How to Raise $1 Million for Your Equity Crowdfunding Campaign

Our special guest Jason Fishman, CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA) walks us through the importance of content strategy and how to:

👉 Establish social proof
👉 Convey trust
👉 Encourage action
👉 As well as detailed advertising strategies for social platforms, including when to run traffic campaigns vs. conversion campaigns

18:53 Benchmark metrics to aim for
23:44 How to create effective visuals for your ads
24:14 Recap: tactics and timelines
25:49 Advanced Facebook ads strategies
26:39 Examples of strong ads
27:39 Q&A
29:09 Question: what about click fraud?
32:09 Does a marketing agency need to be specific to my industry?
40:59 Does equity crowdfunding work for B2B solutions in the industrial space?
45:39 What about the B2G space - Business to Government?

If you want to raise capital for your business visit us at https://netcapital.com/

Transcript

Kathy Kraysler: 0:00

Hi everyone. It's Kathy from Netc apital and this week, Rob Burnett, the CEO of Net Capital, is speaking with Jason Fishman, the CEO of Digital Niche Agency, and he's going to walk us through how to raise a million dollars or more for your equity crowdfunding raise. Let's get right into it.

Rob Burnett: 0:15

For anyone who's watching the recording of this welcome. Sorry you couldn't make it live, but hopefully this is educational for you as well. So for everyone here, welcome. This is from Net Capital here, where we're happy to be hosting this content for you. We have our good friend, jason Fishman, here with us today. Not to be confused with the founder of Net Capital, jason Fishman, who some of you may or may not be familiar with, but Jason Fishman is the CEO of DNA Digital Niche Agency, a fantastic marketing firm that does lots of work with many of our issuers, as well as people on other platforms as well.

Rob Burnett: 0:54

So the format here is going to be Jason's going to take it away here in a minute and talk to us for 15 to 20 minutes about all the great things about marketing do's and don'ts, ins and outs, and then at the end we'll be happy to open it up to everybody for questions. Do me a favor if you have a question while Jason's presenting, feel free to put it in the chat. If it's appropriate, we'll answer it at the time. Otherwise, just save it for the end so you don't forget. And then, just as a courtesy to everyone else, please stay on mute until it's time to ask your question and we can go from there. All right, jason. Well, thanks for being with us. We really appreciate it and I'll pass it over to you.

Jason Fishman: 1:35

All right, thanks, rob. I appreciate that warm introduction. I am a Big Netc apital fan, so it is a privilege to be here speaking with you guys to issuers and I have worked on over 350 equity crowdfunding campaigns. My agency and I, dna, started working on Reg D 506C Accredited Investor campaigns back in 2015. Reg CF day one in May 2016,. Started working on Test the Waters later that year as well too. I have my podcast, test Optimized Scale, episode 120, coming out this week Eric Cox from Net Capital one of the top episodes to date, I may add. Definitely go check that out.

Jason Fishman: 2:20

We put out monthly webinars with different info as well, too. We want to be an open book in terms of what we see working and not working in the space, which brings us to today's topic around targeted advertising and how to use ads to raise a million dollars effectively on your Reg CF and then really scaling from there. Maybe you're going for 1.235. You hit that metric. You do everything you need to to keep it live. You hit 2, 3, 5 million. You need traffic to see enough conversions to substantiate your goal. I'm going to do a full breakdown for you today on how we see that happening on our live campaigns. As Rob mentioned, we've worked on some of the top Net Capital campaigns. I've spoken to even more of them. That's not even to mention other places where we do investor acquisition, whether it's equity crowdfunding or working with fintech apps, working with VC funds on their LP, their limited partner acquisition. That's what's in the background of what you're going to hear here today. This is not just a marketing 101 best practice. Hey, facebook says you should do this. Google says do that Post on social media. No, we are presented with far more aggressive direct response goals and guidelines from issuers and have been able to effectively operate in that space.

Jason Fishman: 3:49

Now I have to start out the presentation by mentioning equity crowdfunding does not work for everyone. Simply by building a campaign does not ensure that you're going to be able to bring in investments, let alone hit a full million, hit 5 million. I'm going to go over some of the numbers of campaigns that actually do. 90 percent of campaigns are raising less than six figures a month right now. For July was bit higher about 150 K, projecting 130 K as the 10 percent top 10 percent mark for what is raised in August, and this is based on Kingscrowd Kingscrowd metrics actually going to be on a presentation with Kingscrowd tomorrow as well. So I point that out to really emphasize statistically you're not going to raise $5 million in two to three months. You can and using these models you can map out how to get there. But simply going live, it would be very difficult to see that miraculously happen out of thin air, which is why it's so important to be able to plan, build out content marketing funnels to drive traffic into and consistently run advertising into.

