Wedio is the fastest-growing camera-sharing community in Europe, where filmmakers and photographers can safely rent and lend gear between each other. Think Airbnb, but for professional film equipment.

In this industry, you need a lot of equipment. Not only a camera, but also different lenses for different shoots, lights, audio, gimbals, and more. And it's super expensive—it can easily cost €100,000 for one setup that works for one specific shoot. At the same time, creatives are not necessarily swimming in cash.

At Wedio, we make it affordable for creators to access gear via our peer-to-peer rental marketplace, and we globally cover the gear whether they’re renting it for a 2-hour shoot or a 40-day expedition.

Outside of rentals, we also offer masterclasses in filmmaking and photography, contract templates, and other resources to over 100,000 monthly guests looking to improve their craft.

As of March 2023, we have more than 20,000 members across Denmark, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and more. We also have over 18,000 listings on Wedio, worth more than €36 million, available for our members to rent.

Our 20,000+ members include photographers, videographers, creators, YouTubers, Instagrammers, and hobbyists, as well as in-house marketing teams at companies and professional production houses creating documentaries, films, and commercials.

Since the beginning, we’ve intentionally defined our community as ambitious creators who want to get better at their craft while enabling others to do the same. Typically, if the ambition is there, the helpfulness naturally follows.

Content creation, photography, and filmmaking are niche industries, but they’re also growing like crazy. For our members, none of this is just normal day-to-day work—it’s artwork. Our community members live and breathe to create. Their emotional connection to the work makes our community even more powerful.

When we first started Wedio in 2019, it took a huge effort to attend conferences, do cold outreach, and work our networks to build up the initial supply of 1,000 members in our marketplace. But as more creatives started using Wedio, word of mouth fueled our growth and really got the flywheel turning. None of that would have been possible without intentionally cultivating community.

Wedio is for creators, by creators. We’re a community, and community is our top priority. Who better really to have full engagement in Wedio through true investment than our own members? It fits our narrative perfectly to open up Wedio more for creators by letting the community invest in us, contribute to our future, and advise us on how to make Wedio even more relevant for them.

A Community Round is an effective way to fundraise as well. We’ve fundraised many times in the past, but it's a lot of doors you have to knock and a lot of no’s. That’s fine—that's just how it is. But how much more effective is it to just pitch the masses rather than knock on individual investors’ doors? It’s also helpful that the terms are set in stone—there's nothing to negotiate, no hassle to get all our investors on the same page.

If we were ever going to raise a future round, we know our community round would be a positive signal. Around 80% of our community round investors use Wedio, which shows that we have great support from our members.

March will be the best month so far for Wedio. I don't know if that 100% correlates to us doing the Wefunder round, but something has happened, and I believe that we’ll see increased customer engagement and loyalty from opening this round.

We’ve always noticed how our community members are more than just lenders or renters—they’re also Wedio ambassadors. After this community round, I hope we’ll see even more of them taking on that role.

But even though we knew our community was engaged, we were still surprised to see the outpouring of kind, supportive comments and the number of members who actually want to participate in our journey.

We hear feedback every so often in the day-to-day, but we don’t always know how people really feel about Wedio—we just know they’re using Wedio. So reading our investor comments helped us see that we’re doing the right things by our members. That was amazing to see.

We already co-create with our co-owner members, but as time goes on, we’ll involve them even more. For example, in March, we started building a Buy/Sell marketplace with our members, and we have already experienced the power of co-creating this product with 20+ co-owner members. With their help, we’re much more confident about launching the optimal buyer's journey.

One of our main drivers for inviting members to become co-owners of Wedio was to include them much more in our product development. I think that’s going to be one of our company’s superpowers.