Grubklub file further large losses

Grubklub raised £290k on Crowdcube in 2015. The latest accounts, filed 4 months late, show further large large losses against projected profits.

It is getting quite hard to make the same story sound interesting. But here goes.

We wrote a short piece about these guys and their creative use of figures here

Grubklub were supposed to making profits of around £210k for their last filed year. Instead they reported losses of £175k. Further equity raises have caused dilution. 

At some stage we suppose that Crowdcube investors will add 2 and 2 together and get 4 instead of £10m each.

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.