Jason Fishman: 5:06

It scale, as you're seeing, performance Less than 1 percent of issuers have raised the full 5 million. You probably need about 50,000 visitors per million dollars raised. That that's based on a thousand dollar average investment. Again referencing metrics off Kingscrowd, they even say 500 to 1000 as an average investment on a reg CF. That's based on a 2 percent conversion rate. Google says an average conversion rates 2.35 percent. Given that's internet wide, that includes, you know, t shirt purchases, everything that you would convert online 2 percent. So to see 2 percent on an investment campaign without speaking to someone offline is pretty good. 50,000 visitors, 1000 investments off that thousand dollar average. So advertising is a great way to get that traffic there.

Jason Fishman: 6:02

I recommend starting early Can't relaunch engaging with the marketing group or consultant from the start, we'll give you the best chance to hit your goals. That is not a promotion for us as much as a promotion for marketing. Get the marketing conversation going. Talk to groups like us, whether you work with us or not. Get those insights. You want to talk to people who've been down your path and could give you the cheat codes. Start that discussion early, not once you're live.

Jason Fishman: 6:29

Here's a breakdown of all of the live campaigns. This is from a webinar we did in July, so these stats are of July 18. All the campaigns have gone live. So, of 6100, 50 percent in raise over 74 grand. The top 20 percent raised 340, 3304 excuse me $1000 or more. The top 10 percent 647,000 or more. 420 have done over a million. Again, this is as of last month, this is slightly higher now and 35 have done 5 million, including eight this year.

Jason Fishman: 7:03

Now everything starts with strategy and I don't have these numbers here to discourage as much as to say this is very much a marketing exercise. Get the traffic there. Just because you've done a filing does not mean you're going to raise the full amount Again, talk to the top issuers, talk to agencies, talk to groups that have done this. Get their tips. In my perspective as a marketer, it all starts with strategy.

Jason Fishman: 7:28

If we're driving across country, we're based here in Los Angeles and Marina Del Rey. If we're driving to New York, you'd want to know that I had a plan in mind. We may shift course. Hey, there's some weather going on. Just had a hurricane here in Los Angeles, really just a rainstorm. But hey, we want to avoid this weather, we want to make this stop. We have extra time. We're going here. You can pivot, but without a map you're driving, you're just going, you don't know what's going to occur. So I talk to issuers all the time that want to skip these steps. I highly highly recommend doing it. I built a model called the eight point plan and it takes place over the course of a month. When we do it, I have done it in workshops in about four hours. It's all comes down to how long the research takes. So these are the eight points to the strategy. Also, if you know marketing and know the channels, for us, it's a bit quicker, but you can work with the consultant to set this up.

Jason Fishman: 8:31

Industry analysis and competitor marketing audit are week one Industry analysis. I'm usually looking at two to three industries, one of them being equity crowdfunding to get the real time data, and then finding a group that operates in two, finding two different verticals to research, because I find companies operate in two different spaces. If we just researched marketing agencies about DNA, we wouldn't get the full story for what we do as an agency could look at, you know, vc firms, investment banks, accelerators we're not really those either. It's taking information from both those to kind of determine the verticals that we're playing in and what's working in terms of marketing, which shows up in the competitor marketing audit. We'll look at at least two to three examples here.

Jason Fishman: 9:15

Want to know what they're posting on social channels, how often they're sending out emails and the content that is being distributed there. Who's talking about them in the news? Who's talking about them on social media? I'll look at their site analytics sandwich. Traffic's going through there on a daily basis. I'll look at their search terms and determine how organic traffic's driving there. You can look up their search ads. You can look up their Facebook ads. You can look up. You know so many different things and understand, or at least look to tell a bit more of the story of how they're bringing on investors, how they're bringing on market share that these competitors, your ads are going to show up right next to theirs. Literally, someone's scrolling through their social feed. They're going to see their ad first, then yours, is yours going to compete.

Jason Fishman: 9:59

Are there some things you could take so that your ads are performing at a stronger level? Without doing this, it's really shooting in the dark, even for a group like us that have. You know, volumes of these campaigns live at any given time. We need to have the real time analytics, and I'm taking screenshots myself of ads that I see every day, new ones that are launched for XEF every day. We then build out target audience personas. I want to know what these individuals do on the weekends. I want to know where they go online. I want to be able to target them. This is going to come in handy as you're going through Metta and building out Facebook and Instagram ads and using their data which is very unique, by the way to be able to drive them to your offering page. This is going to come handy for setting up on any ad platform. Once you have a better idea of those audiences, you can look at their touch points, how to reach them organically with content marketing, how to reach them with paid advertising and what you're going to do on each of those channels before moving into creatives.

