Getting feedback from customers is a key component to building a successful product and company. Crowdfunding is an inexpensive way of reaching thousands of potential customers and finding out what they think. Most new businesses depend on some form of marketing to reach customers, with crowdfunding, you're able to create urgency (30 days) around a funding goal. With this approach, you're able to test demand for your idea prior to investing in manufacturing, inventory, hiring staff, building a website or other expenses. This allows you to focus on revenue, retain ownership and build your business on your own terms which which will put you in a stronger position to raise investment if that is what you're after. Investment has its place in business but we believe having a successful crowdfunding campaign under your belt means you're steer the ship in a direction that is on your terms.

We're a rewards-based crowdfunding platform. We encourage creators to offer tangible goods and services as incentives to backers in exchange for their financial support. Our creators typically create pre-order campaigns to build demand for products and/or services.

UpEffect was founded to eliminate the biggest problems plaguing the $2B crowdfunding industry: low success rates and harmful products. Campaigns on most crowdfunding platforms suffer from limited curation, lack of personalised support and are mass-market focused which is why over 60% of campaigns fail. Furthermore, most platforms do not hold their campaigns or creators to any ethical standards. 9% of Kickstarter campaigns have failed to deliver a single reward to supporters, essentially pocketing the crowdfunded money.

In stark contrast, UpEffect’s enterprise solution approach and campaign consultant model drives our 95% success rate, the highest in the crowdfunding industry. Instead of simply providing another platform for campaigns to raise money without any help, we employ industry best practices to ensure founders are creating exceptional campaign pages and building a “crowd” to back their projects. In essence, UpEffect allows smaller fish that get neglected on larger platforms to convert their powerful ideas into successful campaigns, not only to meet a funding target but also to successfully launch a product to a loyal customer base.

We understand if you're after a "big" crowdfunding platform. That's not us. We're not on a mission to build a hyper growth business or a unicorn. For us, our creators and backers come first and we have a vested interest in making this business succeed; we're the only two stakeholders (Sheeza Shah and Sharjeel Chaudhry), have no investors and intend to keep it this way. By building a financially independent and profitable business, we're able to focus on what's most important to us: maximising societal wealth by nurturing impactful businesses and helping them raise capital to build a better world. We move slowly and modestly at UpEffect; this allows us to test, iterate, improve and create services that cater to the evolving needs of our creators. This also allows us to learn and become students of the process.

We believe this puts us in a strong position to equip our founders with the right tools, funding and knowledge to solve global poverty, illiteracy, social injustice, climate change and more.

If you are tired of pitching for funding, struggling to navigate crowdfunding, in need of structure and discipline or unsure how to build a profitable business without investment, we're the right platform for you. We're dedicated to improving access to funding for founders bettering our world; this means creating opportunities and removing barriers to entry, in particular ones placed by banks, investors and other crowdfunding platforms that frequently overlook founders of colour, social entrepreneurs and female founders. More details on our criteria can be found here but we encourage you to apply if you're unsure.

All payments are processed by Stripe and their fee is 1.9% + 20p per transaction for European cards and 2.9% + 20p per transaction for non-European cards.

For £199, you get 30-days of personalised campaign support. You can decide to opt for extra support for £149 / month thereafter. We don't automatically charge you and will ask you how you wish to proceed once the 30 days have completed. We'll let you decide. You are, however, contractually bound to run your campaign on UpEffect before leaving for another crowdfunding platform. We pour our heart and soul into helping our creators succeed and we believe it's only fair we share in your success if you decide to crowdfund.

To create a sense of urgency around the live campaign, we implement an all-or-nothing model, which helps set targets and also offer protection to backers so that campaign creators are only able to collect their funds once they have met their minimum funding goal. This means that entrepreneurs are continuously motivated to ensure they succeed. This is also a good way of building credibility as backers are more comfortable supporting an idea that they know campaign creators are serious about making a reality.

No, but you will need a verified Stripe Business account to crowdfund with UpEffect

This depends on your funding goal. Our Funding Goal Planner will help you determine what the right goal is for your campaign and based on that, we can advise on the timeframe in our Office Hours.

The minimum is £1,000. There is no maximum, however, we recommend setting realistic goals that you can explain to your community of backers. We also suggest calculating how much capital you need to build a profitable business in the next 18 months and using that as your guideline to determine your funding goal. Our Rewards and Funding Goal Planners will help you with this.

Please see here for a list of companies supported by Stripe

We apply a 5% success fee when you complete your crowdfunding campaign. All payments are processed by Stripe and their fee is 1.9% + 20p per transaction for European cards and 2.9% + 20p per transaction for non-European cards. If you don't meet your funding goal, no fees are applied.

If you have a constrained budget, we encourage you to still apply and let us know about your situation. We'll do our absolute best to help you.

UpEffect was founded by Computer Scientist, Sheeza Shah and Medical Technologist, Sharjeel Chaudhry. They're both passionate about improving the world and have dedicated much of their careers to serving society through non-profits and community work.

We’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at hello@theupeffect.com