Equity Crowdfunding: Transforming Customers into Loyal Owners

by Jonathan Frutkin

Equity crowdfunding is going to change our view of capitalism. This book is about more than raising money for a company. It is a book about how business owners can turn their customers into loyal owners. Smart leaders will further transform their investing customers into evangelists for the business. With its ability to leverage social networks to gain market share, crowdfunding offers established local businesses the largest marketing opportunity of all time.

Transforming Customers into Loyal Owners

Last year, I wrote an article for a local business magazine about the JOBS Act. What I thought was a relatively benign article for people to flip through while sitting in local doctors’ waiting rooms generated a ton of calls to my office. I realized business owners were thirsting for a new avenue to raise money for their company. Upon some reflection on the response that the article created, I decided that I missed the mark entirely. The opportunity to raise capital using crowdfunding isn’t exciting. What is exciting is that local businesses can make their customers into owners. This marketing opportunity is huge!

Crowdfunding is the collective effort of individuals to pool relatively small amounts of money into a much larger “fund” for a specific purpose. Crowdfunding almost always refers to online efforts to get financial backers, but the projects themselves range from disaster relief to political campaigns to arts projects to just about anything else that can be imagined. My book focuses on equity crowdfunding – where a collection of individuals invest in a business with the hope of future financial return.

Experienced Wall Street hands believe that equity crowdfunding has little utility. They believe that while some small amounts of money will flow to help startup companies, the opportunity will be very limited. This sort of small-minded thinking misses the true opportunity offered by this innovative funding model. Equity crowdfunding is the single largest marketing opportunity for local businesses to transform mere customers into loyal owners. By resetting the relationship between corporation and patron, the new rules for crowdfunding are going to fundamentally shift the way entrepreneurs think about both raising capital and creating long-term engagements with their customers.

For the startup entrepreneur who believes that the new laws will solve their undercapitalization woes, crowdfunding will prove to be a disappointment. While there will be a limited opportunity to equity crowdfund a startup, that window will soon close. In a few years, the only companies that will be able to capture the imaginations and dollars of the investing public are solid companies that generate consistent investment returns. Once investors realize that betting on a clever idea with an untested business founder is a losing proposition, crowdfunded money for startups will dry up.

The good news is that the quickest-growing job creators are profitable companies that generate $1 to $10 million in revenue. These companies are the ones that stand to gain the most from the new equity crowdfunding rules. And the American economy will benefit from having more investment dollars in the hands of companies that will create the most new jobs.

221 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2013

Reviews

[Gil Bradshaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so few books on Equity Crowdfunding that this is a must read if you are interested in the topic. It looks like some people ripped on Frutkin's book, but frankly, I think he did a good job of painting the revolutionary picture that could be crowdfunding.

I don't agree with some of his analysis but found that his explanation of the Jobs Act was helpful and again, thought provoking.