Jason Fishman: 10:59

Creatives these are the ads themselves, as well as the content calendar, the content marketing that's going to be distributed during the first month, first few months of your campaign. Map it out now. Take your audiences through a storyline, whether it's through the content marketing or through the advertisements, and you're going to see stronger performance. Scrambling to determine what to run as an ad every week, you're just not going to have that higher level view on what your audience is experiencing. You get to manufacture that here in the strategy stages. This is why it's important for me to talk about strategy before just saying set up ads, here's how you do it. Go for a 10x return on ad spend. That this is really where good ad performance is born.

Jason Fishman: 11:46

Strategic partnerships by the way, we're on week three here. Those industry overview and competitor marketing audit for week one. Target audience marketing channels. For week two, creative and strategic partnerships. For week three, I like to put together a perspective map and a messaging sequence to reach these folks. Sometimes I can run ads from their page. Sometimes they'll give me audiences that I can then target the advertisements with. I am a big fan of LinkedIn outreach. I have webinars on that channel on its own, but it directly supports ads as well, too.

Jason Fishman: 12:22

And then projections only way to measure with numbers. We like to build out an algorithm consisting of three stages impressions, clicks and conversions for each channel. So we're not expecting a million dollars to be raised in one month for only spending $10,000 that month. Meanwhile, if we are spending $10,000 and we produce 100k in investments from that, and then the next month we spend $20,000 and that produces 200k now we're at 300k and we keep taking that to higher and higher levels we can have some real metrics to strive towards and determine when we're off, determine when we need to optimize further.

Jason Fishman: 13:06

I break all this down into an executive summary and activation section one and two pages. You could present this to your CFO, to your lead investor. Who's going to be funding it? You could talk about it with a marketing agency you're bringing on. If you're doing this on your own internally, it's a great first step for an agency-client relationship a consultant you're working with and getting them fully familiar with your brand and building out a full campaign roadmap. It really is the campaign you're building. In these stages, a successful strategy is crucial to a successful race. Planning to fail, so that went wrong. Failing to plan is planning to fail. If you're unsure about whether you should put the time into a strategy, there's probably something in the background about the success of that strategy and why you do not want to invest time into it.

Jason Fishman: 14:01

Next comes content marketing. If you're sitting there with your meta ads manager out and wondering why I'm talking about strategy and content marketing and an advertising webinar again, this is how you produce ads that are outstanding in terms of industry averages. We've seen it take seven touchpoints or more to get investors to participate, to convert. We look at stats that show a good content marketing funnel allows ads to convert at a higher level Statistically. When we say content marketing, we break it down into three areas social media, email and long form content. This is typically referring to a weekly email newsletter, still one of the most effective forms of digital communication today. Here's some stats on how emails growing portal updates. Once a week I would say minimum you should be updating your net capital page. So this is post strategy. You're live, but you already have your first portal updates ready to talk about momentum, to showcase that traction, to get audiences excited about physically putting in their KYC, their know, your client information and converting on net capital. So post updates there. I've seen other recommendations three to five portal updates a week. I think that's great, but you do need to really think that out and make sure each one has real substance to it.

Jason Fishman: 15:35

Live events this is a live event. Webinars you can give you a platform to speak directly to your audience and create an interactive experience. Here's some stats on why webinars work, not just that we like the format. I'll see webinars take place and $50,000 investment come from it. And then you know that investor reaches out and says over LinkedIn and says, hey, I would love to introduce you to a friend to get you on a call, another investment coming out of it. Make sure this is all discussed with the capital. Make sure everything you're doing is compliant, but you can't have enough Content marketing, let alone social proof. In my opinion. Content marketing you're only distributing to your audience and then you're making it searchable online so that investors who are performing their own due diligence see this type of momentum. Not, you know, social page that has had no posts in weeks.

Jason Fishman: 16:39

Third-party validation is the best asset for your campaign. This can include, you know any type of press, investor testimonial, strategic partner review, anything like that from industry leaders. There's a fun little meme my team's created about it. And now we get to advertising Again. I am an advertising guy. I am big on this form of traffic. If you have an audience of hundreds of thousands, you know you could close the campaign without any ads at all. There's a lot of different ways you could get traffic. You could get covered by a financial email newsletter. You get covered by press. There's nothing said that you need to run advertising. Meanwhile, you should know about it and determine whether it's right for your raise.

Jason Fishman: 17:26

And it's a powerful tool. It's, you know, gives you the ability to say I want a thousand investors to go to my offering page tomorrow. I want to retarget those guys and bring them back. So it's, it's a great way to get impressions, to get traffic. You know, if you do a great piece of organic content, you can get more eyeballs around it. It makes all of the difference.

