Welcome to the League! 

April 12, 2021  

Hello Portal Owners,

We’re all busy people and so I’ll skip the pleasantries and focus on why this year you need to join the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA), the group that helped usher in the age of Crowdfunding and for nine years has advocated for you and your business each and every day whether you knew it or not.  

Invest 3 minutes of your time now into helping secure your portal’s future. Let’s start. 

• Scale for Free. You’re busy running a crowdfunding portal and don’t have the time to personally advocate for the policy and regulatory changes that make operating your business easier, more profitable and sustainable. 
• Expertise. You know that there is a regulatory, bureaucratic, and administrative process to getting policies and legislation drafted, introduced, championed, debated and ultimately passed. But again, you don’t have the time to make industry advocacy yet another full time job.
• Strength in N

Introduction to Investment Crowdfunding 

For as long as entrepreneurs have started businesses they have also needed capital to grow and scale those businesses. To that end, this article explores how HBCUs can leverage Investment Crowdfunding to help their students, teachers and alumni raise capital for their businesses, while providing HBCU community members the opportunity to be more than just customers of businesses but also equity owners in the businesses they make successful. 

Investment crowdfunding is when businesses and entrepreneurs engage the general public to become investors into their businesses. Title III of the Jump Start Our Businesses & Startups Act (also known as the JOBS Act), was signed into law by President Obama on May 16, 2016. With this historic Act, it finally enabled Main Street Businesses to raise investment capital from retail investors (also known as Customers), along with accredited and institutional investors, aka “Sharks”, “Angels” and “VCs”...more

Hello Beautiful People, Founders, Entrepreneurs and Business Owners! Ya’ll rock and I want you to know that I love each and every one of you. What you do as innovators and creators truly does make America Great. Did you know that because of your hard work since 2016:

• $585M has been raised via investment crowdfunding
• Resulting in a total of 88,000 new jobs and
• An economic impact of $3.2B over 1000 local communities across all 50 States 

The real awesome thing is that in 2020 alone, JOBS Act Investment Crowdfunding generated $214M in small business funding, an increase of 105% over 2019, and 35,000 jobs created during the Pandemic using a regulation that is limiting for both investors and businesses alike. And don’t even get me started on how Customers and Communities have responded to the opportunity to invest in Main Street businesses since the new rules went into effect on March 15, 2021. In case you missed it as of March 15, 2021 the new limit for Regulation Crowdfunding (aka ...more

How would you like $5 million for your social enterprise?

The SEC this week raised the limits on equity crowdfunding to $5 million. This is huge.

The aggregate limit last was was just $1,070,000. The limits on accredited investors have been completely removed! So angel investors and venture funds can invest as much as they want right along with your other individual investors who may only put in $100.

Ordinary individual investors can also now invest more with limits tied to the greater of income or net worth rather than the lesser, meaning everyone you know can invest something--most can invest thousands of dollars legally.

There are lots of great resources available to help. If you have questions, put them in the comments and I'll answer those I can and I'll tag my expert friends to answer the ones I can't!

Let's rock this for good!!!

The secret to raising money for your business is having money to spend raising money for your business. Thank you for attending my TedTalk on how businesses are using JOBS Act Investment Crowdfunding to raise up to $5M for their business. Note - they’re spending $250k to $500k to do it. 

As you get over the shock of the Sticker Price of how much it costs to raise money for your business below are the Three Steps you need to know to understand why it costs money to raise money. In short, you need to be ready. 

Step 1 - Getting Your Business, Business Ready 

You need to have a BONAFIDE BUSINESS in order to legally raise money for your business. What does this mean if you’ve been in business for a few years or decades? It means you’ve already invested in starting a business and are more than likely 95% Business Ready. 

However, if you’re a StartUp, are you business ready? More likely, if you’re thinking about starting a startup (aka, you’re a wannapreneur) is your star...more

CrowdInvesting doesn't mess up your captable.

The only down side of having your mom, 8 auntie, 30 cousins and 3000 second cousins or customers on your captable is VC hate it when they can't dilute you down to an employee. That is the real reason VCs don't want a quote-unquote "messy" crowdfunding captable. It makes it harder for them to push a co-founder on you and claim 3 board seats so that in 18 months they can push you out of your company. Typically VCs reserve this treatment for women Founders but alas, greed is almost free of sexism...almost. 

However, I digress. Because seriously, Sharks are sharks and you've sorta gotta expect that kind of behavior from an industry and practitioners who call themselves Sharks, right? I mean the only ones you've really got to keep an eye out for are the "Angels''. Swear to g-d the best trick the Devil ever did was pivot into investing into early stage startups. What's one soul when you can claim the upside of an entire industry? Know what I...more

Your customers are you business' biggest influencers, not "Influencers". 

"Most influencers couldn't get their dog to sit."

Darren Marble, CEO of Crush Capital. 

The great thing about customers is that Customers are Humans and Humans rarely change. Yes, behaviors, expectations and even language adapt and evolve but at the end of the day, Human Customers all want pretty much the same thing, predictability. When you walk into your favorite store, restaurant or barbershop it's your favorite because you know exactly what you're going to get. The food is predictably delicious. The products predictably great or in some instances just predictably "okay" and you know that. You knew that going in hence why you're there. Especially when it comes to comfort foods. Yes, you know they're "bad" for you. But when you're in need of a bit of culinary nostalgia, a particular smell or taste that takes you back in time, to a place where an emotion or memory lives, you beeline straight to that s...more