My First Experience With Fundrise

With the passage of the new JOBS Act many new websites have sprung up to help connect promoters with investors. I have visited many of the sites and several of them are far from impressive. That was not the case for Fundrise. I was immediately drawn to the simplicity of the site and how it uses popular networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to help well-connected promoters interact with their subscriber base easier.

It took me about 2-3 hours to build our company profile on the site. We used some of our logo artwork and many of the elements from our website to copy/paste things over. Today I spent about 2 hours scrubbing our list of investors down to about 220 total to invite to our network on the site. Our goal was quality and not quantity given that online advertising is new and we're always super-cautious about adhering to securities laws. As of this evening about 4 hours after inviting folks about 5% of them have showed up and our network currently consists of 13 accredited investors.

When I was building our profile I noticed that the site said we need 30 investors in our network to get promoted from whatever page status we have now to where things show up in the main gallery so that everyone can see them. I guess this is to weed out the weak companies so that people with money to invest see the stronger ones immediately. They are probably trying to build the site's following too so you need some "sweat equity" via invitations to get featured in the main gallery.

We've yet to post any new materials and I don't think we can do so until we reach the 30-investor mark. That is something that I'll explore with the site going forward. Our network is displayed nationwide in a nice, interactive map. This is a pretty cool feature so you can see where your investment dollars are coming from. We have several international investors too so it would be a lot better to see a map of the globe, but I guess there are screen constraints and possibly some legal constraints for that.

The site has some pretty cool features like being able to follow people, etc. that are very similar to LinkedIn or Twitter. In general you can request to join promoter's "network" to have access to their public or private offering. I have requested access to another Austin-based company and one of the BP investor's companies, but I have yet to make any investments so I can't comment on how those features work. The site has a place to put your bank account information so I would hazard to guess that it is pretty straightforward to wire money into the placement and sign subscription documents.

I'll post more on Fundrise after we get our network beefed up some and have had a chance to place some offering documents on the site. There is something called "testing the waters," which I interpret to mean that one is posting the opportunity and gauging interest before they spend money on documents. That could be inaccurate though. I'll post more on this when I get a chance to make an offering for our development company; Inner 10 Development.