Peter Daneyko  00:00

Hello. Looks like we’re on. Welcome to day four of our KoreSummit on real estate and capital formation. Today’s panel is really going to discuss the journey from the investor’s perspective from beginning to end from an issuer’s journey specific to the preparations for RegA and RegCF offerings, as well as the investor’s journey before and after they’ve invested. Quick introduction to today’s panel consists of a digital securities transfer agent from the KoreTransfer, welcome Amanda Grange. Andrew Corn, a leading customer acquisition firm with a very systematic data-driven investor customer acquisition approach. Welcome back, Andrew, looking to do a deep dive in analytics today. And Mona DeFrawi, a serial entrepreneur on a mission to help startups who is currently the CEO of Radivision. It’s great to see you again, Mona. So let’s jump right in. So for the capital raise to occur, it really takes a team. And when we talk about a team, there are a lot of various participants, there are broker-dealers, there are escrow providers, there are transfer agents. There are payment rail providers, there are marketing teams, there are firms that have marketing platforms to assist those marketing teams. So let’s just jump a little bit out on the preparation side. So once we’ve gone through our legal which we discussed in previous panel sessions, and we’ve done our preparatory work, the real work begins from a marketing perspective, and we must be compliant. And so we’ve just so let’s say we’ve now decided we’re going to do a RegCF or a RegA offering. And before I actually start that, I need to set up a platform, I need to set up things called the cap table, I need to do things like a transfer agent. And I’m going to jump over to Amanda and maybe you can explain to our audience here, what a transfer agent is and how it fits in with regards to Regulation CF and RegA.

Amanda Grange 03:05

Thank you, Peter, a transfer agent is in easy terms basically just someone or something ie a platform, it can be an automated service that basically manages your cap table. Your cap table is a general ledger of all of your investors and every investment, whether that be an initial investment, a transfer, a trade, or whatever it is. That pertains to your cap table or your investors. So it will list all of your investors all of their information will have how much they invested in your company, what price they invested that not what the current price is, but what they invest, at the time of their investment. So their transaction date will reflect the close of their transaction. So it’s basically a general ledger of all your investors and their investments. And it’s very, very important. As we get going, you’ll learn that this is an accurate account of all your investors and their investments.

Peter Daneyko  04:07

Let me ask you a couple of questions about that. So when I’m from a preparatory standpoint, I’m a company I’m doing a RegCF, I’ve got some existing shareholders. What do I do with them? I mean, maybe I had a, I didn’t have a transfer agent. For example. I’ve got five shareholders, but I’m going to do a crowdfunding and hopefully, I anticipate 10s of 1000s of shareholders. What do I do? Where do I begin?

Amanda Grange 04:33

Well, first you research to find a transfer agent that’s going to fit your needs. To be qualified for a raise, you’re going to need a transfer agent, it’s important that you have one even to qualify for your Reg A raise, for example. So and then once you’ve chosen a transfer agent, and there are many different features a transfer agent will have if they have an online system, it’s much easier for you and your investors. So I would recommend a transfer agent that gives you access to your investors and gives your investors access to their investment as well at the same time, as much easier to manage your cap table, your investors, and your raise. So then what you want to do is work with your transfer agent to make sure that your investors get uploaded, and your information is accurate. So those are all your investors prior to your raise. So everybody that’s invested in your company prior to your raise is what we’re talking about specifically, and those investors and it’s getting them all in on one. It can be even as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. But they all have to be located in one spot, with all of the totals of how many shares you have in your company, and what your total investment is in your company. Basically, that’s a simple explanation of what your cap table is, you can use a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Peter Daneyko  06:05

Okay, so but you must be having you must have a registered transfer agent. Now, there’s a big difference from a technology perspective today, the old days, we’re all used to. I am old enough to know that I had an old share certificate that sat in a filing cabinet or drawer, but I never heard back from the, unfortunately, the company in the startup that I might have invested in I found one recently, it was probably 25 years old. And I went and looked online. Well, unfortunately, the company wasn’t around, but things have evolved a lot since then. So the days of Excel spreadsheets, the ability for private companies to manage 10s of 1000s, or hundreds of 1000s of shareholders on the cap table, they believe you manage some companies that have over 100,000 shareholders under the cap table. And they’re private companies. That’s I don’t think a lot of our listeners, and most people don’t realize that Regulation CF and Reg A actually facilitated that ability for companies to do it. But how daunting is that to manage? From a digital securities perspective, let’s say I’m an investor, is it hard on me? Or is it can I can just I can, you know, I’m kind of, I’m kind of leading you here a little bit, but I can just login today can’t I just take a look at my shares?

Amanda Grange 07:24

That is our hope is that for the user, it is a user-friendly, easy experience for your investors. So that your investor can simply just log in to a platform and have access to their investments, they can see their investments. Not only can they see their investment, like I said, when they invested, so what the price was when they invest in it, but also see what their shares are worth today. That’s something that, as you said, Peter, you would invest in a company years ago, that certificate would be a paper certificate in a drawer bottom of your sock drawer sometimes, and you may never see it again. And you may never know when you come across that paper certificate, what your shares are worth, or if the company still exists. Or if they’re what they’re doing, if they’ve gone public, you may have no idea what’s going on with that investment. And with an online cap table, you would be able to know even what those shares are worth today, and what the company is doing, you’d be able to reach out to the company to the CEO with any questions if you wanted to transfer those shares if they’re transferable. Let’s say I wanted to transfer my shares to my sister, my husband, or my son, if he was of age, it’s just the click of a button. Now, I could say transfer my shares fill in all of the information, and then it would let me know if the person I’m transferring it to it’s transferable to them if the shares themselves are transferable. Some shares are not and have stipulations and regulations on them. But if they’re transferable it would be an easy process for you to transfer those shares on a platform.

