Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 8

We got 6 new investors to our Fundrise network this week with zero effort. Our total committed funds is now $6.24M, which is probably highly inaccurate (low?) because people seldom select the proper amount that they'd really invest. I'm not sure how useful this feature will be going forward.

I flunked on my interview time with iFunding so we didn't get any movement with those guys this week. We still have many outstanding questions about their agreements and how they screen investors. Hopefully we'll get some movement on that next week. Catlin from Fundrise missed our call so we'll have to visit with her next week at our rescheduled time.

I spoke with some folks from Crowell this week and they were less than knowledgeable or helpful. The one nugget of advice that I recall from that conversation was to consider the total cost of keeping investors if they're smaller like what one will probably get in a Title III type offering. That was good advice and something to consider going forward.

Some PR firms were helpful this week. I think we have selected one that can assist us with getting ad spots in the future and sculpting our website as we develop it around a 506c offering.

Georgia Quinn from Seyfarth Shaw was super impressive on the phone this week and I circulated one of her crowdfunding articles on BP earlier this week. She really seemed to grasp both the legal and marketing aspects of what was needed and offered some great advice. She is a likely candidate for doing our fund docs in the future. One of the great things is that she has some products coming out to drastically reduce the cost of what are currently very bloated budgets needed to do a placement.

I met with the Quest folks this week about co-sponsoring some webinars to attract more investors. We'll probably kick those off in March of this year. They're the most entrepreneurial TPA I have ever met and seem to understand promoting events well.

The highlight of the week came today. I met with Bob Carbone from Crowdbouncer and they'll likely provide the screening services for our 506c. I was super impressed with him and their price structure was more than reasonable. $250 for an implementation fee that is credited toward each screen later on. I think the cost of screening was something like $13/investor, which seems like a bargain. They use a lot of the technology exposed from Dodd-Frank and the IRS records and my partner is investigating their API for integration with our new website.

A couple of securities attorneys meetings got pushed to next week. After a few more conversations we'll be ready to select a firm to do our documents and get things rolling. We have a call set up next week with a company that white labels products for starting our own crowdfunding portal and we'll be shopping for broker-dealers to purchase too, but my preference still is to use existing portal infrastructure if we can get comfortable with some of the portals. A lot should come out of iFunding and Fundrise discussions next week.