Jason Fishman: 17:51

So Facebook Tarding allows us to pick an interest. You could choose equity crowdfunding. You could upload custom audiences we have databases of millions of historic equity crowdfunding investors at this point and could upload them, segment them, run ads to those individuals. They don't know how they're being targeted as much as the fact that they're seeing an ad and they're seeing your ad. It feels like everywhere that they go advertising. On Facebook there's over a billion daily active users. It gives you access to Instagram placements. It gives you access to their audience network, which includes thousands of the top mobile websites and apps.

Jason Fishman: 18:28

There's a huge audience, great click through rate, conversion rate. That's why we do it. We test other ad channels. It's the most consistent by far. Audiences can interact with it. You're showing up right next to posts from their friends, family the brands that they follow the closest on a daily basis. It stands out what's a good ad the KPIs and the industry averages. We're generally looking for a click through rate of over 1%. Many campaigns are two to 5%. Then there's a cost per investment cost per acquisition of an investment. If you're somewhere between $100 and $200, every $100 you spend, you get an investor at an average of a thousand 10x return. That's a good place to be.

Jason Fishman: 19:12

I will mention that it is tougher to track just on the pixel. You really need to look at total spend to total raise, even in a given period of time, matching the traffic analytics to make sure ads are the primary source of traffic. You're not buying the ad spend, you're buying the traffic. You're looking to think about the overall results. No one wants to spend, but people want traffic. Founders are able to utilize that. You want to make sure you're getting good click through rate and then hitting that 2% or higher conversion rate. If they're not converting, you want to look at your offering page. What can be added to convert audiences quicker? Maybe you're taking them to an email sign up first a landing page and getting that audience to sign up for an email before they're going to your offering page. That way you can continue to email them as well as retarget them with ads. You could try different audiences, different ads, including different messaging and visuals, different funnels that's what the landing page would be. You could look for more of a call to action and then you want to find opportunities to scale.

Jason Fishman: 20:15

Audience. Founders generally start with us at a certain budget level and then, as they're seeing performance, are saying, hey, can we increase this by 2x next week? I want to produce twice the amount of capital next week. That work, let's do it again the following week. So, once you're hitting the conversion rate, a good cost per acquisition, good return on ad spend. It's when it's typically time to scale. You could front load ads and that gives you a bigger retargeting pool. The people that you're running ads to that have already been your offering page and are more likely to convert. The performance is really in the retargeting but it's typically once return on ad spend is there.

Jason Fishman: 20:53

Could also be during closing, getting that fear of missing out from perspective audiences and getting them to convert. So going to go this for a couple more minutes and then we're going to move to Q&A. Going to do a quicker overview of some of these pieces. But I have a lot of info here and can you know, rewatch the webinar, make materials available by request, but essentially on and I'm happy to speak with anyone after today's discussion. But audiences about strategy already experts here but age, location, interests can all be good advertising variance you want to set up four to 10 audiences to begin.

Jason Fishman: 21:37

Here's a breakdown of traffic. So let's say we're spending 10,000 dollars at a $20 CPM and that's cost per Roman numeral, m thousand impressions. If you're getting a 2% click through rate, enjoy their campaigns and that two to 5% click through rate level, that's 10,000 clicks. That's a dollar per visitor, dollar per visit, I should say, because click could be from the same person multiple times. If you're getting 100 conversions off, that it's only a 1% conversion rate. Again, we, we aim for two, but but that's still 100 investments that have occurred. If that's a $750 average investment, average order value is the proper digital marketing term that that's a 7.5x return on ad spend initially. Then we see investors participate multiple times, about 10 to 30% of investors participating multiple times. Maybe it's on your next round. So if it's two investments over two years, what have you that? That could go well beyond it and that's how you would get from a 7.5x to really 15x lifetime value over time from these audiences. But, as I mentioned, it could be 50,000 visitors per every million dollars raised. Here's some direct, conservative metrics being produced. None of this is guaranteed. It's all based on your conversion rate. Really, that that is the most important metric here.

Jason Fishman: 23:13

Here are some tips to write ad copy that converts. Writing for specific audiences. Again, you want to A B test variant, test multiple audiences. You want to speak directly to them. You want to ensure your copy goes well with your visual Use. One call to action, one button there. Keep it short, punchy, valuable. This is not an article that has to pass the browse test. Create urgency. Use persuasive words. Here's some different tips on how to create visuals for your ads.

Jason Fishman: 23:43

Real photos, real video, selfie videos do really well on these type of ad campaigns. Believe it or not, it feels very native for the social platform. Use real people over animations video as much as possible. Investor customer testimonials. Investor customer testimonials Again, people don't believe what they see online. The more third party validation, the better design images for specific audiences. You're going to customize as much as possible.