Peter Daneyko  09:03

So that’s the key advantage for the investor digital securities transfer agent. I going to segue over to Andrew here. So Andrew, what are your thoughts now? I mean, the transparency for shareholders to visualize their shares on a regular basis to see what’s going on from a company’s perspective. Does that help companies to perhaps get shareholders to reinvest to have a more engaged relationship with their shareholders? Andrew, what’s your take on that?

Andrew Corn  09:41

So to begin with having a really good transformation is important as even soliciting investors from scratch. They need to know there’s going to be a place where they can go, they can see if they’re being diluted they can see if there’s any liquidity they can see if there’s a dip Then that’s been issued. So having all that information at their fingertips. Is there a transfer agent who’s going to put all that into a mobile app? Does anyone think anyone may ever do that?

Amanda Grange 10:13

Yes, yeah.

Andrew Corn  10:16

I think I just taught you a little softball there. But I know Kore just released theirs and I have not downloaded it yet. Even though I’ve made several investments where cores the transfer agent.

Peter Daneyko  10:32

I’m going to take that softball and just touch on that because as we get into the marketing and avenues with you, and Mona, I think it becomes really important. So if that investor journey makes an investment, and good news or bad news or the status of what’s going on, we want to be able to touch them and communicate and so to answer to Andrews, softball there. Yeah, of course, yes. KoreConX, just recently introduced what’s called KoreID. It was the ability for all of the companies that we work with, the shareholders can download an ID app, and the individual companies themselves can actually push information to their shareholders who keep them informed. Maybe they’re closing out the offer, it’s the last time to reinvest. Now, here’s the really cool thing about it. Me, as an investor, we’re always using our phones. I mean, we now have beside us all the time, if I want to make a reinvest in a particular offering, or look at my holdings, all the data that data that was captured about me and my investment, I don’t have to reenter that data. So it’s a really seamless, frictionless approach to say, hey, I want to reinvest How much do I want to reinvest, because it’s captured all my unique information in a secure permission blockchain, this isn’t the chain that we talked about, where I’ve got off-chain wallets, and I’ve got things with Crypto and coins. Now, this is a fully compliant KoreChain. And it also allows us to manage literally millions upon millions of shareholders in private companies. And, and, and let you guys push out and communicate to them. So I think that’s kind of the future, it’s still early in the game. But if each investor has what’s called a KoreID, and it’s their personal information, it just makes the communication for the issuer to an investor as well as that ability for me that shareholder look at the status of my holdings and make decisions.

Amanda Grange 12:23

Can I jump in there, Peter, just for one sec, staff of what you’re just saying, just to that really helps emphasize the importance of your transfer agent? So if you are just starting up with a transfer agent that is going that has an app or has the Invest button on your allows you to do that on your website. And makes it easy, like you said, for investors to invest again in your company. That’s why it’s very important that all of your investors, your current investors are uploaded accurately to your cap table and platform before you do go live. A lot of companies are live and they just want to go live and they rush the process without getting their investors, you could have 400 investors, and current investors in your company before you go live. And if they’re not on that platform, that investment process is not easy for them, like Peter just was emphasizing. But if you get them up on your platform, and they’re active and registered and set up before you go live, that investment reinvestment for your investors is such a smooth and easy process for them.

Peter Daneyko  13:34

So again, all about shareholder communication. That isn’t exactly yeah. And I would assume that if I’m a shareholder, I mean, the transfer agents role, it’s a very gated community, it’s a very compliant community. But if I’m a shareholder, I’m not on the cap table, and you’re doing a raise right now. And I don’t have access to look at my cap table from by the way from an issuers website, you know, so they can click on a button on your own web property and say, Here are my shareholders, I might be a little disgruntled, hey, or I might be spending time reaching out to a CEO indicating that where are my shares? Well, I certainly didn’t update the cap table. Well, maybe I don’t want to reinvest. And so that’s what it’s all about.

Andrew Corn  14:16

I’m gonna, I’m gonna interrupt this portion and just kind of get to it from an investor’s perspective and an issuers perspective, which is if it’s not on the website, and it’s not easy, and you didn’t have the 400 people pre-loaded, then the whole cap table is wrong and wrong. It is a disaster beyond disaster for the CFO, it’s a distraction for the entire company. If shareholders are reaching out to the company, because there’s not good information, it means you’re not doing your job. And you don’t have time to do your job because you’re now answering disgruntled shareholders for absolutely no reason. So, being set up properly is a super important thing. And then from an investor acquisition standpoint, it is all about transferring RNC, Peter said good news, bad news. No one cares what the news is they need it. If it’s good, it’s bad, it’s indifferent. They need to have it, they’re owners of your company, and they need to be treated that way. And with that kind of respect, and having a great transfer agent, as a part of that.

