Today I’ve teamed up with Paperclip to bring you the full lowdown on the UK’s leading marketplace provider!
We live in an age of start-ups. Our inboxes, Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts are awash with news of brand new business concepts and new companies who promise to deliver one innovation or another that will enrich our day to day lives.
For those of us who are almost constantly online – bashing out another blog post, promoting our business on social media or applying for another influencer opportunity – startups are viewed with interest but an element of caution. Not every business can succeed, of course, and the endless hours we pump into growth exemplifies how painfully aware we are of this.
So when a business goes from start-up to fully-fledged in just a few short years, there’s always cause for cheer and renewed hope for us small business owners with big dreams. And there’s no better example of this than Paperclip, which was formed only 5 years ago by two university friends, Rich and Alan.
The lowdown
The project started as a kind of Tinder for trading but soon became an established online marketplace, available as an iOS and Android app on desktop too.
Online marketplaces used to be pretty complex spots to do business. They mainly started out based on the stereotypical paid advertisement magazine or newspaper space, only online. These days, as we all know, online marketplaces are everywhere. But quantity does not equate to quality – and Paperclip’s quick success showcases this perfectly.
Paperclip creates marketplaces without any fees whatsoever. There is no cost for listing, buying or selling and its global marketplace now extends beyond 100,000 users.
It’s welcomingly niche in its outlook too. Paperclip’s private marketplaces for students allow students at 30 different UK universities to buy and sell from and to each other online. These universities include Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL. A schools platform has also just been launched to allow parents to buy and sell items for their children or even themselves. So no more rushed one to one item trading at the school gates!
Crowdfunding
I’m a firm believer in companies reaching out to people and trying to get them involved in their business, and this is where Paperclip have particularly caught my eye.
The company is now crowdfunding on investment site Seedrs and basically, this allows anyone to be a part of Paperclip. You can invest as little as £10 and get a share of the company, which is absolutely fantastic and pretty exciting as it extends ownership to individuals of all budgets.