Jason Fishman: 24:11

So here's a recap of some of the structures I've mentioned here, with some timelines and some metrics around it. Four to 10 audiences to start. Two to six creatives each. You're looking to run that for about a week or a thousand clicks per segment. Analyze that the impression, click and conversion level, along with retargeting pool and report to somebody your partner was as an agency. We're talking about it with the client. It really makes it more of a discussion and helps for optimizations if that takes place and it's not just one media buyer talking to themself about it.

Jason Fishman: 24:51

Optimize for each creative. Run it for another week or a thousand clicks. Now you can start reallocating spends at the creative level, meaning, hey, we have six ads running, add three and add five are doing really well, let's put more budget behind those. Run for an additional week and then you could start optimizing at the audience level. Run that for a week. You get the idea. You need data. It's a sample. That's a good. You need a large enough sample size. You need that focus group occurring each week. You can then start to scale the budget, but only once you've optimized at the creative and audience level. You could then start to narrow down ad sets. You want to continually test new audiences. You could start beginning optimizing towards channel from there and adding new channels and I would say scale every week or thousand clicks, as you're seeing.

Jason Fishman: 25:42

Performance time is the most important asset here. Could go in details about these and setting up, you know, campaigns towards prospecting with traffic and towards conversions, three targeting and how that produces a better cost per investor. Creating lead formats, testing new Facebook ad units that are coming out all the time. Use third party data partners. Again, our audience data that we've created has been instrumental in the success of these ad campaigns. So you know, look for groups like us, look for various ways to do data mining, trying to create a formats. You could build retargeting pools by retargeting off your assets, such as a video, not just your offering page, and getting a much lower cost per view and retargeting audience. There's a lot to the bid system and some hacks around that advertise from multiple narratives, even run from different pages, and develop a replicable user journey.

Jason Fishman: 26:36

So, going to cut the ad conversation here, we have some different case studies in here and why they matter, and this was out of 15 X return on ads that actually worked on three of their campaigns to regs, yep. And then we have this. This was a campaign that had a massive, massive investor base built. The average investment was only around $300 and even higher return on ad spend. Have some other great visual opportunity visuals to be able to analyze here campaigns that did seven figures, campaigns that leveraged media and even I've been able to run multiple rounds successfully.

Jason Fishman: 27:24

I hear some influencers, third parties, talking about why it's a great investment opportunity and using that as an ad format and that that's how we've seen success. I want to open it up for questions and be able to answer. You know, different inquiries around your campaigns could even pull up an ad campaign you're running right now and advise on it. But I want to make this as interactive as possible. I hope I didn't go too deep in the presentation there. Wanted to make it thorough, that that that is the roadmap you can use that directly to read really raise millions of dollars. Our campaigns have collectively produced hundreds of millions and that's the actual instruction manual.

Rob Burnett: 28:20

Thanks, jason, that was awesome. I hope you have a really good information in there. I hope everyone got a good rundown. That was a ton and obviously I'll reiterate what Jason said, which is both Jason and myself and our teams are happy to hop on and do one on ones with any of you or anyone watching this recording If you want to die deeper and and get into it in more detail. But, that being said, happy to open it up the floor to questions. At this point I see Steve and John. Steve, why don't you go first, and then John, I'll get you next? Can you hear me?

Rob Burnett: 28:57

Yes, we got you.

Speaker 4: 28:59

Awesome, yeah, so great presentation. Really really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Very informative, thank you. So so my question is what about, like these click farms that are chewing up ad revenue and stuff like that, these fake clicks and fake followers and bots that are online? Have you been noticing this is an issue, or ever affect some of the campaigns?

Jason Fishman: 29:20

Great question. You have a background in advertising. I imagine being able to talk to click fraud and some of the things associated with it. So you're never going to get 100% authentic traffic from advertising with as many extra layers that you put on there and third party tracking. You want to be playing for the traffic that you are getting that you can tell is engaging and ultimately converting. And if there's a percentage of fake traffic that's associated, there's only so much you can do to combat that. If we're hitting a good cost per acquisition, if the cost per click and associated metrics to produce that cost per acquisition are in good ranges, clients are happy, we're able to scale and it's. It's a good utilization of the tool where, if we avoid advertising altogether out of fear that some of the traffic is going to be fake, I just don't see that to be as beneficial of a route. You can set up multiple stages along the way for the funnel to ensure that traffic is real and audiences are actually responding, without having to place a full investment. We're we're uploading email lists and running ads to those specific custom audiences Much better chance work. We're only reaching those users and we know they're real people and that's why we've uploaded them. So there, there's ways to combat it. But you know, I'm playing for the percentage that is real, understanding that some of it will not be.