Peter Daneyko  15:18

Appreciate, appreciate that comment and didn’t really realize from an investor, you know, really how important that is. So I think we got some great takeaways from that. So now let’s get into the marketing avenue and a little bit, and we’re gonna, we’re going to talk about different types of marketing that are occurring. And maybe I’m gonna start with you, Andrew. So I got an invest button on my page. I mean, we’ve worked together over the years. And I’ve seen some amazing offerings that you’ve personally been working on. And I truly mean, amazing. And I commend you, this isn’t a commercial here. But I, I’ve seen the work. And so I see a website, and I click on a button. And there are various ways that individual investors can pay, I can pay with ACH, I can pay with a credit card, if you have a property, raise that you work with your client right now. And I noticed they’ve got a crypto-to-fiat element going on with that. Can you maybe talk about the nuances between the payment rails side of it? And how important is it? Or how does it matter that much, and why you made those decisions?

Andrew Corn  16:27

So there are a few things about the invest button when it comes to payment. First of all, we hate when it says how are you going to pay, it’s one of those marketing things it sticks. It’s like a thorn in my side because it’s how are you going to make your investment has nothing to do with payment because you’re not paying a bill. You’re not purchasing a physical item, you’re investing in the company. Not only that, you’re probably investing in a company with no liquidity or very limited liquidity, we can get into that with digital shares and everything else. But we do live in a supply-demand market. And while the offerings going on, there’s probably not someone else who wants to buy your shares, specifically, anyway. So it depends on where you are in the lifecycle of the offering. In the beginning, you’re gonna have a lower minimum, and credit cards are really important. And one of the first questions I advise issuers to ask is, what is the credit card fee? Because if you’re charging 2%, above, whatever the credit card fee, that’s going to be equal to more money than my fee. The lawyer’s fee, you name it, their fee, even paid media, it’s going to potentially be more than. So that’s a huge issue. But as an offering goes on, one of the things we like to do is raise the minimum. And one of the offerings we have the minimum is now beyond most credit card limits. So typically, though, let’s say the first couple of months, the median investment is in the $3,000 range, that’s still well within credit cards, and people are going to use credit cards. People want to be able to use debit cards because they’re not used to ACH. And so that’s another big thing. But eventually, you’re going to get to where you’re getting larger investors, and you’re going to see more ACH than anything else. Although some people will still wire and then also when you open overseas, it’s a whole nother set of issues with AML and KYC. And of course, how are you going to physically get the money into escrow? So why as someone who runs an advertising agency, or systematic data-driven investor acquisition from Why do I know so much about it and care so much, is because we are judged by how much money comes in at the end of the month, not by how many ad impressions there were, how many clicks there were, or how many video views there were. So all of these things matter to us because it’s essentially how we’re measured. You know, if we’re doing a $50 million offering, and we brought in 48, at the end of 12 months, we didn’t meet our objective. So we may have done okay. But I can’t tell anyone we did a successful raise. And I hate not being able to say that what my firm does is successful, it should be successful. So we ended up getting involved in all these things.

Peter Daneyko  19:32

I think I mean, the pressures on you, I mean, at the end of the day, and a good investor acquisition firm has to be accountable. I mean, it’s easy to say, Hey, I got all these people that landed on the page. We see it from a tech perspective all the time they go, it must be the technology, they didn’t finish the investment. And we go I didn’t finish purchasing something. What do you do at that next stage when it comes to I didn’t purchase the investment and what Are some of the analytics and data that you’ve discovered when it comes to what I’ll call an abandoned application?

Andrew Corn  20:06

Sure, so we have a variety of things we’re doing. And it starts even a little bit before it starts when they click the invest button. Because when they click the invest button, they’re showing more engagement than they would if they hadn’t. One of the things we really look for is people clicking on the offering circular, that’s a real leading indicator to people then clicking the invest button with true intent. Something like 95% of the people who click the invest button really has no intention of ever completing their investment. At that moment in time, that doesn’t mean they won’t come back. So we look to build audiences based on where they are in the investor journey, and then message them appropriately based on what they should already know where they are in the journey, and where we want them to either go next or if we want them to complete. So that involves everything from different advertising. Once there’s data capture, and they get to page two, and we have their email, that’s a whole different set of Journey engagement. So it’s ads, it can be emailed, it can be webinars, it can be webinars, just for people who fit certain criteria. It can be emails and data, meaning sharing industry data, things about the company, whatever the messaging needs to be to get them to that moment where they’ll say, I am willing, I’m not buying a pair of pants here, I’m willing to put larger dollars into an illiquid investment, where I’m going to be along for the ride for several years. So you know, we’re asking for a very different type of decision. So we need to know where they are, how many people are there, what percentage drop off there was, and how we can improve each one of those metrics, again, trying to get them to use KoreConX language to sign and complete where they have completed their investment. and they’ve gone and ACH they are monthly app. So it is an enormous task. And it’s not something that can be we can set it up. And we’ve got a great playbook for it. But we can’t start optimizing it until we’ve been live for a few weeks so that we actually have real people who have gone through the process. So while the issuer may applaud the first step, we’re like, no, no, no, we need 20 or 30. More, we need something statistically significant, which even 30 isn’t, but that means way more people have gotten close to that. And now we can start learning and the optimization process, which is messaging, media, and audience building. And then what we’re doing with each audience.

