Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 64

Our fourth crowdfunding deal is set to go live tomorrow provided the API keys can be swapped properly.  The escrow account was opened today and the listing is ready.  After one more QA pass we'll launch things.  Hopefully this will happen tomorrow.

We're in the process of setting up syndication and sales agreements with a registered broker-dealer to find us new funding for a fee.  I also have some calls scheduled with institutional financiers for providing pre-funding or a backstop for raises to provide needed bridge financing as we get started.  This should help us get more deal flow up so that we're not worried about trying to fund too many deals at once.  Once these relationships are solidified I am confident we can have 5+ deals going at once.

The back-end CRM was recently changed to Zoho.  Sugar proved to be too cumbersome to manage.  Pretty soon we'll be able to measure where leads come from well and figure out what acquisition costs are for new investors.  It will be interesting to compare these costs to what broker-dealers in the space charge to see if it is worth it to spend a lot of dollars on marketing.  One of the advantages of being a sponsor-driven portal is that we're not worried about these fees and thus there is a ton of utility in just having more investors for our own projects.  I think the costs for everything will decrease a lot as we scale.  Our list of 5000 folks may be 50,000 a year from now.  We should know who among those folks actually invests as well so we can target raises better.

We're going to send deals out to our existing investors first to give them a one-day free look.  The new project will be sent to the rest of our list next and then marketed elsewhere afterwards.  I really want to use this raise to test out various marketing channels and campaigns so we can get a good sense for what works.