Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 17

The Fundrise folks delayed my meeting with them again. This is quite frustrating and I let them know I am not happy about it. The wait should be worth it though because we are still pulling many new investors from the site. I am meeting with some folks that can assist with growing our network tomorrow because there is simply too much to do for me to do it all myself now. Our marketing plan needs to be worked and molded into something more cohesive and measurable. This should take shape over the course of a few months.

We're meeting with the PR company again tomorrow and we should have copy written for our new site soon. One of my partners is spearheading the site development effort, CRM tool selection, etc. That combined with our enhanced lead generation effort should help us figure out what media pull the best and focus our efforts where they have the most impact.

BiggerPockets continues to be a great source of leads. I spoke with an investor today that wants to invest $200k and is really just trying to decide if they want to do it via our fund, a JV, or via a crowdfunded deal. Through those options we really have pretty much all of the bases covered if they like our deals. Most people end up liking the deals and just have to select the best option for them. Those that end up not investing generally want to do their own deals with their capital, which is understandable. I think at least half of those that plan to do their own deals would be better off investing with us in the short run, but there is something to be said for learning how to do it on your own and practicing with your own money. We're really targeting folks that want to make their money work for them instead of the other way around anyway.

I have officially exhausted the crowdfunding sites for real estate. iFunding, Fundrise, GroundBreaker, and ForeFund Capital are our pared-down list folks right now. I am speaking with GroundBreaker again on Friday to check out their new product and we're set to follow up with ForeFund Capital soon too. iFunding and Fundrise still are where I spend about 80% of our energy given all that is going on. They have very different business models, but both add a lot of value for us given what we're currently doing. In the long run our own marketing efforts and lead generation should be superior to working with the portals, but for the next long while they'll provide a lot of utility for us.

We have about 8 projects that should exit in the next 3 or so months and that capital all needs to be recycled. For the next little while I am going to be working on business development and letting the leads grow organically with the help of some folks so that we can really target our efforts going forward. Deal flow has slowed a bit while we wait for these exits to happen because we're pretty much at our limit for capacity with 37 doors in process. We want to scale right so we can keep capital safe and thus we need to let some of our operations relationships with builders and other team members mature before we scale more.

I'll post more after my meeting with Fundrise later this week. We should have the securities attorney engaged soon and be working on a test-the-waters campaign next week most likely. That should hopefully boost activity on Fundrise and investor interest. More to come soon...