Fairmint.
It was the start of turning what used to be an insider’s game — startup investing — into an open, community-based play.
Lots of cool stories start in a garage. Ours started in a basement 😂
We were at Boost VC in the basement of Draper Hero University in San Mateo, after spending months at IDEO Studio in San Francisco.
So much time leading up to the launch was spent with Dan Elitzer, Tara Tan, Gavin McDermott, Ian Lee and Joe Gerber on design & UX sessions. There were also many business discussions with Brayton Williams, Adam Draper and Maddie Callander at Boost VC on how decisive it would be to secure our first customers.
It was time to make it real! Namely, by sending the first funds to the smart contract to officially etch the first equity investments into the public Ethereum blockchain.
With a few clicks, we transferred $30,000. The rolling fundraising ready to take Fairmint from launch to IPO was up and running 🚀 🚀
Those first $30K were relatively easy — after all, it was the founders’ personal investments in the company! #skininthegame
The next $70K came from our early community: frens from the crypto world, other founders, startup executives, even some lawyers: Marie Ekeland, Philippe Honigman, Michael Zargham, Simon de La Rouviere, Julien Bouteloup, Solomon Hykes, and Anson Lau, just to name a few. As the offering reached the six-month mark, that early community had started growing and we reached $200K, both from new community members and from earlier investors like Christoph Jentzsch who decided to re-invest!
By eating our own dog food and putting significant skin in the game, we were proving to other founders that it really is possible: You can raise with a rolling on-chain offering while remaining focused on building, executing, and communicating about your progress to your community.
Our conviction was reinforced when, after announcing the release of the first legal template for early adopters, Fairmint hit the $1M raised mark without any deck or any pitch, just our product 🙌
Community capital had arrived, and nothing was going to stop it. People were starting to notice.
To celebrate the first anniversary of the web3 offering and incentivize our growing community, we decided to add more equity to our offering, pushing it above 30%. Then we announced it on Twitter.
Yeah, on Twitter only 😆
In the 60 minutes following the tweet, over $400K was invested, with more high-profile crypto founders like Ryan Selkis and Alex Svanevik joining in.
The Slack notifications were pinging constantly as investors completed their KYC and sent funds. With Fairmint it’s all on-chain, from the sign up to completed investment. That’s new, but we all know it’s going to quickly become the new normal.
That momentum was further confirmed when Tim Draper joined — one Zoom call, $2M invested on-chain via our portal 💰💰
The same happened with A Capital’s Kartik Talwar and Ronny Conway soon after. And with more and more people signing up, the investor community grew as well, passing the 200 mark in summer 2021.
We activated our pilot program, a crucial moment in the product lifecycle since it lets you gather real customer feedback, understand the UX, get exposure to other people’s communities! It’s also the best way to experiment with “things that don’t scale” while preparing for the next stage: automation.
Product-market fit is obvious when it happens. We felt it in our offering, when things really accelerated and when communities of our early customers started to invest in us!
We hit $2M. Then $3M.
Then $4M, $5M, $5.8M… We wrote an article about the experience so far, one year after Sari Azout and Packy McCormick synthesized our vision in a fantastic post.
And the rolling fundraising just kept going 🔥
In late 2021, the LegalTech Fund, led by Zach Posner and his team, investing for strategic LPs from the legal industry, reached out after customers of several top law firms asked their partners for more information about the Rolling SAFE.
With some of those top law firms as LPs and given the emerging web3 market, they felt it was time to learn more about the first real web2-to-web3 bridge. In the end, they did more than just learn — they invested, pushing our rolling fundraising to 299 investors and over $6.25M raised.
And most recently, while preparing for general availability in 2022, fresh support came from the Sigil Fund, a highly successful crypto fund, which invested at $5.70 after first passing in 2020 at $0.71.
“Founders today want to build a web3 company. Fairmint enables founders to do just that, compliantly. We’re convinced that Fairmint will become part of the modern startup stack.”
Pavel and Fiskantes, “Sigil invests in Fairmint ahead of its strong 2022”
The bottom line
- We’ve been building the web2 to web3 bridge for all organizations,
- We’ve been building what founders need to (re)align incentives within their company’s ecosystem,
- We’ve been building the founder’s portal to community capital, just as Shopify built the portal to e-commerce.
- We’re celebrating the 2-year anniversary of our rolling offering and we’re still aiming at the stars because we know community capital is limitless.
So strap in for 2022: we’re ready to engage the thrusters, and nothing will stop the Fairmint rocketship 😉
