KickfurtherReviews of kickfurther.com

The idea is good, and many of the businesses offering investment opportunities (co-ops) are reliable and honest. They either repay early or on-time. If they have a problem, such as slow product delivery, they keep the investors notified and they clearly make every effort to catch-up on repayments as quickly as possible. That's the good part. Due to severe mismanagement, many rogue companies also have offers on the site and, due to the way Kickfurther operates, it is impossible for investors to do proper due diligence themselves. We have to largely rely on the research done by Kickfurther staff. The same staff whose job it is to bring onboard more and more companies and who, no doubt, get commission on every new company they sign. The result is that a significant percentage of the offers end up either only paying back over a much longer (think 2x or 3x) period than agreed, or don't pay back at all, or stop paying after the first couple of payments. Kickfurther Management have repeatedly proven themselves almost powerless to recover funds from the rogue/failing companies. Current investors are, on average losing a considerable amount of their money. There are plans for big changes to tighten up on which companies are allowed to offer, as well as various improvements to the system. Early Kickfurther investors have heard this all before, several times. Unless the management is completely changed, this business will never be viable. Stay away unless you want to lose your money!

It is a great concept, but very poorly executed. I joined at the start of 2016 and everything appeared ok, but within a few months it became obvious that several of the businesses took the finance as a last attempt to save their failing business. Others took finance, providing timescales which they never intended to keep and fell way behind in their payments or did not repay at all. Some just make an absolute minimum payment to string along the investors as much as possible. Some businesses are fraudulent and disappear once they get their money. Kickfurther staff have proven themselves incapable of controlling the businesses and when things start going wrong, they just stop communicating with investors. I'm losing about 20% of the money I invested and there's no hope of recovery. It will only get worse for me, as more of my investments default. I am not an exception, but the average for those who have been invested for more than say, 9 months. EDIT: There's a Reddit sub which might be useful when trying to decide on Kickfurther. Go to Reddit & search for the sub: KFTalk It is a bit negative, but the info is accurate, especially the statistics. Kickfurther had their own sub, but they blocked access because they were getting too many complaints from users!

When I first heard about Kickfurther I thought it was a great concept and I eagerly jumped in head first. I now have over a year of experience with the platform and would not recommend it to anyone. When the offers work as intended (ie the company is not actively trying to scam you or fails immediately) it is a decent system. However, the amount of failed and outright fraudulent offers on the platform are way to prevalent. Sean will claim that they are improving their screening process but he has been making that same claim since I signed up and quite frankly it is still a horrible process based on the amount of fraud/horrible offers that still get through. When an offer does fail you will not get any updates from Kickfurther staff for months at a time (I am in one offer where we have not heard anything for 3+ months now.) Kickfurther will also try to make you think that they are on the side of investors but the majority of times they will have policies in place that benefit the companies first. One example (there are tons) is that a company can list an offer as being 3 months with a 6% return so a reasonable person would think they are earning 2% return per month. However, the company could also have a 2 month offer window where the offer doesn't official start for 2 months but as soon as backers make claims for the offer amount kickfurther charges your account. So even though the offer pages says 3 months/6% your funds are tied up for 5 months and you still only get the 6% return. This and many other things have been brought to Sean's attention and he simply does not care.

Management is literally 2-3 recent grads who have no idea what they are doing. There have been dozens of companies that have already scammed the system for hundreds of thousands of user's money and the company has shown no signs of due diligence in stopping this. DO NOT INVEST - for your own sake!

Technology : Too many bugs on the website, missing core feature such as a functional dashboard, a way to calculate profit, ways to track correctly returns. Management: Sean has decided to downplay every single issue backers have and this platform is way too business oriented instead of backers. Bad decision taking, extremely poor customer services, emails go unanswered for trouble COOP. My last two cents about your management, when your CEO is having a fight and petty arguments over Reddit, it shows us what type of a company you guys are. Handling failed COOP: You guys deserve a - score here, you've done a terrible job providing basic updates and you keep finding excuses. Finally, I would give you guys a minus score if I could, but I can't. You deserve to be sue for false advertisement and lack of competent skills.

I started using Kickfurther over the summer of 2016. I had high hope for this platform as per their marketing on their website and really wanted to make it work. It has been nothing but nightmares the one after the others. On some investments, their transactions dashboard was double charging me. Too many errors with money put in my account and then taken back. No available support throughout their website (no chat, no phone number, no email address...). I had to go in a reddit forum to finally get the email address of an individual working at Kickfurther and try to get things resolved. The quality of the information provided by kickfurther about companies is consistently incorrect. I am assuming that kickfurther does not have a quality control process when a co-op goes live. The reporting from the platform is almost non existent which makes it impossible to effectively manage my co-ops investment. Many users have said that they are doing their own Excel worksheets to track their co-ops investments. It takes too much time to manage my co-ops (hours a week), it is not scalable. I was not made aware when a co-op is not paying back and had to find out myself, going through their convoluted non user friendly website. There is very little communication from kickfurther as to why a co-op (company) is not paying back and what is being done. Kickfurther does not provide internal metrics like default rate, etc...I only have been with this platform since summer so I do not have enough history but I have already 4 of my co-ops that are not making their payments and not much information from the companies themselves and kickfurther. If they do not pay, it will take me years to break even (assuming every other companies pay me back...). My personal experience has been very frustrating and aggravating (and I am an investor/trader). I really wanted to make it work as I was very excited to be able to invest in a different asset class. I think this company went live without being prepared and 2 years latter is still providing a very inadequate and overall poor service. To put it mildly, if you join the platform consider yourself part of a beta release and accept that you will likely lose money. Also understand that it will take a lot of your time to review and manage your co-ops and likely aggravate you a great deal along the way.... Edit 12/03/2016: The following reddit forum (KFTalk) has a post that captures the Troubled and Cancelled investments (Businesses that have stopped paying investors, never paid, paid less than supposed to, paid back partially, etc....). Not perfect but at least it provides an idea of the range of the various default rates and the problems rate to expect: Sorry, I am not able to paste the link as this review system does not allow links in reviews. You would have to go to the reddit website and in the search box: KFTalk Update 03/19/2017: 1- KickFurther still refuses to provide a default rate or any other helpful to investors metrics of that type. The overall default rate (troubled and cancelled investments) we are calculating on the Reddit forum is +27%. 2- Kickfurther leadership keeps on engaging in completing fake surveys and making false statements without identifying themselves. The VP of Operations and Business Development at Kickfurther was caught on this very website making a fake review and very misleading statement. 3- On their Facebook page Review: 16x "1 Star" reviews and 15x "5 Star" reviews. 25% of the "5 Star" reviews have been made again by Kickfurther leadership team. 3- Height (8) complaints to the BBB have been made recently by investors against KickFurther 4- KickFurther is still deceiving potential investors by advertizing an outrageous "38.16% average annualized coop profit Margin" and furthermore making no mention of risk or default rate.

Over 90% of the co ops are late or are absconding. KF should enforce stricter guidelines before allowing companies to raise funds, rather than trying to earn maximum commissions. May be because even if a co op fails, KF still gets their commissions. KF should be held accountable if a business fails completely. They should at least distribute their commissions from that co op to backers.