Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 20

I locked up an off-market deal today where we will develop 4 units in the heart of 78704. Our company will fund $275k of the development and we'll probably raise $375k on iFunding. The deal demands a 45-day close with $5500 in earnest funds at risk so it is important to be able to raise the remaining equity quickly. We're rushing to get the information needed to post the deal on iFunding. The title commitment is likely to take 3 or more days and hopefully we can get the balance of the material submitted and ready for the raise prior to then. This will be our second crowdfunded deal.

We are live on ForeFund Capital's site. They offer lead generation for a fee and we want to see how their organic site pulls before paying for any leads.

Our new website's soft launch date is still set for April 4th. We'll likely need a few weeks to work out the bugs, but I expect to use it heavily in late April. I have some teams working to generate 50 leads for accredited investors each week right now. Once we have a scalable and repeatable process we'll start paying for lists, which we have already vetted pretty heavily.

Our Fundrise network is up to 121 investors today with $8.36M to invest. We are pretty much pulling 1/day now pretty consistently using just an organic approach. I am still working through their frustratingly slow process of getting a test the waters campaign going and our securities attorney is working to bypass some of the folks that are the blockers at Fundrise to get traction quicker.

We have a demo with GroundBreaker's new software this Friday. The system sounded cool on the phone so we may try it out for a future deal. I still like iFunding's model the best for what we're doing right now. Our own site or Fundrise may be better in the long run though. Time will tell. These small $600k - $1M raises in 30 days or so are pretty easy to do on the portals so we plan to keep using them. Larger raises probably need a different strategy unless we have a lot of time to raise the money.

Overall we've made huge strides in 2014. By the end of the year I hope to have a machine built with staff managing it, etc. Working on all of this is a lot of work and it distracts from deal making and overall business development. It is an important part of growth though so we'll devote a lot of energy to it this year.

There is a crowdfunding conference in Austin in May of 2014. I'll be speaking in some capacity at the conference and the iFunding guys will probably be flying into town to speak out my WIN meeting that month. I'll also be attending the dealmaking symposium in Vegas in April where Ruth Hedges will be speaking. This is the first conference Joel Block is hosting for successful syndicators too after 5 years of running the symposium. I'm looking forward to both events and it should be a busy next couple of months!