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DueDash – Online Start-up Fund-raising Community

Thoughts - Markus Buck - Co-founder & Customer Experience

“Marketplaces function on a triangular approach. Before people trust peers in any marketplace, they have to trust the team as an entity.

That’s how we started looking into building trust, and DueDash is a marketplace with such trust at its backend”

How did your quest towards becoming a founder in this particular domain happen?

A series of entrepreneurial experiences happened incidentally. While I was doing an internship with a very experienced marketing professional, on a product that gave a 360-degree insight into sports processes, myself being a sports phonetic.

Even without any money coming in, I stayed just because I wanted to see how the product performed in the market. Watching how it captured the confidence and trust, we wanted to build something of an MVP, just a level below the DueDash idea, something that minimized the criteria for experienced people to have access to startups and offer their services to the market.

We started using different block building systems, but looking back at it now we feel it took so much of our time just getting to this point. Initially, you just want to put something out there in the market to see if it runs or not. My current co-founders then got together with the idea of DueDash. It was a perfect fit for me because I, as an individual founder, was having issues working alone without a team.

With DueDash we were proposing to help startups that were looking to scale and grow. So that’s how this journey began.

Identifying the industry demands, how have you been able to achieve the vision you set forth as you forayed ahead in this journey? Did the steps you take help you towards your goal?

Absolutely. If I hadn’t done my businesses before, I wouldn’t have been open to marketplaces. All my academic papers, including my business experiences, on trust-building mechanisms, were on online websites and marketplaces.

Understanding better every time, that trust was primarily important for marketplaces to function. But, since the element of trust is easy with offline engagements compared to online dealing, the point was to overcome trust limitations and build a better platform.

Following the concept of ‘bricolage’, we combined our diverse resources at DueDash, and when ideas toss back and forth, better outcomes are sure to come out.

About your first sale/deal/transaction and the way it was special

The day of the platform launch was the most special. The last few days before the launch stretch you to fill in the remaining gaps, before the actual journey begins, are the most grilling and exciting.

What was your initial annual target? Where are you – far or near to it – in your journey?

The number of startups that we can help throughout this process, is what we are looking at as the goal for the number of transactions we can park at.

We will not be able to say we have reached any target yet. As our platform provides access to startups as well as experts, the optimization of the marketplace for the experts’ end is yet to be done.

Unless we match the experts to the respective startups, we won’t be able to meet our goal.

Where do you see yourself with this venture in the post-pandemic times – say 2 – 5 years down the line?

The goal that we have, at least with the marketplace, is to be the target platform for startup founders to find relevant sources for fundraising and startup services. If we are able to achieve this help from the ecosystem for the startups, we will feel fulfilled.

DueDash as a platform is witnessing a lot of synergies. We are looking at it as the DueDash universe, where all relevant players are on-boarded with access to relevant experts from the ecosystem for their services.

Our platform is one-place access for the resources, connections, and knowledge for startups, to help raise funds.

We want to give back to the community. We have all data helping us optimize the process of selection. Data is always helping us to leverage the entire process.

Your advice to other businesses facing the same challenges as you did?

A steady endeavor takes you through. If I didn’t keep going ahead despite no success with the intermediate engagements, I would not have been able to come across this.

The DuesDash marketplace is only one part of our platform-powered investability system. Usually, people launch a product first and then form their community around it. But we have flipped this process around, because our goal is to build an investability platform that helps startups guide them through the due diligence process, and get the investors they need, and then do the same for the investors’ side.

The DueDash marketplace is an extension to the DueDash community platform where the experts also get visibility and access to the community that needs them.

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