Peter Daneyko  22:53

 I’ve seen enough of your offerings that I see the pages and I see things changing all the time. So the testing and the analytics in the data capture in the manipulation is really apparent to me, versus an offering that sits there for 12 months, and nothing’s changing. So you really need to be thoughtful about that. Prior to the information the investor gets there. There’s a variety of new media sources, and new marketing coming out there, my understanding is that a lot of the and I’m going to jump over to Mona on this one. There are a lot of changes that are occurring, and people are looking for new ways to engage with potential investors. Mona, you’ve got an interesting new company, and you’re being a serial entrepreneur, and with Radivision, and the use of video and trying to help companies touch on that and where that fits into this to this mix and what your experiences and what your thoughts are.

Mona DeFrawi 23:49

Yeah, so I’m coming into this from a very different place coming to the same point, but from a different original place. So I worked with IPOs. I helped execute for IPOs starting in 91. For 10 years in the 90s. Back when the markets used to work very differently. Companies went public in three to five years. Half of my shareholder base was retail investors during that time. That’s how the markets used to work in the 80s. And then in the 90s, the venture capital industry grew on that. When electronic trading decimalization came in at the end of the 90s. It changed the markets, disenfranchised retail investors, the big banks came in and bought the small banks everything went big, big, big, big, big, and then fast. You know, the internet bubble happens around 2001 Is the burst of the bubble, and then everything crashes, and fast forward to 2007. Chuck Newhall the founding partner of Nea the largest venture firm comes to me and says, you know, come to Silicon Valley and fix the IPO crisis. And there’s a little bit of background on that and you know why he did that. But I came here and I came up with the concept of while companies used to go public in three to five years now it’s taking seven to nine yours today, it’s 10 to 13 years, by the way, which is why crowdfunding was created to fill the gap. And back in 2007, I said, we need to fill this gap. I’ve worked for 10 years with all these public players, I know they’re comfortable investing in three to five years. How do we get them back in? And so we created the private markets, we gave it that name, branded it. And then four years later, we started the unicorn investing trends. So the first 80 companies on my platform, the company was called inside venture became the first ad unicorns. So we did fix the IPO, you know, exit issue and the liquidity issue for the venture industry. But we only did it with the largest deals, and the whole industry has become very skewed to the late stage and grows. So if anything, we made the problem worse for early-stage startups. So that’s why I’m back with the Radivision to democratize the private markets. And I think we’re filling in a key gap that supports what all of you are doing and what all of the startups need. So my role was director of Investor Relations and VP of Corporate Development, managing investor relations. So I’ve always managed the b2b communications, the financial communications, but also be to see one good article stock price would move. And you don’t want to create volatility, you want to create sustainable growth based on, you know, truly attaching the value of the company to the actual fundamentals of the company. And so that’s always been my perspective. So I created Radvision, which is really like television for radical visionaries. So like, ESPN covers the world of sports. Radvision covers the world of startups. And we want to make, we’re really a consumer engagement site. We’re building large consumer audiences who are really dying to know but entrepreneurship, it’s not just the biggest trend on the planet today, it’s actually the new economic paradigm and has been for quite some time. And yet, it’s very private, it’s opaque. It’s complicated, it’s biased, and it’s very hard to get into if you’re an outsider. And yet, 60% of all, college students are graduating not wanting corporate jobs, but wanting to have entrepreneurial opportunities to have a business one day. 17% graduate with businesses already founded, even my son, who’s now 28 graduated college with a business he started when he was 16. He’s going to do I don’t know, upwards of $20 $30 million in that business this year. He also has a full-time job engineer is an engineer at a big Silicon Valley, public company now. So this is the new world, and yet only the qualified institutional buyers. And you know, the very high net worth can get into it, no, the SEC said no, and the SEC has dedicated the last 13 years to opening the market. And yet we see that there’s a big disconnect or not a disconnect, but there’s a gap still between, you know, the legislation, which is already approved, you know, having the transfer agents having the legal requirement, you know, having all that in place, which you all are doing, and then actually bring retail investors in. And I think Andrew like the work you do is really super important. And what we’re trying to do is prime the pump even before that, we want to capture folks who you know, and even broader net, who are just interested in inspiring stories. I mean, these are the Marvel comic book heroes, these are the real-life heroes, curing cancer fixing climate change, you know, delivering really big solutions to people. It’s entertaining, people watch Shark Tank, it’s a 14-year, you know, phenomenon. And we know people click like crazy, they buy millions of dollars of products overnight and download apps by the millions. And so we’re helping to activate a third click, which then refers them to their licensed platforms, or, you know, find it, you know, crowdfunding sites. So if they want to engage more, and then just buy the product or download the app, they also have opportunities to, you know, invest properly. And mostly we’re helping people understand how this business works. It’s scary for a lot of people it is high risk. So that’s the gap we’re trying to fill. It’s informational. It’s promotional, and we built the platform. So you can go to Radivision.com Right now, just like you would to Netflix or Disney plus, except we’re free. You don’t have to subscribe. And you can watch original shows. We’ve produced I believe, about five different original shows. We have 50,000 pieces of content. We have our economics community, it’s actually going live later today, and we have a big promotion for this month for Women’s History Month. So we’re honoring 14 organizations, and they have amazing female founders and amazing companies. So we’re telling those stories so people can come in and be entertained just like they would Tik-Tok or anything else. But we know from 14 years of Shark Tank people get excited and want to engage and so we’re here to connect them to feel that connection gap. It’s free for the companies. It’s free for the viewers and companies like try net the Human Resources solutions company, it’s a b2b to seed model. So they’re the ones who pay, they spent over half a million dollars producing the first season one of the economics original series, eight episodes with host Emily Chang, you know, telling those stories, and then we have a lot of user-generated content. And we also curate a lot of content. So we’re a media company, we’re here to support all of your work and support the work of great innovators fixing humanity’s problems. And we’re here to give the other 90% of investors who, by the way, have $64 trillion of assets under management in the US that are investable, in, potentially in crowdfunding and private markets. And all of the venture capital has 900 billion, with only 200 billion and dry powder, and you’ve got 64 trillion with retail. So don’t talk to me about little investors, they aggregate really nicely, and they can smoke the venture industry if we can organize the system, educate and inform. This is what the renovations role is, and then allow people you know, to get into the pipeline, and I have other innovative opportunities that I think we can offer so to lower risk, and make it more consumer-friendly. And by the way, you’re another trend, and I’m sorry, I’m going on but just last thing, it’s worth mentioning, we are seeing a trend where Blackstone, Apollo Carlyle KKR, and you know, the top private equity firms, all are now growing retail investor markets to invest in their products. And we also have Cathy wood Ark investments with her new Ark venture fund that also is attracting retail. So there are new products coming out. And I will see that more and more and more and one of the things I think renovation will be great at is IPOs. Also, I think retail can come in and really facilitate and improve this whole pop-and-drop pattern that’s been consistent for the last 20 years that we need to fix.

