Oscar Jofre  14:34

So, gentlemen. Andrew, good to see you. Jose, nice to meet you. meeting you. Yeah, likewise, likewise. So we’re, we’re waiting for our, our colleague, Mr. Fishman, so who should be making his way through unless there was a anybody read the news, anything happening, California, any weather breaks.

Andrew Corn  17:23

And then once you mean, if I could weigh in on the IRA thing for a second, please, while we’re waiting. So, you know, the IRA, the, I’ve invested in private deals by opening a self directed IRA, and then I have my traditional IRA money. There’s instances where I think the IRA makes a ton of sense, in instances where it may not, we have a kind of real estate deal we’re doing now. It is a essentially, you’re investing in a mortgage pool, the deal pays seven and a half percent, it’s extraordinarily secure. And that, I don’t know, if I would do that in an IRA that self directed. There, the fees are higher with those types of self directed IRAs. So something like that, that’s pure income, I may say, oh, gee, I’m gonna do that in a taxable account. A different deal that I’m working on is a very specialized hotel deal with Phoenix American. And there, yeah, there’s an 8% preferred return. But you’re there for the upside as well. And the upside might be 15% 20% 30%, total IRR per year that I don’t want to pay the tax on. So certainly, if I could defer it and put that in my IRA, I would. I’ve invested in that one for my kids. So those are in trusts. And anyway, I did my test one, which I know you’ve seen Oscar, which I just did, in a direct account, but want to make a larger investment, it will definitely be through my self directed IRA.

Oscar Jofre  19:09

But it is interesting, though, what he said there, I didn’t catch on to that noise with Bill before. And you know, it’s funny, like, every time I speak to all of you, I learned something, because you’re paying a little close attention. And one thing that just drew to my mind to ask, so even though with all this kind of noise we hear and all that, where is the robot and he said it. What we didn’t know is if somebody was even thinking about using it, just bear in mind what he said, if somebody was even thinking about using it, and didn’t have any information on the site, their immediate jerk reaction is to go back to fidelity and Schwab and they would say, No, no, no. So it becomes the red flag. And I never again, even at that moment, that’s when I said to myself, wait a minute, we’re kicking people out and we’re not telling them what it means to so It’s an exciting I think it’s a great frontier. And it’s great to have partners like Bill Humphrey to provide that insight. Mr. Fishman, it’s great to see you my friend. We were afraid that something in California either forest fire tornado waterflood I don’t know, you know, but you’re here. That’s the important thing. 

Jason Fishman  20:23

Here, excited to be with you. Always a pleasure, participate in the KoreSummits and with yourself. Oscar, Andrew, pleasure to be on a panel with you. We’re big E5A fans here and excited to be on Jose as well to send our regards to Chris Shawn, excited to be on with everyone today.

Oscar Jofre  20:44

Gentlemen, have fun. And don’t forget, this is the this is the whole day got started on real estate. One of the things I don’t know if you heard the earlier conversation, prop tech, and real estate is emerging. Really exciting to see that. And obviously you heard the preparation, all the items, you’re a vital piece to all of that. But there’s one thing about real estate that I really like is the visualization. We just shown a video about a brand new. I don’t know if you guys ever been to Dubai, but in Dubai, everything is big, right? They’re now building. So they already copied the Eye they already copied. So what’s next? They’re gonna copy, obviously another great wall. So they’re building a great wall. So it’s a so I leave you all enjoy it. I will come back and get you late. All right, cheers.

Jason Fishman  21:41

Excellent. Excellent. Well, excited to be here with everyone today. Did we already go through introductions? And everyone already talked about groups and what we’re currently doing in real estate equity crowdfunding? Okay, why don’t we start there? Jose, you want to kick things off? Tell us about all the amazing things Arora project is involved with yourself and your focuses as well?

Jose Renteria  22:08

Sure. So I’m the Director of Marketing at the Arora project I, you know, create all the strategy, implement on the plan, make all the changes and make sure that everything’s running smoothly. To date, we’ve raised the I believe we’re at $120 million right now. Mostly through Facebook and Instagram. We’ve also dabbled in LinkedIn. And we’re specifically going to try on Tick Tock now, which sounds a little crazy. But the watch time on Tick Tock actually surpassed YouTube. That’s an insane stat right now. So we have to create special content for there just because we can drive more traffic or lower cpms. And you will convert it on the retargeting later on on Facebook. So it’s pretty interesting what we’re doing and all the plans that we have for the future to help founders raise the equity they need to succeed.

Jason Fishman  22:58

Excellent. Excellent. always enjoy conversations the Arora project success record as loud and clear. So thanks for sharing that. Andrew, what about yourself? What about E5A real estate involvement and just overview for any listeners that have not had an opportunity to speak with you yet?

