Birchal is a platform where you can invest your hard earned cash into a business via crowd-sourced funding (CSF). Moneysmart has a good explainer on CSF if you're not familiar. I subscribe to Birchal's newsletter and like seeing the businesses that pop up asking for money and what they plan to do with it.
In 2024 I invested in two companies via Birchal/CSF: Evee and Broad Radio. Evee is a car sharing platform dedicated to EVs and Broad Radio is a podcast network aimed at women.
I invested in these businesses because both are in sectors (EVs and digital media) that interest me and I wanted to keep an eye on what these companies do. How do they grow? What tactics do they try? How much money do they lose/make? How do they communicate with shareholders? How transparent are they? What sort of work is involved running a business like this?
I forgot about my investments until recently so I thought I'd see what Evee and Broad Radio have done with my money in the 30+ months they've had it.
Unfortunately, I am unable to give details on Evee and Broad Radio as I am bound by confidentiality clauses as a shareholder as outlined in both company's constitutions. What I can give however, are my opinions on my experience as an investor in these early stage businesses.
Evee managed to raise $236,000 from 143 investors. I paid them $1,000.48 on April 23rd, 2024.
The last I heard from Evee was on the 19th of December 2025, where they published an investor update and their annual report for FY24-25 - I'd love to share excerpts of these but that would be disclosure of confidential information and could be grounds to have my shares sold at a 30% discount.
With that in mind, the vibe from those documents is that the status of the business then was pretty bleak to my untrained eye, mostly due to some very well capitalised competitors (Turo, Hertz) joining the EV rental market after Evee did their crowdfunding round and their options for growing the business were very limited due to their financial position.
Looking at Evee's socials, nothing has really changed with the business since that investor update. Ditto the CEO's LinkedIn page which has been silent for about 5 months.
Broad Radio received $373,132 from 269 investors and I paid them $505.60 on Feb 20th, 2024.
They were much more active than Evee with updates after the crowd funding around, with a flurry of announcements in September 2024 about a range of new shows and their smartphone app, but after that, nothing in Birchal or Cake (the platform where company documents are held), they prefer to email instead, which is fine by me.
The last I heard from them was the 15th of June 2026, when they emailed an annual report for FY24-25. That's the only piece of "inside" info or investor comms I've received from them in over 2 years. Again, I can't share what's in this document due to the confidentiality clause in the company constitution, but it's very enlightening and access to this type of document is why I invested.
I can't go into details, but I can say that The Sizzle, my shitty newsletter, is wildly more profitable and has a better outlook for future growth. Not a good sign for Broad Radio considering the media connections available to the directors, show talent and board. I honestly don't see a path for them to grow in any meaningful way outlined anywhere.
Details of that path - something I would think they'd share with investors if they had one - was another reason why I invested. Not to give input, because I have no idea, but to see how someone with skin in the game approaches the problem.
The point of this post isn't to shit on Evee and Broad Radio (and there's a lot to shit on if I wanted to or was allowed to!) - business is hard, stuff doesn't go as you expect, I get it, but I am disappointed at the lack of transparency with investors. Both Evee and Broad Radio, along with their CEOs have basically gone silent except for the updates they're legally obligated to provide.
Even at shit-kicker jobs I'm expected to give at least a weekly update of what I did at work, is it too much to ask for a quarterly update from the CEO? Even if that is "yeah I talked to x, y, z about a, b, c and it didn't work out, but I hope that d, e, f in the pipeline turn up something". An email to all the investors, or a webinar wouldn't hurt. It shows that you're actively doing something and haven't moved on to something else more shiny and forgotten about the people that invested in you.
I don't know if this is common with CSF, but I expected a lot more transparency from the businesses and was the reason I invested. That puts me off from investing in other companies as the chances of these investments making any proper returns is very, very slim, so without the learning and investment "experience", what's the point?
The only upside of my investments in these businesses is that I feel a little better about the businesses I have tried and sucked at. Sure, Evee and Broad Radio got hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in the 2 years since they've struggled to do anything meaningful with it. They're just as bereft of ideas as I am. We're all just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
