Reflecting Today at ECW
As I sit in my hotel room wide awake at 3:00 am (I’m still on EST time), I was taking a moment to reflect on all of my work over the last 6+ years playing in the equity CF space. Why am I here? Why do I care and want to help founders grow their startups? Well, my start-up, my love, and my baby were burned when I took on too much money, and my focus changed from creating a great company to making more money for guys in dockers. I knew at that point that a different way needed to be completed. And along comes the Jobs Act. Now, I played more than anyone else in the Kickstarter sandbox, but I knew the time for marketing in that space was coming to an end, and six years ago, I jumped to marketing Reg CF campaigns. Over that time, I ran over 160+ campaigns, each of which has gotten harder and harder. I don’t think this industry is on a good path. The overall size of potential investors is not growing fast enough. Hearing the talks of “just grow your crowd and market to them” should alarm everyone in this space. It takes years to develop a large enough audience to “just have them fund you.” Plus, the money to grow that audience is a massive burden to 95% of the start-ups in existence right now. Oh, and you have the social platforms all in flux. FB is dying, Twitter is dying, Reddit doesn’t allow ads to the platforms, and TikTok, the jury is out). So where are the investors coming from if the platforms are over-saturated with deals and the growth of potential investors is stagnated?
That’s the question that is keeping me up and night. So, with that said, today marks my 43rd trip around the sun for me, and I can’t think of any other place to spend it. Seeing like-minded souls trying to figure out what the future holds is inspiring because there have been some pretty dark days in the last 12 months. Here is a little gift for everyone. I’ve included an image of my foundation funnel for marketing equity CF campaigns. It may look like spaghetti, but watch this video, and I’ll walk you through the thought patterns.
https://www.loom.com/share/872d2a782a8e4e6eb84bea5d57b3a053
Oh, if anyone wants to book some actual time to sit down and chat, here is my calendar link — https://calendly.com/kiwitechjeff/ecw-week?month=2022-11&date=2022-11-10