Jason Fishman: 31:11

And, uh, yeah, I could speak at length about that, as you guys could talk. I could speak at a length about the marketing of these campaigns. We're very passionate about it. We've put a lot of time into, uh, the systems that we use. I did the presentation in 25 minutes and I was, I was hoping to do it in 15 to 20. Uh, but, uh but. But, good question. Happy to look at it with you guys further. And you could always look for discrepancies and analytics from Google analytics to first party analytics, from from meta as an example, and their ad platform, and try to understand what percentage is actually engaging.

Rob Burnett: 31:48

Sean, do you want to ask your question next?

Speaker 5: 31:50

Well, yeah, just a little background. I'm John Clark, founder of global cancer technology, and the work non revenue private company were developing a drug to treat brain cancer, in particular Glioblastoma, which is a deadly brain cancer, and the same drug is doing very well in breast cancer. And I did a CF with Robert a couple of years ago and, uh, can't say enough about how great net capitalism Bob and his team are. Uh, we started out we were raising 105,000. I think that was the limits at that time and we got into it and was struggling, wasn't going very well and at that time we were attaching a drug to a nanoparticle to get it into the tumor and we we couldn't figure out what we're doing wrong. So we went back. We just changed the theme of it. We said let's call this remote cancer drug delivery, remote controlled cancer drug delivery, and in three weeks we sold our $100,000 just because we changed the name of the campaign and we know clearly that we're not marketing people. So we got a little more expansive and I did a reggae plus qualification with the SEC. We spent six figures to get our audits done, hired a firm in Los Angeles and we totally bombed out.

Speaker 5: 32:58

It was on another platform, but the point being that you got to be a digital marketing company If you think you're going to get on these platforms and do something because it just doesn't survive any other way. So my question for you is I'm I'm in, I'm only out of yours for somebody that can tell me that they are specific to my market, that I am in cancer, I am in curing drug or drugs a cure. I'm into these types of ways to get my message to these people, because for some reason, it just seems to be a big stretch If you've got a digital marketing company that can do work for Audi, they can do work for General Mills, they can do work for Mayo Clinic. And I just don't see, or confirm for me, if my thinking is correct, that the more specific you can find a digital marketing company to the market you're in, the better off you are. Does that make sense?

Jason Fishman: 33:50

Yeah, and I would say the market that you guys are in for this initiative is different than the market that you're in for your growth milestones, Although they can overlap, and actually I've written articles about about that. I have a Forbes article about it. But I would rather use an equity crowdfunding agency than an agency that's only worked on, let's say, MedTech campaigns, even if they're the best at it, because this is an equity crowdfunding campaign. Now, yes, absolutely, we work with other marketing agencies. We play well with others. We work with groups that have long standing AORs, agencies of record, and they'll use us in addition to what they're doing. Again, we can collaborate well but, like you said, just changing some of the messaging around, you saw stronger performance. So, if you're researching groups in your industry, or if you're researching groups that are similar to your industry, but in equity crowdfunding, you're probably going to be able to take from some of their messaging formats and concepts, seeing what audiences are responding to today. Furthermore, working with a marketing agency in this space, like I mentioned, we have a database, a very large one, of historical equity crowdfunding investors, so I could reach the actual people who are investing in MedTech on these platforms. So it would be a major advantage over performing against the best MedTech agency in the world for this initiative.

Jason Fishman: 35:41

They would likely have to hire some strategic marketing experts, some strategic market experts even to be able to fully activate a campaign in this space. I know I would look to bring on a consultant, some experts that only operate here, but I would look at this as an equity crowdfunding industry marketing campaign. And yes, having a niche focus is very good. When you get to the larger level of agencies you were talking about some very long Audi, some of the big Fortune 500 type companies there's actually a vertical exclusivity. So automotive manufacturers wouldn't necessarily want to be at an agency that another automotive manufacturer is at for various reasons and they'd want the focus for that market really going to their brand. So there is a level past it. Just with my background with agencies can tell you that. But yeah, for these campaigns I would definitely recommend bringing on a consultant, if not an agency team members however you're bringing them on who's worked in this space directly.

Rob Burnett: 36:53

And Jason.

Jason Fishman: 36:53

I can.

Rob Burnett: 36:53

just, I can add a little bit of color to that too, because obviously you work from the agency side, I work on the funding portal side, and so you know I've seen people with all types of agencies. I, in general, agree with Jason's assessment that the marketing agencies that have a niche around investors and equity crowdfunding tend to be stronger than the sometimes amazing ad agencies but that don't have expertise in this space in terms of getting people to convert into investors. That's pretty. That's a pretty. I've seen that multiple times.