Andrew Corn  23:17

Well, if there are any listeners who are on a course summit and have not had the opportunity to hear me, I’d love to meet them. Both of them probably, you know, say the same as you and good to see you both. Actually, we just made a referral to Jose’s company earlier this week. So I don’t read directly to you or to one of your colleagues. But anyway, it wasn’t real estate in this case. So we have been involved in real estate raises since just about the day we opened our doors. When we opened our doors, it was financial or investment product ETFs hedge funds, mutual funds and real estate and we were involved in real estate before equity crowdfunding was a thing. Doing essentially reg D aimed at other institutions or advisors. Course that is all expanded with RegA plus and RegA. Plus it’s 75 million makes it more viable. We tend to work on larger deals, we don’t work on many things under 20 million. Anyway, so we are a systematic data driven investor acquisition firm doing the financial products and of course real estate. So we’re working on a few real estate deals right now in the equity crowdfunding world. But I want to mention that we’re, we’ve looked at some of the equity crowdfunding deals at 75 million in said you really should be raising 250 million, help them convert to a reg D help them become a CUSIP on custodial platform set broker dealers, and at independent financial planning firms like an LPL, Schwab, etc. and then run a very, very different type of campaign in most of the real estate we work on is essentially to two plays. It’s a an asset backed yield play. So we live in a yield Stark world, and especially people 40, and over 50, and over 60. And over, they all want that monthly income that can be paid monthly. And then of course, there can be upside if it’s an equity deal, which is great. So although we work extensively in Tick tock, and on Tick tock, we don’t in real estate, we work on Reddit, we do sometimes go with real estate there. And of course, there’s a couple of million websites. And then of course, there’s Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter and everywhere else. Our whole thing is audience discovery and data. And we are having a great time. especially in this day and age, you can’t fight demographics, people need income, interest rates are low for a long time, Real Estate’s a great alternative yield product. So it’s just a matter of, does the audience understand an alternative yield product? Or what are you selling them and sorry, I went on so long, but real estate’s hard to not hit kind of all those different silos?

Jason Fishman  26:34

Absolutely, there are so many silos, as you mentioned, different complexities, I know the marketing is to make it seem as straightforward as possible, really highlight the deal points. I want to get into that and talk about strategy a bit here, in our perspective, that that’s where a good marketing campaign successful initiative begins. I should add as well, too, I’m getting told to do an introduction for myself as well. My name is Jason Fishman, I run a marketing agency called DNA here in Los Angeles, California, we’ve worked on over 200 equity crowdfunding campaigns to date. Real estate is definitely part of our portfolio. And we work with several funds on investor acquisition that they could point at for new projects, new properties, they feel very quick, most amazed by the numbers that are produced in this field and see this element of the digital investor acquisition world to be primed for growth, beyond other verticals at that. So excited to be part of this conference here today, talk about some of the channels we use the approaches, so on and so forth. Also interested to hear firsthand, I’m probably the number one fan for this panel, I may add, just to be able to hear what you guys are doing and be able to share different insights. But as mentioned, wanting to start to the discussion now that we’ve done intros around strategy, often see groups so focused on the return on adspend numbers, the return on marketing spend, what is the cost of capital, and even overlook some of the fundamentals of the marketing plan? What are we going to be doing? What are we going to be setting up what’s what’s physically going to be rolling out to generate leads, nurture those investor leads to the point of conversion, as the average investment here is higher than let’s say, a reg CF for RegA plus campaign? So want to be able to speak to that today? Jose? How, what recommendations do you have for anyone in the industry, whether it’s founders, or any groups that are trying to put together these deals and see how digital see how marketing and overall investor acquisition can take place? Where do they start? What type of roadmap what type of plan? What is the strategy that you point them towards?

Jose Renteria  28:54

Sure. So I mean, it’s it’s pretty simple, right? First of all, I always recommend you work with an agency just because whichever agency you work with, they’re going to have the investment audiences that are going to convert, so you don’t got to start guessing, hey, where am I going to find investors? Right? Like us, we have 1000s of investors, we haven’t separated by so many segments, how many, how much they’ve invested, how many times they’ve invested the value of each investment. So we can create literally different segments for each type. And depending on the on the offer that we’re pushing, we will use those. Use those look alikes, right? So always go with somebody who has those investing audiences. The next, somebody who knows what creative is what converts, because there’s so many types of creatives, you could think that some creative works, and it doesn’t, right, like how much texture using an image will depend how the Facebook algorithm is pushing you to the different platforms and the cost that you’re paying per 1000 people per 1000 impressions. So you need to be cautious on how much you’re you’re you’re paying for 1000 impressions, what’s your cost per click, and just make sure that you’re driving enough traffic where you’re growing a retargeting audience, that as Jason said, you can teach a nurture over time, so that at towards the end of the campaign, we’re using that FOMO fear of missing out copy, you really convert them and explore the campaign.

Jason Fishman  30:13

Excellent, excellent. hope everyone’s taking notes. Those are some real key drivers there. Andrew, what about yourself? What about E5A? How do you guys.