Peter Daneyko  32:04

Thank you for all of that Mona. Wow. I mean, that’s a lot to digest. But it’s all part of that investor’s journey we’re talking about your storytellers. I mean, by the way, SHEconomics is great. And it’s the leverage of video. And I think Andrew, you, and Mona need to connect on.

Andrew Corn  32:21

We need a solid conversation. Yeah.

Peter Daneyko  32:25

I was gonna say where does this fit in? Yes, we’ve never met. So yeah, it’s really really, because it’s about that storytelling and that investor. Here’s something where, you know, from a starting point, it’s not just we talked about this impasse panels, Hey, I can’t just take a database of email and email 100,000 people and expect anything to happen whatsoever. You have not earned the right to that. You haven’t even earned the right to ask for somebody’s money. You know, you just spam beings and just did that email, it starts a journey with communication. So So I wanted to thank Mona for that because she got me thinking and me buzzing to say it’s telling history. And learning. Learning about a company before I think the best investor is I learned about a company. And they’re not even asking for money. And I go, geez, I’d sure like to invest in that company, then you’ve really done your job, right, as far as storytelling. So Mona’s company does video, that that’s a potential jumping-off point. There are all kinds of you’re an analyst deep dive analytics guy under changes in the landscape as far as using social media and the channels and paid advertising the buys. What changing on that for the nvestor’s journey to get them to the page?

Andrew Corn  33:44

Well, one of the things is there are more choices, a lot more choices. But I have to say, in the 90s, I either wrote or designed hundreds of mid-cap and large-cap IPO Roadshows with my first agency, which I sold to a public company in the UK in 2001. Anyway, I bring that out because I’m so amazed that Mona and I have never met before. So social media platforms are good news and bad news. The bad news is some of them just don’t work or the ROI is just not worth the effort. We have extensively worked on Reddit, and it has not been all that fruitful. Twitter is pretty toxic at this point, especially for paid advertising because you are supporting all sorts of things by advertising there. You know, a lot of people have moved off of Facebook, but they’re on Instagram and that’s still a very, very viable place. And then of course there is Tik-Tok and LinkedIn. And Tik-Tok is still in its infancy and of course may go way, it’s being banned on government phones all over the world. So we’ll see what happens. But the whole mindset of Tik-Tok has really taken off. And one of the things my company does now is we produce reels, these short 60-second, under 60-second videos, they are placed, they need to be educational, they don’t have a direct link to the offering circular, so we can’t ask for anyone to invest. But it has great use, having a YouTube channel is really important so that you are developing this library of content. And, you know, a client will say, hey, we have a whole 30 subscribers on our YouTube channel. And I’m like, well, that’s 30 More than you had before you started. And eventually, it’ll be 300, and then 3000, and potentially 30,000, or even 300,000. So does that matter? So I want to bring it back to real estate because I have a true love for real estate. And real estate marketing, because I consider all real estate marketing has a little having a little ESG twist to it. Because we’ve got 12,000 people retiring every day in the United States, they all want to get away from the volatility of the markets, investing in something that you can stand in, can kick my dog can bark at. And it’s just a really, really good investment that has been around for a very long time, and has only recently been offered to the public. And you know, with that, there’s also generally yield, which is distributed quarterly or monthly. And that’s why I consider it almost a social benefit because people are looking for better yields, even with higher interest rates. Anyway. So social media is a way to get to people. The question is, is who you getting to, and why do you want people who have recently retired, or do you want people in their 20s, who are the up-and-comers to have enough money to invest? And in many real estate deals, they don’t. But you don’t want to miss you know, Monas in Silicon Valley, there are a lot of people in their 20s with more than enough money to invest in whatever they want, because of the companies they’ve worked for. So you need to really understand what audiences you want to go after. And then I will give a little inside baseball here, you want to set a separate campaign for each of them. You don’t want the same campaign for people in their 20s, 30s, their 40s, their 50s, or even 60s. Because they have different motivations, they have different things that they’re looking for, they have different criteria, and the diligence they’re going to do is different, yet you have to do it all under the same compliance-oriented offering. So that just makes the job for the marketer that much more complex, I can tell you, we are running not only separate pages for the pre-retiree markets in our higher yield offerings but other parts of the journey we’re running separate pages as well. So to keep track of all that, it’s an awful lot of work. But of course, it pays off. 

