No entrepreneur going into business ever does so with the aim to fail, but going into business with inadequate capital and financing options is an easy way for a business to crumble. Many factors go into a business owner’s lack of funding, from lack of personal capital to few networking contacts and inability to borrow from traditional sources.
To be an entrepreneur means to be someone who takes on challenges but the lack of funding could be a rock in an entrepreneur’s purse.
Equity financing is one of the ways through which capital can be raised but there has always been a strict rule regarding the way it is dished out by a company. It typically refers to the value that would be returned to a company’s shareholder if all of its assets were liquidated and all of the company’s debts paid.
A Jos based hybrid crowdfunding platform, Elesaro is posed to solving the above problem. Founded in April 2020, the platform spans from Reward-based crowdfunding to Equity and Lending. It is set to launch its native crypto token to facilitate easy transaction across its robust platform.
HOW ELESARO WORKS
Elesaro approves only exciting projects by offering exciting rewards to potential backers. It makes use of an $Elf coin, as its native token which serves as currency for transactions on the platform.
Elesaro is built on the Binance Smart Chain. Donations and pledges to a campaign can also be done through the Elfcoin. People can crowdfund as well as invest in well curated startups. About 300 million tokens can be accessed and is distributed. The token supply is fixed to ensure that the value of the token is maintained at all time.
Startups leveraging on technology can crowdfund their businesses on the platform, from creators in the music industry to comic artistes, authors and many more. Elesaro has risen over $100 for creatives with a number of successful projects.
CRESTHUB learnt that Elesaro has enabled two campaigns on the Plateau to successfully raise funds for their needs. This reporter spoke with two of the enterpreneurs that had a successful campaign.
Seth Micheal, founder and owner of Unified Camp narrated how he had started his firm in 2020 by providing materials for easy learning for students to access, use, as well as interact. Starting out, he made use of a student’s free plan to host his website until its expiration and that led to a major challenge as the website could no longer be accessed by students. He contacted Elesaro for help and created a crowdfunding campaign using various social media platforms.
Less than 48 hours into the campaign, a number of positive feedbacks and responses were received and about 25,000 naira was raised, which covered the websites expenses and more. Unified Camp is still up and running till date.
Miss Nankak Tsetu a visionary, reached out to Elesaro to enable her crowdfund for World Sickle Cell Day (June 19) to support persons battling the disease in her foundation. The Elesaro team had responded immediately and the whole process involved was set up. She was also granted a platform via their social media group to narrate her experiences to others. Donations came in and money was raised.
Elesaro is set on providing solutions to as many businesses as possible. Its campaign commission fee is extremely low compared to other traditional systems.
Speaking to CRESTHUB, Johnpaul Nwobodo, Co-founder/CEO Elesaro stated that “our goal in Elesaro is to make funding easily accessible to people. We aspire for entrepreneurs and creatives to be able to access funding not only for their projects but to also build a community around them. Our target community growth by the end of July 2021 is about 10,000 community members. We are leveraging blockchain technology to make sure Elesaro is a full grown-robust crowdfunding protocol in areas such as reward-based crowdfunding, Equity-based crowdfunding and Lending. We hope to launch our Lending platform soon to enable people to take on collateralized lending easily in the future.”
