Interesting results for Crowdcube's Just Park.

Just Park has had £6.2m invested via Crowdcube over two rounds. The company's original projections were a joke, as were their second round ones. They lost over £1m in the 9 months to Mar18, meaning their losses are rocketing again. 

They have enough cash to last till March 19, at this rate.

Whilst the accounts appear stable, a figure in the creditors account (current) listed as 'other' for £1.4m would worry me. 

Good news is reviews have improved. 

How much more money people are going to throw at this company will be interesting to see. Clearly the total invested so far of £6.9m is not enough. Just shows how naive they and Crowdcube were when they set out on this journey. 

As we said consistently, a major flaw in the model is that the company has little control over the end service offered to their clients - the parking spaces are controlled by their owners not Just Park. Unhappy clients do not tend to make for a successful business.

We will see.  

Justpark continues to get appalling customer service reviews

We have mentioned this several times - Justpark's customer service stinks.

Take the month of December and up to now on Trust Pilot.

18 reviews.

6 of these are 1 star and 1 is 3 star. The rest are 5 star. You cant go lower than 1 star but all of these sound like they would if they could.

That's over a third that think the service they received is rubbish. Surely that's not how to build a profitable company?

And the complaints are consistent - parking fines, lack of help when space not available etc etc.

Where are they now? 3 of the Best - Our version.

Just Park raised £3.5m on Crowdcube on a business model that has now been shown to be a little fluffy.

The Crowdcube plans showed the company making losses in 2015 but only £400k not the £1.7m just filed.

We said at the time that the main flaw with their car park sharing model was that the people projected to make all the money were not the owners of the spaces but Just Park. This has proven to be spot on. There are numerous examples for the past year of people booking a space and arriving only to find that the space is taken and there is no way at such short notice to sort out the problem. Some people end up with £100 parking fines as a result. Customer service appears to be poor. Looking at Trust Pilot reviews, we are struck by the complete contrast between the 5 start reviews and the 1 star reviews - not much in between. A bit like Marmite.

When we questioned JP on this flaw they just said na - it's not a problem. We now have £1.3m of extra losses to prove it. They may yet get to grips with it but we doubt they will be able to scale to a level that will see any CC investors getting returns. Their main hope now must be that JP don,t fold just yet. There has been more money raised and will no doubt be more in the future - all diluting the CC shareholders. 4 of the Directors left in 2015.

GrubKlub

Yet another internet business that only makes losses, Grubclub or Klub, showed exceptional growth in their Crowdcube pitch when they raised £288k in January 2015. They used the unlikely metric of GMV to big up their sales pitch or show traction as they put it. GMV for those not in the know is the total sales value for a company that is say commission only based and gives a highly misleading image of a company's size. So for example the GMV for Grubklub in 2014 was a projected £400k (which at the time of the pitch was in reality an historic figure). The real sales value as reported in the filed accounts at CH for this was £34,994. Now the 2015 accounts are also filed and show a net revenue of £34,189. In the Crowdcube pitch this 2015 figure was given as £157k on a GMV of £1.7m. From the figures it looks like the real GMV was around £400,000 - so zero growth.

We emailed Grubclub and were told that our numbers were all wrong; although when asked they failed to provide the numbers that were correct. Either the filed accounts are wrong in which case this is for HMRC to look into, or they are way off target.

Angel Berry

Raised £190k in 2014 on Crowdcube. Despite the fantastic projections that Crowdcube allowed them to use to sell the equity - Angel Berry have made actual real losses of over £340k to date  - breaking most records in 2015 by filing losses of £150k against Crowdcube projections showing EBITDA of £612k. That's worth a gold medal surely.

Just Park anywhere.

We wrote about JustPark a while ago, as their customer ratings appeared to have been fiddled.

Fiddled as in there were over 1000 reviews but the vast majority of these were from a very short period and were all 5 star. Most of the remainder were naturally spaced out and were very poor.

Anyone who invested in this outfit through Crowdcube should take a look at this - https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/justpark.com. The last year has seen mainly 1-3 star reviews and yet the overall rating here is still 5 star because of the nuanced block of 5 star 'reviews'.

We think the problem may be that the people offering their spaces are not really too bothered by the level of service they offer  - why would they be, they just offer the space to JP and expect them to do the rest. Justpark have absolutely no control over this crucial issue - their parking customers' interface with the parking space and owners of that space. Angry customers do not make a multi million pound business.