Peter Daneyko  38:27

So it sounds like what I’m hearing here involves a lot of different content for different audiences. So you need to be I mean, pros and cons of crowdfunding, in general, is the pro is I can reach out to the crowd. The con or the challenge is I better be prepared to do what it takes to reach the crowd. The beauty of having the internet and the technology is is is the fact that I’ve access and, and channels and platforms and new ways to put content whether it’s on a Rata Vision or whether it’s on YouTube, I’m hearing video come up a lot you mentioned tick tock due to short attention span is that good it’s just more engaging, I’m going to make some assumptions.

Andrew Corn  39:18

So it’s also the level of the relationship. I just met you. How much time am I willing to invest when I just met you? So you know, let’s take it out of crowdfunding. I was just introduced to someone and I’m going to meet them for a drink. I’m not going to meet them for dinner because I don’t even know them. I really want to spend two hours with them. So it’s all very similar when it comes to having a high enough EQ to understand what is going to happen in each one of these engagements. When you talk about the investor journey. It gets deeper as it goes. Although there may be an emotional toll trigger at the end where it’s very quick. And they make the decision, yes, I’m going to invest. You know, one of the things we look at is time on each page, and each different page along the journey should have a different amount of time. So and you’re looking at the median, you’re getting rid of the outliers, because someone had it up and walked away from their screen, etc. But when you want larger investors, you need them to have done more diligence, because they’re not just making a quick decision of yes, I’m going to do this. I have personally probably 75 Crowdfunding investments, but I only have 15. angel investments. So the angel investments are 25 and above, where it’s any amount of money when I’m just doing a crowdfunding investment. And some of them were just to check out someone’s invest button or so I can just be on their mailing list as an investor. But many of them were because I was interested in it’s like, yeah, you know, that amount of money to me is not going to change whether I go out to dinner or not. Friday night, so yeah, I’m just going to do it. But others, if I’m making a larger investment, it’s a different amount of diligence. Now, is everyone like me? No, I am not a focus group of one. So when I look to my team of each of us, or we have people in each decade, their opinion matters, it matters more with certain issuers and less with others. Same as mine. And a ton of it comes down to storytelling, which, you know, I’m loving what Mona is doing. And I’m curious Mona, if, when an episode is over, if an issuer gets to use that footage, or if they can purchase that footage, how does all that work?

Mona DeFrawi 41:54

Well, they can link to it. So you can, you know, certainly show it, you know, on your site or anywhere you want to and then they would just be watching it, probably at Radision. We also have a show that we created specifically for companies who are fundraising, pitch planet, I mean, we are just telling the stories of the company. So technically, any company can go in there and tell its story. And we do want every company to have its own pitch planet episodes. So this is user-generated content. But we’ve created the, you know, the engineering around that. And we actually did a pilot last year, and with very little funding, we doubled the number of video views on the same budget on social media alone. Because of the community-generated effect. So instead of, you’re paying for an ad, and you get one click to watch your video, viewers came in, and they watched eight videos on average. And we’ve designed the whole carousel to have a 99-second trailer and then the full episode of up to 10 minutes, so that people can come in and just like you know, french fries just have one after the other really quickly. And, then if you settle in on one that you like, you can continue and look at you can multitask, you can look at their profile page, which has posts kind of looks a little bit like Instagram, which has a tab for information. One of the tabs is called opportunities. So you can connect. If there’s a crowdfunding URL, just immediately you’re there, and the video follows you wherever you’re looking. So it’s picture and picture. So you can continue to listen to the pitch while you’re checking out the company and engaging more deeply. And so based on the pilot that we did, we developed a pretty big audience, almost half a million people in just one month on a very small budget is under $10,000 of marketing spent. And so now we’re ready to scale this. So we’ve we took a lot of user feedback, we’ve made a lot of improvements, people can change it, and companies can come in and do this for free, or they can add a right now they can get a scholarship for free, but in a week, they’ll be able to just there will be a free option there as well. And then they will be able to allocate part of their marketing budget. And the system then will, you know, they’ll have additional benefits to you know, build more and more of an audience. So our goal is to really create communities. For companies, we’re here to create fans. That was my job as director of IR, you know, for seven of the years and VP of corp dev for more. And, you know, to really create fans, people who understand the story, who support the company who get excited, who want to engage and maybe follow the journey all along through IPOs. And, you know, when you look at the IPO performance over the last couple of years, almost all of them went public, they go out, they pop they drop and then they’re down for 15 to 18 months. I’ve written a lot on this venture capital journal and private equity hub and it’s a consistent pattern but then you have a company like Airbnb, which comes out and it keeps going up. Why? Because they had a natural Consumer Community, they had hosted and they had guests who love this, the hosts were able to keep their homes or, you know, create new income and the guests were able to travel in affordable ways and be comfortable. And my kids won’t travel in hotels, they only go to Airbnbs. They like having people. In fact, my son is in Europe right now. And they did all Airbnb is again. And so there was already a very big fan community for Airbnb. So then when they did their direct listing, a lot of them went first to their hosts and their guests and offered them an opportunity to buy. And so you know, similar to crowdfunding, crowdfunding isn’t an initial public offering, it’s very public, you know, and you have to go through the same rigorous process in order to have that offering. And so now, here’s a way if you’re building that community, throughout your process, when it’s time for you to execute a raise, your community is already there and ready, and your fans are there. So that’s what we’re working on. Yeah. And I, we’re happy to hear from you also, how it delivers results. So improving,