Rob Burnett: 37:28

The other thing for everyone here, right, as you think about your campaign in general, I give advice. You know, I hold office hours and I give advice to a lot of entrepreneurs, and I like the idea of every entrepreneur thinking about two big buckets of investors as you think about preparing the fund raise. The first is the bucket of passionate people who want to see you succeed, right? So, john, in your case it might be cancer survivors or doctors, right? People who are passionate about your, your thing, whatever your thing is, and your thing might be something that drives a lot of passion, like cancer research. It might be something that is a little more boring, like infrastructure or advanced materials, but there are groups of people we've seen that are they're passionate about who you are and what your business does. And when that happened, when you find those people, they tend to invest less, even because they're trying to get a return on investment, but more because they just want to see what you are doing exist in the world and they tend to be great backers and if you can get them returned, all the better.

Rob Burnett: 38:23

And then there's the investors the people who are their investors. They're looking for a good return on their money and they're looking at deals all day, every day, and those people are sometimes easier to convert because they know what an investment is. It's easy for them to click the button, it's easy for them to send the money, but it's hard because you're competing against every other investment out there in the world, every other place they can put their money. So both of those groups having having a strategy for both of those kind of macro groups, can be very advantageous as you think about how to how to find investors for your campaign. I know there were some questions that came in via the chat. I think, terry, there was one maybe from you had one earlier on. If you care to share, otherwise, we're happy to ask it on your behalf.

Speaker 6: 39:09

Yeah, no, I actually I had something to add to what you're saying to for john. There's a book called faster cures. It's a. It was written by Mike milken. He's got the biggest investment agency groups in the world and he deals with cancer. He's a cancer survivor and he's right there in LA. So you should check him out because he is probably your best point of contact just to get what's in the market that he can do for you, because he looks for that every day. All right, Thanks, terry.

Speaker 5: 39:45

appreciate that he actually had prostate cancer, from what I understand.

Speaker 6: 39:49

He did and he's a survivor and he's raised billions of dollars for cancer, I mean, and he had that big event. The last event was in Wilshire at the Wilshire hotel and you know LA and, but you can't miss it. But the book is really fascinating because it gives you everybody he's worked with and it gives us this whole story and worries that today and it's just called faster cures, all right. Now my question was we're going to do?

Speaker 6: 40:25

We've created an industrial solution, not a product that looks, you know, with a lot of that. I see that is raising crowdfunding. It's something somebody's created to sell to them, to the public, and we've created as an engineering solution that goes from the industrial waste streams back to the supply chain. And I've talked to Eric Cox and we're in a dialogue right now about using net capital and he's listening to what everybody's saying. Is there a specific isolated corner that crowdfunding would give us the best bang for our buck? In raising crowdfunding capital up to certain levels and this net capital success stories is a company would buy our product or our resource that we take from the way streaming, converted to something that he could use, as well as the whole battery industry.

Jason Fishman: 41:28

Yeah, so you know I'm really on the marketing side and have this presentation on advertising as a focal point of marketing, and that's what I would really point to as one of the big advantages. So you could speak to strategic investors offline. I really like Rob's breakout of all the different types of investors that you could work with and, it's not to say, equity crowdfunding is always the row and for everyone. But what it allows you to do is have this offering page live. I've heard issuers say it acts as a PPM for them, where they're able to talk to investors offline and point them directly to the offering page and have the valuation set. I mean there's no preferred terms, that that's why the law was created to make these deals available and to give everyone an even playing field from the investor side. So you can have this page up and running. You can have a video on there that reflects what an in person with you would feel like. Potentially, you could have aspects of the offering page mirror would be in your pitch deck, maybe with more depth you know headlines with more depth, so they can get everything they need to invest without speaking to you and then, instead of speaking to I don't know, dozens of investors a week. You can have thousands of investors a week as it's working. You could scale that up, so it's thousands of investors a day with advertising. Get getting to your offering page.

Jason Fishman: 43:00

We've seen user owners come out of this and that's what I was talking about. A little bit is going after your target audiences. I've seen that on the B2B side. By the way says in just you know consumer products, where B2B clients invest, then become a client, or maybe they're already a client and they invest. I've seen franchise opportunities. I've seen M&A discussions come out of emerging acquisition discussions come out of an equity crowdfund campaign. There's really no guarantee to any of that as much as hey. This is a place for you to list your offering page, really refine it and then look at a variety of different traffic sources to bring people to your offering. Then, as you're seeing things work and can take it to the next levels.

Jason Fishman: 43:45

That's why I got into equity crowdfunding. I was working with startups as a growth marketer and I had my history working with Fortune 500, it's on advertising, but love focusing at the early to mid stage level and being part of the growth and once I learned hey, I could use my digital marketing skill set towards fundraising and actually bringing in capital for the groups that we work with. And that was always part of the discussion is you know, how do we bring in more? We have this round coming up, so I think that's what this opens up and if that sounds interesting to you, if that sounds worthwhile to test out, there's a lot of benefits outside of that. You know, I've heard founders talk about the valuation they got here, versus having to speak with VCs that just wanted to tear apart their pricing. There's a lot of great things about equity crowdfunding. For me, it's that advertising, it's that marketing piece and being able to bring, in many cases, millions of people to the offering.