Andrew Corn  30:24

So I will agree with everything that Jose just said, we just happen to work in very different worlds. And also everyone remember, say that I said that we refer to clients. So when I expressed a different strategy, it is not a disagreement, it’s just a different approach, or a different type of client for different type of risk. So we do not keep records on any investors whatsoever. For us, there’s privacy policy issues, all sorts of stuff, we certainly don’t keep track of anyone and how much they have invested somewhere. Certainly KoreConX has that kind of data, they don’t share it with us, we don’t ask them to and broker dealers to what we have is what’s known as first party data. So let’s just talk about that for a second. Although maybe I should even step back and talk about bigger 30,000 foot strategy. But data is a very big component of that. So basically, Google said a couple of years ago, we’re not going to allow third party cookies, meaning we’re not going to take other people’s data and then be able to show ads across our network, which is most of the internet. Using that so when we heard that, we said, Gee, we’re going to build our own data. And we decided, because we do more than just RegA plus, we’re going to start with the accredited world. So step one was saying, Let’s only get people who are publicly out there saying that they have made a private investment before. So they’re known as angel investors. They’re all 100% accredited. And we got ourselves several 100,000 of those. Its name, address, phone number, email, which then allow you to to create a custom audience in Facebook or Google or other places. We then said, Well, what about the rest of the credit world, and what happens if they’re not publicly stating that they’ve made these types of investments? So we have employed a group of them, I’ll fully admit, they’re highly paid interns, Berkeley, Stanford, Duke, NYU, Columbia, all data science majors to help us figure this out and start collecting them. And we have a different group that is now building this, because now that we’ve got north of a million of them, now it’s time to put that into a more searchable database. So to me, that’s like a great asset, and it’s something that an agency should have access to. But everything stops goes back to why using RegA plus, why are you doing crowdfunding at all? What is your offer? And we look at things, you know, I was an equity portfolio manager for nine years. And the first question I ask is, would I put my money? And if the answer’s no, they’re never going to be our client. It doesn’t matter how much money they have to pay us. But assuming they have a really good deal, they’ve got a good management team. We don’t work with first time funds, we only work with people where this is their multiple, the URL and an offering we just launched actually is fourth offering dot their URL. com. So that’s part of the strategy. We want people to look up at that URL and say, fourth Fund, and the first three were institutional, well, then why are they going equity crowdfunding? So all that goes into developing the strategy? And this strategy, essentially, is, what is the investor want? And why is now the time for it? Can this real estate firm developer fund fulfill that? Because to us, it’s not millions of people getting to it’s the right person at the right time with the right message in the right medium. And anyway, so I’ll I’ll turn it back over to you because I could do another 40 minutes just on this topic.

Jason Fishman  34:45

And we have time so we’ll be hopping into more of those answers. And appreciate breaking it up. But But yes, you guys can tell listening in here that Andrew and his team are doing this firsthand. Sounds like you’ve seen things work have found different learnings when the performance isn’t quite there.

Andrew Corn  35:01

Our single largest real estate race was a billion dollars. So I’ve always noted that that’s a single raise. And we’ve done many a 300 500 600. Those are not equity crowdfunding. Those are definitely not even second time funds. But they are doable, they are performed. And they actually follow more of the pattern that Jose was talking about with the pulling the man building it, and then actually humans closing them. In as everyone know, I noticed I do way better with data than with human. So we have nothing to do with closing anyone. But we’re really good at helping figure all that out and drawing them in to begin with. So when you bring that down to retail, then what’s your strategy? And what’s your messaging? And what’s your medium? And when you said cost of capital, that is something we are, you know, painfully aware of every day.

Jason Fishman  36:02

Oh, yeah, I’m sure it gets brought up and client calls as good as ours. So I wanted to highlight that and prospective calls that that groups that are trying to figure out equity crowdfunding. And, you know, we’re asked to talk about strategy, because I’m told it’s a missing piece for some RegA plus campaigns that are going live these days. And something that, you know, Oscar and his team are emphasizing to groups, it’s certainly something we focus on, we have a system called the eight point plan, it’s just a way to streamline this process, compartmentalize it a little bit, and it works in sequence, we do an industry overview to bring our team up to speed with their market with everything that’s going on in that space. So we’re not asking questions that are basic, and the point, we want to be able to have those discussions. And we’re always finding new tips while doing so. And then the competitor marketing audit, where we want to know exactly how other groups are doing in their space, even if it’s offline, we want to know who the key audiences are that they’re using to close their round. We want to know if the reach them over email, phone, direct mail, you know, advertising as Jose’s mentioning, what channels are they using, we’ll pull up the exact ads in the Facebook library and have other tools to look at their Google copy, even in many cases, how much they’re spending, and what they’re using to target. We look at their organic content, which publishers are talking about them what day and time of week, they’re posting on their social channels, success leaves clues, we want to be able to take those learnings and apply them to the groups that we’re working with, we then build out a framework for the plan with if nothing else builds an alliance between us and the client. And I recommend men founders to do this with their internal marketing folks, if they’re not working with an agency, but like Jose said, if it was my group, I’d certainly be working with an agency because of the data because of the findings. Because of everything that Andrew was mentioning here, based on their success, you know, you want your brand to have the best shot at the total goal. And in the quickest period of time that you can from the right investors, the right individuals, as Andrew was mentioning there. So we map out and in sequence the target audiences based on what we found from the research the marketing channels, because because we now know where the target audiences are online and offline, we know we could have a presence there organically with content marketing and advertising. With paid channels, we map out the creative. So out of the gate, they know hey, here are the visuals. Here’s the copy that we’re using. Here’s the third parties that we’re going to reference to validate the deal across the marketing end or the offering page, any stage of the funnel to nurture that audience. We do a section on strategic partners and do a messaging map and sequence, then everything goes into projections. as Andrew was mentioning, it’s very important to have that laser focus on the cost of capital. We build an algorithm consisting of three stages, impressions, clicks and conversions. So if something’s not working, we could pinpoint it. And instead of telling the client, hey, the tick tock ads aren’t working, we could say, Hey, we’re getting a good click through rate here, we’re not getting the conversion rate we want we want to focus on a landing page want to focus on the messaging and a stronger call to action? What can we do at this stage this parts working, but what can we do at this stage, it makes it very focused, very organized. And we can really look to improve a channel to manage it to a point of effectiveness, rather than write it off and show how the campaign gets to its goal was actually on a call earlier before this group that saw strong performance week one, week two was a little slower. From the time they scheduled the call to when we hopped on there important performance is already picked up. And this is a client that didn’t go down the strategy path with us. So you know, we have to point out the timelines re emphasize them, where if it’s already aligned, if we know hey, month three, this is when we’re looking to see these goals hit month four Here’s how we’re scaling up, it just becomes that much more of an agreed upon approach for everybody. And then we summarize that process. So that’s all our approach to strategy. We like to have a plan right out of the gate. But we already started talking about channels. I want to talk about channels a little bit further. When I work with different VCs or investment groups, often question advertising and say, you know, is this an accredited investor really going to click on an ad? Are they going to be giving us millions of dollars through that advertisement? Because again, the average investment is higher here than on a campaign that may live on a FINRA regulated equity equity crowdfunding portal for reg CF or RegA plus, and I speak to why but but curious on your recommendations pose your to give it a few great insights. But what do you speak to in regards to channels? How do you guys acquire investors? What type of pushback Do you get on those channels? And where are you seeing commonly the most performance what combination of channels