Andrew Corn  46:03

I’m going to kind of address a couple of things there. So I left the industry in 2004, through 2014. During that time, I didn’t sit on the beach, I developed a multifactor model and ran equities and designed the index behind six ETFs and ran active equities and a little bit of long short. So Airbnb stock did tank in 2020, along with the rest of the market, how do I know that I owned it? And I sold it in the fall of 2022. So I’m no longer a shareholder. I’m a fan of their business. And I love staying in Airbnb as well as hotels, they’re to be very different, sometimes just like to be waited on. So anyway, the thing about fans is it depends upon the company. So if your fans are of a certain age and a certain affluence, and you can move them from liking the product to investing in the company, it’s not near as easy as one might think. We had a client, they had a 300,000-person database. I remember Peter earlier mentioned, if you have 100,000 people, I looked at the database, and they were saving the world, they were in the recycling business. And I saw a lot of end users. And at the end of you know, I scan through some of the databases, I was like, You got a lot of teachers, social workers, you’ve got students, you’ve got people who mean well, and probably are customers of the company. But they aren’t typically people who invest in private companies. And I think some of that is generational, meaning it will become far more every day for people to make these types of investments. You know, when I was on a few days ago, someone quoted me saying we’re still building the stadium, we’re not even in the first inning yet. We’re probably at the top of the first inning at this point. But we have a long way to go before, you know 5 million people have seen will say, Gee, I have made a private investment through equity crowdfunding, and I’m going to make a crazy statement. Clients of my agency in 2023 will raise more capital than start engine or Republic WeFunder or any other platform. And no one has ever heard of my company. But many people will have heard of our clients, but who are our clients going after? And it is key that we find the right audience so that we can get them the right message in the right context at the right time. and converting them at larger checks so that the cost per acquisition, you know, what does it cost at the end of the day? Is it going to be 15% total all in including lawyers, accountants paid media everything? Is it going to be 10% is going to be 8%? Is it going to be 4%? So getting the cost of capital down is one of the most important things that my team focuses on. And it’s something we take great pride in. So just the world is very, very different. And it starts with getting your brand out there. So that’s why I’m so interested in what Mona is doing and what her firm is doing plus her background. It sounds like she knows what she’s doing with it as well. So I think that’s really exciting. But you know, we will set up a custom audience of just doctors and dentists. Why they’re all credited? Just about right We don’t need them to be because it’s a Reg A plus. So the paperwork is a lot less arduous than it would be to get the, you know, the whole accreditation thing. And they’re also fairly self-directed, we have a totally separate landing page for the pre-retiree market. And just one last thing I’ll say about audiences is what media they want to consume and how, and whatever our guesses we know we’re going to be wrong, or at least partially wrong. So having a lot of intellectual honesty and flexibility is super important in this as well. So I’m sorry, Peter.

Peter Daneyko  50:41

No, you hit a lot of great points there. And it just got me thinking when you talk about the audiences and the type of content that you’re putting out there, and the demographics and the age is associated with that. Both of you use video, on one hand, your comment about Tik-Tok being, you know, a viable channel. And it’s interesting how that evolution I mean when Tik-Tok first came out, I just thought I wasn’t watching Tik-Tok, I mean, I’ve heard of Tik-TOk. I analyzed tech, and I thought it was gonna be this big, interesting thing. But for a young demographic. I think technology also immediate choices, evolve, and change. And on that note, video to both of you the importance of video, and I wanted to ask about the quality of the video. Connecting with the retail investor is somewhat about, you know, emotional connection and trust in you. Do I need a high-quality video? Can I just be up there telling my story? Or is it just a combination of breadth of Mona, you do high quality, low quality, you have all of it.

Mona DeFrawi 51:56

So we have super high quality, we have, you know, $7 million shows, we have half a million dollar shows we have, you know, user-generated content that comes up. Although we do try to control the quality, we reject, you know, a lot of the stuff that comes up. But I think it’s more about the authenticity, their story, and the consistency. So one of the things, the programs that we’re getting ready to start marketing to our users because now we’ve grown a good base of members, you know, people signed up, although it’s free. Is to start creating regular This is a new IR I call it regular monthly stories, like Tik-Tok like videos, we just hired this person, we signed this deal, and this new product feature has been released. So when you start growing your community have you know your audience, they follow you, they can, you know, click on the plus mark just like they do on Netflix or Disney and when things come up that are related, or the news for that particular company and related stuff will also be introducing, you will be up to date. So you’ll continue hearing continuously and consistently about a company story and that allows someone to engage fast, faster, and longer and more deeply. And I think that is more important. So when I did investor relations for 10 years, 10 straight years for different companies, I’d get the phone calls from the hedge fund managers from the grandmas, you know, checking in, as we said. We don’t like those phone calls necessarily, because then we’re not doing our job communicating. But they were very, very informative. And I built this to respond to those types of questions and have this information available. And I think it’s about personal relationships today. People want to feel like this isn’t just a screen but that there’s actually a personal relationship that’s there.

