What Is Crowdlending?
In brief, Crowdlending is when individuals lend you money.
This is important because oftentimes banks don’t want to lend money to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Crowdlending eliminates the banks as an intermediary and allows individuals to lend money to other individuals. Another name for Crowdlending is “peer to peer” lending.
A Brief History of Crowdlending
Crowdlending has been around for several years. The biggest two Crowdlending companies/websites are Prosper and Lending Club.
While the crowd-loans on these sites are structured as personal loans to the business owner, they can be used for business use. For example, small business owner and clothing designer Lara Miller has received three loans via Prosper which she used to launch her new website and clothing lines.
Clearly, you could consider taking a loan for your business from a friend or family member. However, with Crowdlending, you have a much larger number of potential lenders. Also, while not being able to repay your loan is always a terrible situation, it’s clearly worse when you know and see the lender often.
Additionally, many individual lenders on Crowdlending websites take a portfolio approach. That is, they lend to several people. So one of their loans defaulting may not be devastating to them as it might to a friend or family member making just one loan.
Debt Versus Equity
In brief, raising equity is selling shares of your company. You are not required to pay interest on the funding or the principal back. However, the investor owns a piece of your company and if/when you exit, they will take their share.
Conversely, with debt, you have to pay both interest and the principle back.
It is important to note that equity is oftentimes MUCH more expensive than debt in the long-run. Let me give you a simple example.
Let’s say you sell 40% of the equity in your business for $1 million. A year later, you are able to sell your company for $10 million. The investor would get $4 million of the sales price (40%). So, the cost to you of the $1 million investment was $4 million.
Conversely, let’s say the investor lent you the $1 million at 10% interest. In that case, the cost of the funding would have been $1.1 million – which is the principle and interest you would have to pay back.
In this scenario, debt funding would have cost you ONLY $1.1 million, nearly 75% less than the $4 million cost of equity funding.
Crowdlending Versus Debt
Crowdlending, gives you several benefits over traditional debt or bank loans:
1) Your chances of raising Crowdlending are much higher since banks reject many more loan applications
2) Crowdlending gets you lower interest rates than banks because you are eliminating the bank as a “middle man”
3) Crowdlending has much fewer requirements with regards to the application and documents you need to submit
4) Crowdlending dollars are generally raised much faster than bank loans
Crowdlending For Businesses
I have been telling entrepreneurs about Prosper and Lending Club for years. Because they are relatively easy and low-cost forms of funding. However, they both have a big negative, in that you can generally only raise loans less than $35,000.
That’s why I will thrilled when I recently spoke with Endurance Lending Network.
Endurance has amassed a bunch of non-bank lenders including successful entrepreneurs, wealthy individuals, family offices and institutional investors. And, these individuals lend between $25,000 and $500,000 to businesses – the amounts entrepreneurs and business owners actually need.
Conclusion
Crowdlending is a great new way to raise money to start or grow your business. It’s much easier, faster and less expensive than both bank loans and equity funding, making it a perfect choice for most entrepreneurs and business owners.