Jose Renteria  41:07

I mean, this is simple, right? When we when we we think of channel we think of how difficult or how, what’s the mass appeal that this offer has to an individual to an individual channel, right? Like, if it has mass appeal, then we can go more broad, like Facebook and Instagram. And if it’s more focused harder to understand, then we have to go maybe more LinkedIn focused right and target specific industry so so that’s where we choose what channel we’re gonna pick. Also, before we start the campaign, we look at the landing page and make sure that it’s correctly written and we dumb it down. That’s the number one thing we will say like dumbing it down so that anybody who lands on this page understands what’s going on, the more complicated it is, your conversion rates gonna drop. So you always have to be mindful your conversion rate. So I would recommend always dumbing it down, and making sure that everything is written correctly and perfectly, because if you make too many changes once the campaign is live, that’s called the material a material change, and you’re going to have to re re confirm all the investments that were made. So like you can make smaller changements once you’re live, but not so many like you could change the thumbnail make it more actionable, you could change the headline and make it more actionable, but you can’t make that many changes. So I would just be careful of landing page. Smaller changes that you can make in the future and the channel based on how easy it is to comprehend the off.

Jason Fishman  42:38

Okay, and, Andrew, you’re hopping into channels already there too. And I know you had more to say hope we didn’t cut it off or anything. No, no, no. What are your thoughts when people ask about hey, how’s this going to happen? What is ay ay ay ay ay ay ay. What role does investor acquisition play? And certainly first, first,

Andrew Corn  42:58

I want credit for having coined the phrase, come on, okay, let’s, let’s give it up. It’s because I was talking to Oscar, and he couldn’t understand what it is that we do. And literally, I was like, we acquire investors. That’s all we do.

Jason Fishman  43:16

I was not aware of that. But I heard I’ve heard Oscar said early on, oh, no, no, no,

Andrew Corn  43:21

yeah. There we go. If for nothing else, you can give me credit for that. So so you know, a lot of things again, I agree with, with what Hosea said, and some things I don’t the when you’re looking for a high median investment, you know, this is a dirty secret and RegA plus is you’re looking at higher household incomes. You just are, you know, when you’re doing something and it’s it’s a RegA, and it’s AI at some technology thing, and you want $100 minimum investment, or it’s an entertainment thing, and people are gonna jump on, that’s great. With real estate, especially if there’s yield plus capital appreciation, or meaning an upside when they sell the real estate, and they’re there I go, making it easy to understand Dominica town as he was saying, that’s great. And we have a lot of translation into English that we do. Someone will come in and say, Well, you know, I’ve been involved in industrial real estate, commercial real estate for 20 years. And I’m like, yeah, we don’t want to call it industrial. It’s not so sexy. We’ll be like, Well, you know, that means warehouses and it’s like, yeah, that’s still not exactly something everyone wants to throw their money into right away, especially for, you know, keep in mind it’s usually 357 year hold. So then I’ll say well, what you’re really talking about is e commerce. Look around the room. What in the room did not go through a warehouse before For that arrived in the room you’re in now for everyone is watching this. So all of a sudden, then it is understandable. And what we’re looking for is what’s going to get that aha moment where they’re going to say, Oh, I get it. This is kind of the back office II part of commercial real estate. But not only is an important, but you look at 2021. I mean, e commerce has just exploded with COVID and is never going back. I mean, it was already on a huge tractor. So every part of commercial real estate has a different thing. And you know, the last year multifamily or it’s we’d like to save English apartments in big cities where there’s a lot of price discovery, so you can’t find great deals. Let’s take New York, New York was Oh, no, I’m not doing multifamily. In New York, everyone’s abandoned the city. And now you’re seeing absolute record prices for apartments and buildings. So yeah, everyone who was frightened back six months ago should put their money in because now we’re at record prices. So how do you convince an audience that and is that even right? For crowdfunding? Can you convince a retail audience of that, and you know, when the VC say, wouldn’t accredited investor click on an ad advertising works? Now, sometimes advertising isn’t a show you an ad, you click it, you make an investment. And Jose alluded to this, I show you an ad, you click it, you come you learn, and then you’re going to get brought back and retargeting. So explaining that, again, more simply is, you may have to see an ad 15 times and in different places that you trust. If it’s Facebook, it might be on your high school girlfriends page when you’re stalking them. If it’s on Instagram, it may just be in your feed. If it’s on the web, maybe it’s on a Korean travel site, because you know, I’m on vacation right now in Copenhagen, but Oscar twisted my arm. And who can turn down Oscar, so here I am. But then we’re also you seeing it until you trust the man and then eventually, you’re going to come to that page. And then Trust has to be built. Because I’m not writing a check for $100 to doing an on a credit card, it’s going to be $15,000. And I’m going to acth my mom. So it’s just such a different thing than doing your standard RegA plus. And you know, it might be they take 20 times seeing it before they react, or it might be infinity, and they’re never going to. And a lot of that goes back to messaging, and is it the right audience and all that other stuff. So you know, the channel is determined a lot by what the offering is. And, you know, we say four things test, measure, refine, optimize. And with that you’re going to get discovery, you’re going to make data driven decisions. We literally can tell you that investor a clicked on a 300 to 50, which is the physical size of an ad and pixels. And what website that was on, or it was a specific Instagram ad. So that’s known as what’s called last click attribution. And people who don’t care, you know, that’s the last click was their first click, was this their second time back their third time back? Did they watch a video? Did they download something? Did they spend more than two minutes on the page? Did they complete the investment when they click that investment? Or did they only do a little of it needs to be brought back? Yes, yet again. So all of these things are part of the consideration set and need to be orchestrated together to have a successful campaign.