Speaker 6: 44:45

Well, yeah, and I agree with everything you said, but one of the to me, one of the key triggers here is momentum. You start the ball rolling. You got to keep it rolling and the big benefit is that it's a consistent almost. You have to, whether you hire someone like yourself or a group like yourself, that consistently manage the inputs that they're getting from the, the, the reactions and the engagements of the ad or the, the request for capital, or if it starts to get stopped and go, it loses the strength and you lose the crowd attention. You know, and, like you said before, you got to really make sure that you're you're delivering your, your requests to the right audience. So now would this also apply for an incentive in the B to G, b to government grants, dod, doe, those types of agencies in developing a better rapport or a better explanation of what you have to offer?

Rob Burnett: 45:53

I can probably answer that, jason, if you don't mind. Terry, good question. We've definitely seen some companies that have big government contracts and are more in the B to B or B to G space do really well on the platform. I could think of a couple of one in in court tech, one in advanced materials that, had you know, was building a factory in a certain state, things like that. I don't know if you've ever seen you know an equity company campaign result directly in like a government contract. But saying that you have lots of everyday people as shareholders can be very compelling to government agencies and things like that. It just depends on how you package it and kind of what you're looking for out of what the government contract might be or or who you're working with. But it can be, you know, a nice thing politically to you know whether or not you're actually working with the government or just in general to talk about how you know you've got thousands of shareholders and you're doing this for all of them as well as yourself, right? That can be very powerful.

Speaker 6: 46:57

Okay, agreed, thanks no problem.

Jason Fishman: 47:02

And, terry, just to add to the momentum part, you know I want to echo Rob said, and on top of that, on the momentum part of it, that's why you'd want to build out that strategy, that's why you'd want to map out a content calendar. So you have something to talk about each week and you're determining it at the beginning, you're building out that storyline. It could be, you know, you have 50 investors. It could be retail level, minimum level investors, but but you know them. Or just one way or the other, they've agreed to work on a piece of content with you and each week there's something new being distributed across your channels.

Jason Fishman: 47:42

That momentum you're talking about is there and it's a great thing to point out because without it it could work against the campaign. Ultimately, you'd want the capital to do that. So if every time an investor gets there there's there's more that's been raised oh, last week I was here was 120, somehow. This week there's 240 raised and there's an extra couple hundred investors based on some of the content they're putting out. Two weeks later I went on as a half million dollars. Right Now there's 700. Now that that is really the ultimate to be able to demonstrate to the crowd and have that crowd effect, that crowd dynamic take place. But you know, content is a great way to have some of that occurring, with or without performance, and with it it adds to it and creates more of a social proof, third party validation sentiment. Anyone who's looking at the campaign?

Speaker 6: 48:43

Well, I agree to buy back in. I mean, I think that's a critical point and I've seen it with one of the companies that I was talking about. That I talked with Eric about is that they could. They're constantly in in front of people and they're constantly in the raised position all the time and they they pinned up at least 7 million plus. Okay, so you're absolutely right. If you you got to be, you got to share some of the goods to go back in, and you know to go back in and refresh it again and go in and ask for another one. So, yeah, well, also, is it possible to get a copy of your, your PowerPoint?

Jason Fishman: 49:21

Yeah, yeah, I yeah. I was looking to want to check that capital. I have no problem.

Rob Burnett: 49:27

No, no, no problem, jason, happy to let you share it. We can if you send it to us. Actually, we can send it to to you, harry, or because we just have the signups. I'm happy to share it around with anyone who wants it, there you go.

Speaker 6: 49:38

I love that you know, because I think it gives us a basic understanding who are not marketers. You know when you're an engineer and you're in the solution business marketing is. What tool do I use? Yeah, I would like to have that. That would be nice.

Jason Fishman: 49:55

Absolutely my pleasure. Happy to answer questions anytime, as well, as Rob mentioned. So if I get a LinkedIn question, if you guys reach out to Net Capital, actually they could put you in contact with me. How are.

Rob Burnett: 50:09

We're in close touch.

Speaker 6: 50:10

Yeah, Eric, he's got my stuff, Robert.

Rob Burnett: 50:15

Great, everybody. I know there was a one question with from Bill, who it looks like he's left, but I'll answer it real quick Is there, are there any industries that can't use regular crowdfunding? There are some things around cannabis, gambling, firearms, a couple of things like that, but for the most part everyone can use it. It's very rare that we have to turn a company away, but that's for the most part. It's pretty wide open.