Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 21

After carefully considering listing our new project on iFunding we decided to capitalize it with our existing set of JV investors instead. The time frame on the raise was simply too short with too much earnest money exposed and too much work as overhead to present it online. I'd say we need at least 60 days on our contracts to make crowdfunding online viable. It will also be nice to have less earnest money exposed for crowdfunded projects too so that we're not generating extra churn if we have to shift funding strategies mid raise. Hopefully I can get a new project up in April.

We're making slow and steady progress with Fundrise with the securities attorneys, etc. Their model is quite jumbled given how they're trying to position themselves for Titles III and IV. The agreements they want you to sign pin virtually ALL of the risk on the promoter, but they want to screen everything through their broker-dealer. Given that they are relying on 506(b) type self certifications too it is unclear how you'd be marketing to non-accredited investors on their site now. I have several questions in to them about that and I am getting dodgy answers right now. 1124 Linden will still be a target project for a test the waters campaign if we can get this all solved.

In the process of exploring all of this I have learned that doing a test the waters campaign and down-selecting to strictly 506(c) accredited investors to close out the raise is permissible. This makes a lot of sense. However, going the other way from starting with a C exemption and trying to close out as an A will not work. I'm not really sure how all of this matters if all of the investors on the site are supposed to be pre-screened as accredited, but I guess the portals want another layer of protection for themselves and to try to pin this risk on the promoters; many of which probably fail to understand the nuances here well.

Our site construction is going well and we're still hoping for a soft launch to work out the bugs next week. We'll see how that goes. This is likely to take the rest of the year to iron out entirely, but the effort is well worth it given the upside.

Our Fundrise network is up to 127 investors with $8.58M to invest in just over 13 weeks. We made good progress with Groundbreaker last Friday about possibly starting something on their site. We still have iFunding and Forefund Capital as other raise resources as well in addition to our new website. I probably will stop looking for new options now and instead will focus on paring down the best options from these existing 5 sites. I'd like to end up with around 3 options:

1. Our site with our marketing

2. A broker-dealer-like site that can raise money for us

3. An open site like Fundrise where we can find and interact with new investors where we have to organize them by ourself

Forefund Capital and Groundbreaker may get folded into item 1 above somehow with some new marketing processes we set up once we figure out how everything works better. For now we're still forging these relationships and learning how everything will fit together. At the end of the day I'd like to get at least 50 new investors interacting with us weekly going forward. We can then measure how many of these 50 actually invest and how long we need to interact with them before they're ready to invest. This will take some time to learn and I will blog about the progress as it happens.

Our monthly WIN meetings and proposed Google Hangout "edutainment" series are next on the list after all of this gets formulated. I expect to start on this around the May or June time frame.