Jose Renteria  49:10

Yeah, and Andrew, I love what you said about the story. It’s so important that you tell a good story, you know how you said that you change the warehouse to like, what everything’s in the room. Like being able to invest is a great story and building their trust. Like I’ll tell you a little hack right here that we do. little hack that we do to build trust is that we hit you with on Facebook or Instagram with different handles. So you won’t see you we make it seem like everybody’s talking about this investment. Right? So that’s like a little a little hack that we do to build trust. Like you said, Hey, you see it on Facebook and Instagram, then you go and you see it on a news site that you’re on, you know, that it’s like part of it is how do we convince these people that were real that were good, and we’re going to take care of your money and and we do that through through using different handles to doing campaign updates, you know, saying updates of what’s going on the progress that the Everybody’s making

Andrew Corn  50:01

so yeah, so I understand you can you explain to everyone what different handles are placed?

Jose Renteria  50:06

All different handles is when you’re on. Let’s say you’re on Facebook and Instagram and you’re creating an ad, for example, you could have 100 different pages, right? So you run page one out of real estate investing, page two could be real estate news, you know, the 24, Seven News, New real estate news, something like that. Use Hey, everybody with different use hit the same people with different ads from different sources. And it makes it seem like, this is the best investment ever. The whole world is talking about this, you know, like, how am I going to miss out. And that’s just one of the ways that we use to build trust and really blow people’s

Jason Fishman  50:45

mind. Yeah, we used to have them set up for different audiences to I learned this on AWS and social gaming and user acquisition there, where we could have gaming moms gaming, dads, gaming, college students, clever names, as Jose’s mentioning, of course, but can build those pages simultaneously have audiences developing from that niche, have the narrative there. And then as Jose sin, that third party validation, so there could be an activation or all of these pages, all these sites are talking about it. But But either way, even if an audience only sees one, if it’s coming from a third party, it digital marketing as a whole is built on creating social proof, people don’t believe what they see online. So if I tell you, Hey, I have a great product, or if other trusted third parties or third parties that appear to be established, are talking about how great that product is, it serves in a louder fashion. And Andrew, data is everything. You know, when I get asked about the channel questions, I say something exactly like you do with data driven AI, we actually have a model called test, optimize scale. I love the similarities there. And I hear different ones for each agency, of course, too. But test optimized scales from my podcast as well, too. I break everything we do down into that any channels that we want to test and we prioritize which ones we want to roll out of the gate first. We can’t. We can’t scale we have to optimize first. But we can’t scale until the data tells us working until the numbers are actually validating what what’s proving it anything before that is just a function we found. We know what channels we want to start with from the target audience research, which stemmed from the competitor audits. As Jose’s mentioning media buying is a big part of this because we could control how much traffic is going through, we could upload our investor audiences. I spent a lot of time putting together more audience data relationships for groups that we can advertise for this. As you’re mentioning Andrew high household income. Net Worth investor behaviors. That’s actually how we started was working on reg D campaigns to accredited investors and tapping into third party data sources. We’ve since been able to develop our own first party audience data have run campaigns, over 20 portals to date, have worked on various types of campaigns where we had to source different real estate, investor data, being able to take them to a landing page. As it’s typically a different sales cycle. It’s different consideration process and love all the notes he pointed out there, Andrew about that, if we’re able to take them to an email signup, have an email drip pointing at long form content that the founders are doing, we’d like to make it an easy process, maybe once a month, once every couple weeks, we’re creating this content directly with the founder filming them. But then in that email address, we can have articles, videos, third party coverage of the founder and speaking maybe they were featured on a podcast, maybe it was some type of group pointing at the content, but we want to use the email as the anchor there and constantly positioning the team as as thought leaders in the space constantly be pointing about all the different product points that would be part of the consideration process for the commercial for you know, whatever type of offering. It is here. Definitely the retargeting ads there too. But we don’t want to be saying How about now each time we want to change up the messaging, maybe different ads for different stages of the funnel, all our different parts of it. And as much third party validation as we can, whether as Jose San we’re creating the pages, whether it’s coordinating with 100 different contacts that the company has, so they’re all commenting on posts or they’re sharing posts, or you know having some type of image or video in the advertisement itself. really wanting to have that harnessed here?

