Shuttle Launch Week - An update

Hello friends, and welcome to The Unsophisticated Investor! Brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle!

If you want to be one of the first to get access to some of the most exclusive private market investment opportunities in Europe, join our limited waitlist now.

Now, let’s get into it 👇

Hey everyone! Sorry we didn’t get an episode of The Unsophisticated Investor out last week. We hope you missed us! But with launch week approaching and much to do we had to make a difficult call and skip writing the episode and focus on Shuttle’s launch. 

We started writing a weekly newsletter at the end of February this year and I think we’ve only missed two episodes before last week. Not bad but truth be told, we hate missing any and it's a difficult call to make.

However, if we ever deserved a pass we figured it was for this. Shuttle’s launch! Or more accurately, Shuttle's private launch!

Nearly 250 people from our waitlist of almost 1000 put their hand up to take part in our private launch which opened on Monday this week and we wanted to take the opportunity to use this week's episode to give everyone an update on what's been happening.

We set out on this journey nearly 3 years ago. A journey to democratise (buzzword, sorry) private market investing. Having been on a bit of an investing journey ourselves, trying to build our own finances, we realised the most attractive investment opportunities were those we couldn’t get anywhere near. So, instead of waiting for the platform we wished was available to be built, we said “F*@k it”, and decided to build it ourselves.

Investing is a regulated activity so it obviously requires getting authorised by the regulator. Something we naively thought would take several months 🙃.

You know the journey Frodo and Sam go on in Lord of the Rings where they travel to Middle Earth over the course of three lengthy movies to destroy the ring in the fires of Mount Doom? Ye, well, getting authorised is harder!

Anyway, they made it and so did we. Minus the giant eagles swooping in to carry us away at the end.

Here we are nearly three years later, authorised to support investors across Europe with the same vision of bringing exclusive startup investments to people like us… and people like you! We’ve built a beautiful, secure and robust platform and we’ve secured access to two very exciting investment opportunities for our private launch.

Typical with any launch I'm sure, the run-up is particularly hectic. Stress goes up and patience goes down! More and more tasks seem to raise their head. And the small things all seem to take longer than expected.

But it's exciting! Really exciting. This is what we’re here for. This is all a part of it. It's supposed to be difficult and bumpy and intense and a bit painful. When something doesn’t go right it's an opportunity to make it better. 

It was such an amazing feeling to see people signing up to the platform. After all the time and effort, it was a special moment. Was it perfect? Of course not. There were always going to be teething issues and bugs but we had stress-tested the platform pretty heavily leading up to the launch so it performed really well. 

There were some frustrating issues of course! Late last week we found out that we couldn’t use direct debits on the platform. SEPA had been hit with so much fraud lately that they implemented a new rule that meant invested funds would be locked for 56 days after an investment closes. That just wasn’t a runner. There was no good fix. One way or another we had to bastardise our payment flow so we could still go ahead with the launch. It works fine but it's more manual and slower. It was just one of those things that we couldn’t plan for and couldn’t get around. 

Then, on the morning of launch, once users started flooding in, our email automation tool decided not to send the email confirmation codes to a bunch of users. This was happening at random over the course of the day. No idea why this happened and we’re still unsure. 

Then Bank of Ireland decided to decline our Payment Services Providers details, leaving a handful of users with no way of making payment. And to top it off KYC and bank transfers were taking longer than expected so we decided not to open investing until this morning to give everyone a chance to get registered and set up.

The list goes on…

But do you know what? We’re ecstatic! We’re operational and we’re doing exactly what we set out to do. And it's an amazing feeling!

After nearly three years of hard work, the real hard work started this week and we’re already making major improvements. We’re listening to our members and shipping fixes and features quickly. And by the end of this week, our Founding Members will have added two exciting investments to their portfolio. Many already have!

We hope to see many of you, The Unsophisticated Investor’s readers, join us in the near future.

You have helped us maintain an open rate of over 60% since we launched this newsletter which we’re incredibly proud of. We have nearly 1000 loyal readers! And to award that loyalty, we’ve decided to give 10 of our subscribers the opportunity to join our private launch. If you’ve read this far and wish to join us this week and invest in our first two startups just reply to this email and places will be given to the first ten readers.

Now we better get back to the launch 😁

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z retail investors and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

Scott & Rob
Shuttle Co-Founders