The problem Payout. solves

Around 90% of startups fail. This failure percentage is consistent throughout all different industries. And can you guess what’s the leading cause of this failure? Insufficient funds.

Even though there is around $150B dollars invested yearly, and much of it in the form of startups, many small startups go out as SOON as they face some competition. Many great ideas in the past have gone down to irrelevancy simply because they couldn’t generate enough funding, and VC’s and Angel Investors had lost hope in them. This is where we provide an alternative.

Essentially we ease out the legalities, and make investing and raising funding much more accessible to small start-ups and people looking to start investing in companies.

Normally, a start-up has to approach a single big corporation, or an angel investor to raise funding in series of rounds and through a daunting process, where the investor can sometimes completely pull funding incase they aren't happy with how things are going and can throw around their weight in a majority, basically deciding the fate of the small start-up.

Our platform gives back the power to the start-up, where there is a much bigger chance for them ensuring proper funding, as instead of one important major player in the game, it's a bunch of much smaller investors, who believe in the start-up and fund through our platform.

Essentially, equity crowdfunding offers the company's securities to a number of potential investors in exchange for financing.

Let us put something in perspective for you.
The story of Facebook's (now Meta) $2-billion acquisition of crowdfunded virtual reality headset maker Oculus Rift in 2014 is now the stuff of legend. Oculus Rift raised $2.4 million on a donation-based crowdfunding portal from 9,500 people.
However, these backers were donors rather than investors, they did not receive any payout from Facebook's acquisition. Had this been through equity crowdfunding, a mere $250 would have turned into $50,000.

Challenges we ran into

User flows and UX: Our product challenges a very complex process, investing in companies. It's a time taking process and we set out to make it as easy as possible for any regular person to start investing in companies that they believe in. This faced the challenge of how we could make our app give out enough details about the company to investors, but still, be easy enough to set up within minutes. We put a lot of thought into the experience of the app so that anyone can understand the process.

Research: We had to ensure the actual feasibility and workability of a radically different idea such as equity crowdfunding. We spent a lot of time learning about the financial markets and how this fits into the legal system.

Investing: The actual process of investing money in a company and stocks, in general, seems like a scary process to some people, especially when big sums of money are involved. We had to find a way for the user to trust our platform and know how much of the company they will own. Our application's UI makes it clear so that the user knows exactly where their money is going. We also used Stripe as our payment processor, which is trusted by millions of users so that every transaction made through our website is secure.

Payments: Figuring out how to use Stripe was a big challenge as it was the first time we added payments to any of our projects.

Imgur API: We utilised this API to upload images onto their server and grab the image links to store on our database, to save on storage space for now. The imgur upload API required OAuth 2.0 authentication which was a hurdle for us and took some time to actually figure out

Mobile app: https://github.com/arhaanb/payout-mobileapp
Backend: https://github.com/arhaanb/payout-backend
Frontend/website: https://github.com/arhaanb/payout-frontend