Andrew Corn  55:04

Yeah, so I’m gonna jump in, we don’t really do any of that. And some of the competitive stuff that you’re doing I’m exhausted listening you to a boatload of work there. No, I think the this is my opinion is people are writing larger checks are not influenced by what other people are saying on social media. They’re influenced by friends, family, respected people who you know people who they respect in their own lives. And then in the press, and you know, we insist upon a PR partner. And, you know, if they read it in, it doesn’t need to be the Wall Street Journal or Barron’s. But if they read it in, you know, a publication that they’re used to reading, I think that’s really important. We love to put, you know, six to eight logos of as seen in meaning what press that Bennett, we will bring in, okay, your search twitter feed, because I know people are working hard on it. I just don’t think it’s that big of an influence. So it’s, but it’s a contributor, I mean, everything is a touch point. And better to have more touch points than less touch points. It’s then a question of what is the past, which then goes back to cost of capital, I love that I forgot what your view said. Sometimes the first two weeks are kind of slow. And that’s okay, because you’re not a full throttle, because you’re testing and optimizing before you’re scaling to borrow Jason’s words. Now, one of the reasons that we don’t do everything that you were talking about, is because of 2020 and 2021. You know, I was an equity portfolio manager, no, wait, no, nine, and back then everyone asked, how’d you do? And I’d always answer Well, in my long, short, really well, in my long only, you know, I had my butt kicked, but I did better than the benchmark, which when you’re raising money, nobody cares. So no one wants to be the benchmark, they just want to raise their damn money. And when we’re doing our calls with clients, they want to know, are we gonna get this stock? Like, there’s so many metrics in advertising that we put there in front of the client, but they don’t care. They just want to know how they’re doing. And are we on track. And with that, 2020 2021, I mean, I’ve never seen the mood of the country changed so swiftly, I’ve never seen us have to change ad so quickly. And I know, it’s a little contradictory to what Jose was saying. But we change the offering pages dramatically. And we also AB them. And meaning we’ll create two of them and use both of them, as long as they’re compliant slash FINRA approved. Or if you have real guts, crowd check approved. There’s no reason you can’t do it and change it in a plus, you can actually change the page as many times as you want, as long as it goes through compliance approval, you can’t make a material change to the offering without changing the offer. So I think that’s a little bit of a distinction. And anyway, but you know, for us, PR is a huge component rather than social media. I’d rather have it on Market Watch, or in USA Today, or Yahoo Finance than a third, you know, a third party people don’t know on, you know, chiming in on a Facebook post, we actually erase most of the Facebook comments on ads, even when they’re positive. It’s like, yeah, you know, this person’s opinion isn’t really something that we want influencing our prospects. So Sure. So that’s a different approach. And it’s not necessarily better or worse. It’s just a different approach.

Jason Fishman  59:13

Sure. And the reason we do it is it’s part of content marketing for us. And content marketing. Yes, we want premium publishers, yes, we want blogs, podcasts, other types of Meteor publishers in many situations. But when we’re looking at a lot of the top, RegA, plus top CF campaigns and their use of social, when we polled investors and get an understanding of their decision process, there’s usually a level of their own digital due diligence. And if they’re searching on Google, likely some of the results are going to be their social pages. And if an investor gets there, and there’s active feeds and it says, Hey, we’re just focused by Market Watch. We’re just intrigued by Market Watch. You’re just on Forbes, we’re speaking at this conference next week. Or if an investor gets there, and there’s nothing, it’s two different experiences. And I’m not here to say Facebook, organic is going to be the key driver. As much as we want to be intentional about what’s showing up there. certainly agree with the a PR, the higher quality the publisher, the better. But we do want to have it appearing as well. These guys are everywhere. So they read the mercury watch article, they’re now seeing their social feed, I think you said that next to their old ex girlfriend or wherever it may be. We want to show as much validation as possible, because we know the stronger we do in content marketing, the higher the conversion rates going to be in the advertising. And I wanted to ask you guys, what do you do when a campaign is not working? When we look at, you know, Oscars team, they put out a study for 2020 rakes? Yes. I think it showed about 20% hitting their goal. Not every capital raise hits its goal. Not every marketing campaign does there’s apparent obstacles for both. And I know, our clients really look towards us to save the day if the marketing isn’t working. first few weeks in FEMA first few months out, Andrew, as you said, they’re all interested in the bottom line, Hey, are you guys able to do this? What’s the capital? I know, it’s a type of scenario, we can’t just work harder, we have to be creative, we have to be intentional. What do you guys do when campaigns are not working upon first push?

Andrew Corn  1:01:36

Please, so I’ve talked too much already.

