⚡ Zash: Community Update 5: New Fundraising Milestone
Say hello to the next generation of retail investing
Hi Zashers,
At Zash we've been head down on customer and product development, plugging away digging deep into our communities' insights. We've got lots of exciting news to share with all of you…
The Problem ⚡
Having spent the last few months speaking with our community members, what has been clear is that there still exists a huge barrier between what someone wants to invest in, and how.
At Zash we are working hard to bridge the knowledge gap, the how, that exists for many retail investors.
It’s never been easier to invest - robo-advisors and neo-brokers offer promises of a better investing experience - yet they fail to deliver on creating an approachable and trust-worthy solution.
On the one hand, you have the emergence of “sit back and relax” robo-advisors, and on the other “instant access” brokers such as Robinhood in the US, or Freetrade in the UK.
The problem is - people still are not investing; trillions of dollars sit in inactive savings accounts, accruing minimal interest because investing is not inclusive.
Parit only made his first investment in his mid-twenties via a colleague's suggestion, and it was, unsurprisingly - in Bitcoin.
So what seems to be the problem? Here’s what you’ve been telling us:
“I trust my network more than all the other data sources out there”
“Investment platforms are overwhelming and complex to navigate.”
“I want to find more interesting things to invest in like art, music, but I don’t know how”
“I have strong beliefs, such as Augmented Reality is the future but I’m not sure which stock to pick”
“I want to know what my friends and the experts are investing in, that’s what I really care about”
The hunt for yield and disdain towards traditional financial services leaves the new generation of investors desperately searching on these platforms for actionable signal and trust."
Ultimately, we seek to address the challenge of how people are investing - in order to facilitate a smarter, more intuitive, and trust-worthy investment experience.
Our Solution & Community 🏡
We want to improve actionable signal over noise for investing.
We believe the winning product in this space will be a creator-led social network for investing.
Over the last few weeks, we have been working incredibly hard, hearing your suggestions, and are really excited to be sharing what we’ve created thus far. More importantly, however, we’d love your feedback.
We’ve just dropped our latest product designs in the #product-and-features-ideas channel in slack and are really excited to be sharing the first designs of our prototype:
We are early on our mission, yet we have seen remarkable participation to make this dream a reality. Within a month, we’ve organically reached over 400 members in our beta community - sharing ideas, asking questions, and building key relationships.
We’ve also hosted 8 exciting Zash talks: ranging from Value Investing 101 through to the Future of Alternative Proteins, led by community experts.
Fundraising Milestone 🎉
We are super proud to announce that we have recently received pre-seed investment from Entrepreneur First, Europe’s leading tech accelerator, which has been an incredible home for us to start and grow Zash.
We're also excited to announce that Matthew Varughese, formerly Co-Founder and CTO of Drover and Interest Rate Swaps Trader at Goldman Sachs has come on as an angel and advisor.
Hiring & Team 🚀
As Zash continues to grow, our community remains a home of trusted, reliable information for our members - and we’re only getting started. We have a variety of opportunities available (particularly on the lookout for people with previous experience with hyper-scaling social products) so if you are interested in joining the team, then feel free to drop us a line.
Upcoming Za$h Talk 💭
Retail Investing in Music 🎸 | Tues, March 9th @ 7pm (GMT)
As music lovers growing up, we’re so excited to be hosting this Tuesday, Faris Zaher, Founder of Encore, and Rashad Shawa, Co-Founder of Keife Records this Tuesday. We’ll be taking a deep dive into how retail investors can invest directly in musicians and their work, emerging business models, NFT’s, & more...
That’s all for now and we’ll see you next week,
Parit & Efe
CEO & CTO, Co-Founders of Zash