Rethinking the Private Investor experience
Club deals and private investors deserve a better experience. This is why we created Zenvest: the club deal management software. With the launch of a new investor interface, Zenvest — which not so long ago humbly started as InvestorX — has now grown into a powerful solution, making the investor experience easier than ever.
From InvestorX to Zenvest
Managing a club of investors and deal opportunities is time consuming. It requires efficient communication and information sharing. Because what’s crucial to making a club work are transparency and trust. But this can quickly turn into an administrative nightmare with tasks that are often repetitive. We experienced this first-hand a few years back when we launched a small invite-only club within eFounders.
So being a B2B SaaS startup studio, we instinctively looked into software that could streamline and scale the management of our club of investors. But we shortly realized that there wasn’t anything that fit our needs in the current market. So we decided to address this gap and we launched our own internal project: InvestorX. The pitch was simple: help Club Deal owners spend as little time possible managing their clubs.
After a few months and countless mockups and wireframes, we released our first version. Of course the UX/UI was not perfect but thanks to highly efficient features we were able to easily share our pro-rata rights with our small community of investors. Eventually, we decided to add a simple investor interface, based on the admin front-end, to replace traditional emails and to let investors express their interest more easily. Our idea was to offer a more Zen-like way of investing: Zenvest was born.
Rethinking the experience
To respond to the growing Club Deal trend, we made major interface updates and started to partner with other clubs (with a special mention to our friends from The Family). But we soon realized that Club Deal investment owners were still spending too much time answering questions from investors and sending documents over and over again.
To change this, we kept on adding new features which unintentionally ended up creating a poor user experience. It wasn’t long until we understood that, like traditional investment players, we had focused too much time and effort on easing the process on the admin side to the detriment of investors. So we quickly added a very simple dashboard and even more importantly a portfolio tracker. The feedback was incredibly positive and this confirmed our belief that investors deserve a better, neobank-like experience. So of course, we didn’t stop here.
To understand our users’ main difficulties, we conducted a thorough customer discovery process with frequent investors. Their main pain points?
- Not being able to keep track of all communications (too much or not enough emails)
- The difficulty of getting a clear view of their investment (how much, when, etc.) and their current gross valuation
- A very poor mobile experience.
Based on the feedback collected and our specs, we leveraged the unfair advantage provided by eFounders: our incredible design team. With Didier at his draw board, we got the first visuals which eventually turned into mockups, illustration and finally: a new interface.
Today, we are proud to unveil the brand new investor interface:
- A sleek Inbox tab to keep track of all communications received (inc. notifications on open or new opportunities and on Portfolio Notifications for reports, valuation and new documents)
- A powerful Portfolio Tracker tab to keep track of all your investments and access new documents & new reports
- A clearer Dealflow tab to access, assess and invest
- A new Community tab to enjoy each a private embedded network
- A simpler Profile tab to manage your account more easily
And now what?
With the new interface, we are convinced that we can add unprecedented value to both Club Deal and general investors. Club Deals are growing, investors are members of numerous clubs and also invest directly in companies and in funds. To Private investors, business angels, LPs, etc: you deserve better than an excel file to store all your investment and a drive to stock reports!
So in the coming months, we will be leveraging what we have already achieved at Zenvest to allow investors to add their own lines on their profile.
If you are a family office or a seasoned business angel, we’d be happy to work on gathering all your investments on the platform. And of course, new clubs are always welcome to join the numerous clubs operating on Zenvest and the 1,800 individual investors registered. You can contact me at cyril@zenvest.com via Twitter or zenvest.com