Jose Renteria  1:01:40

And no, not at all. Everything’s been great. So um, what we do when it campaigns not working is one, we cut the ad spend right away, right? We don’t want to just spend their money overseas, I don’t want to spend your money, just spending, I’m careful about your money, I want to make sure we’re using it correctly. So number one, turn it off, right away. Number two, normally, we get together as a team and get on a call. And I tell them sell me as if you weren’t like if I was always I was gonna invest in your company. So me, you know, some of your company and I just, we just start taking notes, right? What ideas can we get? What can we refresh? What angles? Are we missing? We try to see is there is there any key influential person we can leverage? Are they influencers that we can know we can leverage as well that would allow us to use their handle it? It’s so it’s so powerful to use other handles? I also I mean, that’s really we tend to send it to us we look at it, we have to change the landing page to what Jason said earlier, that he’s looking at the impressions, the clicks the conversions, that basically telling you like, Hey, is it the ad that’s not working? Or is it that the landing page is not working right? Or a ton of people clicking on the ad because they think the ad is relevant, but then they land on the page. And they’re like, you know, I don’t want this. That’s the saying that, hey, step one is working. Step two is not let’s not stop step one, it’s fixed step two, and then drive traffic, again, isn’t that the cost per click is really high, but people are converting, then the ads are terrible, and you need to fix the creative the copy, you know, maybe some of the audiences, right? So so that’s we look at, we look at everything, like what is the root cause of the problem. And then we find a way to address it, whether it be you know, fresh, creative, fresh audiences, talking to the foreigner, like I said, Hey, sellers, like if we were an investor, like we want to get a true pitch from you. And then just bringing, you know, maybe switching platforms. That’s really what we do. And to Andrew’s point, something that we used to show up in ton of analytics, talk to the client. And at the end, we now show like really little because they don’t care. They’re just like, well, how much am I spending per week? What is my investment per week and what my role is everything else you do with it. So that’s that’s what, that’s what we do.

Jason Fishman  1:04:06

Didn’t know if you want to hop in there for us, train my team on being able to focus on three things. I want the client to be able to know our process to be able to repeat it people can remember three audience creative and funnel so we could test different audiences. We could test different creative and different channels at that but different creative and then the funnel as Jose saying, the conversion rate Okay, what can we do, as Andrew was mentioning, let’s look to create something that’s more engaging something inspires more action on the offering page. And his compliance factor to that of course, or a landing page in between will do lead forms that are autofill quite a bit on LinkedIn on Facebook on other channels. Quality could vary, but at least we’re getting more of that mid funnel can Version funnel referring to their decision process when they’re first aware of the deal when they’re considering it when they intend to invest, we see drop offs and all that all those stages. So we want to look at it from that standpoint. And we’ve had campaigns that showed little to no performance three to four weeks in by week six have surpassed every performance benchmark we were looking for in the strategy, we’ve had campaigns that have been live for 10 months to hit their goal. And you know, everyone would love to do it in two, three, but if we’re able to make the changes to get it, their clients very happy also with with real estate, and I was gonna ask questions about the sales cycle, how long it’s taking you guys to see it investment occur. I mean, we’ve worked on campaigns that have a quarter million dollar minimum investment 50,000 100,000 are part of the discussion a lot for our real estate discussions. And and you know, that’s more of a reg D discussion, of course, but but you know, those larger checks as a whole, even if it’s a RegA, maybe $1,000, minimum, to Andrew’s point, groups want to have those larger checks, they want to see one come in, and that anchor, other investors, maybe with the same last name, maybe in the same geographical areas, but it could be a longer sales cycle to get there. So we want to make sure we’re not giving up on these channels are continuing to go after those audiences, and push them to the point of conversion, if they’re interested, of course.

Andrew Corn  1:06:30

Yeah, so let’s start with you guys, two more of these in a year than we have in the history of our company. Hearing the number of deals you guys work on, you know, we’re, we’re not in the same league as you guys. You know, we’re smaller. And we work on different types of deals. As I said, we rarely work on anything under 20, we don’t work in reg CF at all. We did two and it’s an ever again. And anyway, a lot of things were mentioned, one of the things he said a $250,000 minimum. And when someone calls me with that, to me, that’s a no go right there. It’s too small for institutions, it’s too big for individuals, no accredited investors writing a check for 250. It’s got to be qualified investor. And frankly, I’m a qualified investor on my checks for 230. You know, my asset allocations, the way it’s set up, and when money frees up, I’m happy to invest, but I’m not running the check that big. So you know, some of it is is what is a comfortable amount and put yourself in the shoes of the investor? You know, we asked a couple of questions, who is your absolute best investor? And then who is your most likely investor? And if the answer is the same, then you know, the client hasn’t thought it through, which means more will work for you as an agency, which we’re up for. But we want them to help Think it through with us so that everyone’s in complete understanding. We also will turn if things are not working out, well, we will freeze you know, you can pause, Facebook, Google, etc. I mean, it’s like a light switch, you can turn it off or turn it way down so you don’t deteriorate your retargeting pool. We don’t go back to the client and say, you know, talk to us about it. Our onboarding process is really thorough. We develop a messaging platform, before we write a word of copy, we go back to that we look at that carefully. One of the things we find is that people get cold feet very quickly. And they need to spend more money faster. Because our learning isn’t good. If the numbers aren’t statistically significant. So if we go through all that, and everything goes right, and think money’s not coming in, then we need to stop what we’re doing and reassess each part of it. Is it the data? Is it the messaging? Is it no conversion? Is it the technology? Is it maybe we shouldn’t have even offered credit cards because we want, you know, a 20 $500 minimum because it’s real estate? Or like the deal I mentioned before, it’s just pure interest, you’re investing in a loan portfolio, probably going to put in $1,000. You know, what are you doing? On a seven and a half percent on the last return paid monthly? Why are you putting in only $1,000? So yes, we want to democratize it and offered to people like that, but the median investment should be much, much higher. So a lot of that goes into the data targeting should we cut off at top 25% household income not top 50 or top 75? Where should we be on this? And why? And thinking that through and going back to the original strategy and say was there a flaw Where was it? Or, and I think it’s very brave of you to tell the truth there, Jason did, we just need a little more time? You know, did it just need it needed four weeks, not two weeks. And, you know, we have to hold hands with the client and say, we all believe in this process, and we need to let it play out. I always say to prospective clients, the number one reason a large RegA plus offering will fail is that it’s underfunded. And if it takes extra money to get it going, and you’re still gonna have the same ROI. In the end, all it took was a little bit more faith and a little bit more money to get that done. So there we go.