Peter Daneyko  53:42

So I think that’s one of the key things about video. We’re getting closer to the top of the hour there’s so much more that we can cover in this subject. But I think a few takeaways that I’m getting out of this and I really, really appreciate it is companies are going to spend marketing dollars anyway to talk about their brand their companies position themselves even outside of the Reg CF or Reg A world of capital formation. Can I leverage those existing assets in cost-effective ways? And perhaps is Is it a good idea to say start thinking about this, everybody needs to raise more capital, especially in the real estate space if you want to grow and expand what you’re doing, keep in mind are hidden or consider the fact that I’m doing these marketing efforts. Can I repurpose some of these assets for the future for my crowdfunding, for example, or my capital formation using these exemptions? If I’ve got assets that exist, Andrew, is it a good viable thing to always keep in my back pocket to be aware of it or do I have to start from scratch?

Andrew Corn  54:52

They shouldn’t be in your pocket at all. They should be out. And when you’re not marketing, you still are community Heading. And that may be a time to do a show with someone like Mona’s firm. And I just want to quickly address the homemade video versus the professional video, we do a lot of both because there are different circumstances where one is better than the other. We do a webinar every single month, at least one for all of our clients. And we do a lot of them, and I’m being tricky from a question-and-answer standpoint because then we can cut up those answers into smaller reels. And we’re not as quite as big-time as KoreConx. Using this more sophisticated software we do a lot of it was zoom. But taking those zoom videos and making them the format that is portrait or vertical, and then releasing it as a real for on phones with a Tik-Tok or Instagram is something you always want to do. But now I want to address this. So being authentic and great storytelling are super important. But here’s the thing I love most about real estate issuers and when they’re very high-quality issuers is that when the riase is complete, assuming it’s been successful, they’re going to do another one and all those assets can be reused. But the single biggest and most important asset is the pool of people who have touched the campaign at all because they have been tagged. And they are parts of these different audiences. So when I talked about doctors and dentists, that’s an E5A put together exclusive to our client’s audience that we use that we own, and we deploy it for clients. What we don’t own is anyone who has touched any part of the journey with that particular issuer. So you may have 100,000 people who have touched the page but are not really engaged, I would not throw them away. Because the second you know, you’re going to market again, now you can start creating, hey, you already missed out once you want to miss out again. So the whole idea of FOMO is so important that now it closed and now you’re talking historically, from a compliance standpoint, we have already distributed X number of dividends for X number of months and our growth looks like this. And so an extraordinarily powerful corporate asset is the data gathered during a crowdfunding campaign. And I believe it belongs on their balance sheet. You know, we’ll see what FASB has to say about that. 

Peter Daneyko  57:49

What you know what we’re ending on kind of where we started, actually, when we started with, you know, capturing your existing shareholders on the cap table. And thank you, Amanda, for that and for explaining what a transfer agent does. But, those are your that your audience, that’s your first audience. capturing that audience. What I’m hearing is capturing that audience and repurposing, not repurposing and reaching out to them again and continuing to educate them to continue to communicate with them, whether I’m using video, whether I’m using whatever forms of social media, whatever using rad envision, it just got me thinking of all these additional thoughts processes that it’s all about touching your pupil and touching frequently at the right time and engaging them with the proper story. So I thank all of you, Andrew Corn. Mona, thank you, I learned more about Ratta Vision I had somebody just pinged us on the chat to say there’s a new Monday show and sheomics editorial production, lots are coming out. So watch that. And there are new channels every day coming out for the marketers out there to help people succeed with their Reg CF. So the Reg A’s and their capital formation. I want to close on one thing that you brought up, Andrew, that the audience is growing to a company’s website is their audience and its ability to manage and capture that audience. And you would you’d say that you’re not, you know, your firms are raising a significant amount of capital, because it’s not published anywhere that they’re sitting in the background. They’re not promoting that. It’s their business. These are private companies. And you’re right. There’s billions upon billions of dollars being raised on a regular basis, utilizing these regulations that nobody really hears about that because it’s not aggregated data sources.

Andrew Corn  59:45

What we didn’t talk about was Reg D which we could do a whole nother session on. We don’t touch as a company. Reg CF, we don’t do any raises under 20 million. So You know, it’s very different than some other companies and some other agencies. You know, and part of it is, is that we put our heart and soul into our work. So it’s really hard to walk away from raising only 5 million plus, we think that’s insignificant in real estate. So anyway, there you go.

Peter Daneyko  1:00:20

But not to that company that’s starting out that’s looking for $5 million. And it’s a segue to other things. So we’re going to end this session, we’re going to jump into the next session here. And it actually,

Andrew Corn  1:00:34

certainly, Peter.

Peter Daneyko  1:00:37

Then we have a few minutes, I was gonna say we’re gonna get ready for the next session here. And Andrew corn. If time permits, you’re welcome to join my next session. Because the focus of it is reg D, and REG S. We’re gonna get into the weeds a little bit and kind of ad hoc here, you’re welcome to join. May or may not it may or may not be a good time I just throw it out.

Andrew Corn  1:01:05

Yeah, I can stay till 230.

Peter Daneyko  1:01:07

So I’ll have her team send you the link and you can join a couple of other marketing folks on this conversation with us and we can have this because from a Reg D perspective. How’s that sounds great.

Andrew Corn  1:01:22

Appreciate it.

Peter Daneyko  1:01:24

Okay, Amanda, thank you again, sec, digital transfer agent extraordinaire. pleasure as always, and thank you. I’m going to close out here just because I need to address some things outside. And we’ll be back here in probably 10 minutes. So good. Thank you all to your audience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.