Jason Fishman  1:10:47

And no one wants to be in that situation of it, particularly after the fact knowing, hey, if I would have stuck with it a little longer, a little bit more time, that situation where I said, you know, three weeks wasn’t working six weeks, it was if they would have canceled week four, we of course, would have transitioned that appropriately, you’re working on behalf of a brand, but they would have lost the expenses that they put in, they would have not then had that channel to scale up once it was working. And they were very successful thereafter. So really being able to paint that picture. And I think the reason we try to be so process oriented is I’ll get on calls at times, and perhaps a founder thinks, hey, it’s not working. The agencies not working hard enough, where we want to show them, there’s nothing behind the curtain, I don’t have a room of 50 investors back there. And I’m saying, okay, here’s the button, you click, like, here’s what we can do. And part of that is bringing historical equity crowdfunding investors to these deals are free time, here’s what we can, but but here are steps towards it to where we can increase it, and try to create that place to collaboration. But I’m with you. I mean, there’s nothing you’ve said that I’ve disagreed with. And in any which way, I think it’s what you were mentioning of different styles, different approaches. I actually am very envious of how you guys select, which deals to participate in and working on fewer deals and having them be, you know, more impactful. So I think it’s just different approaches that we’re all talking about here.

Andrew Corn  1:12:23

I just want to throw in the best question any perspective has ever asked me prospective issuers ever asked me said, name, your favorite deal you’ve ever worked on? And it was a real estate deal, and it was several 100 million dollars? And they said, huh, and I actually because we don’t mention client names, we don’t show samples of our work in general. People know who we are. And that usually is enough. Anyway, we do give references at the one yard line if it’s really necessary. But anyway, they said, Oh, we know that to say, great. So you know that it’s sold, you know, the period time period sold and blah, blah, blah. They’re like, Yeah, but I have one question for you. Was it the right offering to the right audience at the right time? Or was it your work that made all the difference? And the answer is never know the answer to that question. Yes. But what I can say is that, and I think all of us can say this, we will do everything in our power to increase the probability of success. by tweaking each of these different things that we’ve been talking about. We may say them all differently. But it’s data, meaning audience, it’s medium where we’re going to put it or channel, I think you said, and then the messaging. And the messaging is so multifaceted. We do so much content marketing, yet I never said content marketing, but you did several times. And you know, it’s just another tool in the toolbox. And it’s, I think, really important with real estate, less important than other types of offers. So there we go.

Jason Fishman  1:14:07

Absolutely. all comes down to that messaging. And I like your answer there. groups will ask us and I tell them anything before the analytics come through is just assumption. I would have been wrong many times on which campaigns are the top performers, which are marginally. Jose, we’re coming up on a couple minutes here. Any final thoughts? Any final notes that you want to add anything we didn’t get to that you want to emphasize?

Jose Renteria  1:14:34

No, I think we we talked about pretty much everything like you know, Andrew said, Everybody has different approaches. There’s multiple, multiple approaches to everything, multiple strategies, multiple optimization ways and they’re all successful, right? It just knows that we can can the agency or the person you’re working with do work correctly. And I mean, obviously a story can we walk crushed it. So you know, more than a day It’s been a pleasure talking to both of you and learning how you guys do it.

Jason Fishman  1:15:04

Likewise, Ben, in honor of being on a panel with you guys, Oscar, we’ve had a great discussion here talking about strategy talking about the role of combat best erasure,

Oscar Jofre  1:15:13

because that’s not what I heard, I heard you guys were going at it. I heard one was saying, from bananas, the other one saying this manner banana, it’s an apple. I mean, sometimes you guys just have to, but the important thing is, people got to hear from those who are doing these particular outreaches. And more importantly, the only last last bit that I will add to everything you guys have said, What might have worked a month ago, or three months ago, it’s not necessarily going to be working today. And more importantly, the marketization does not mean you exclude other types of investors. This is something really important that everyone needs to understand I hear this often. I need to hear from you guys, of course. But it’s important to understand that the marketization meant that everyone would get an opportunity to participate, which means that you still target the existing base that you’d normally would go to an include them and bring them all together. And this is part of that outreach that these three gentlemen and their friends helped me with. So Jason, thank you again. We’ll say grace. Yes. And Andrew, have a great time in Denmark. Looking forward, Have a safe flight back home. All right. Thank you, everybody.