How Top Brands Raise Millions and Turn Their Biggest Fans into Owners

In the rapidly evolving landscape of online capital raising, brands that prioritize community engagement and strategic messaging are setting new benchmarks for success. The recent KingsCrowd Webinar explored how industry leaders leverage digital-first fundraising to build investor loyalty, maximize visibility, and generate multi-million-dollar raises. Featuring insights from DealMaker’s CMO, Jon Stidd, alongside experts from Maverick Brands, EnergyX, and KingsCrowd, the discussion offered invaluable strategies for founders looking to optimize their next capital raise.

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Why Brand Messaging Matters in Online Capital Raises

Brand storytelling is the foundation of a successful raise. According to Kellee Khalil, CMO at EnergyX, many companies mistakenly reduce branding to a logo and color scheme. However, a strong brand is defined by how the market perceives your company.

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“What we do is direct lithium extraction—a niche industry in the clean energy sector. We knew that our brand had to be instantly understandable, visually compelling, and rooted in education. If potential investors don’t grasp your value proposition quickly, they won’t invest.” – Kellee Khalil, CMO, EnergyX

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For Scott Hansen, six-time founder and the force behind Island Brands, social proof and consistent storytelling were key factors in his company’s record-breaking raises. Rather than merely announcing achievements, Island Brands narrated their milestones—engaging potential investors by placing them at the center of the journey.

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“We found it really helpful to create excitement around our story. So when we would do things, that were, you know, big goals that we would hit, we would present those to our community and grow our community by telling that story and growing that followership that we're converting into investors.” – Scott Hansen, Founder, Maverick Brands

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Multi-Channel Marketing: A Non-Negotiable for Scale

As Jon Stidd emphasized, a robust marketing strategy must be omnichannel, combining paid media, PR, and organic social content to maintain momentum throughout the campaign.

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“You can't just reach out when you're asking for money. You have to have these intra-round updates that continue to build and strengthen your community.” – Jon Stidd, CMO, DealMaker

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Both EnergyX and Island Brands leveraged programmatic advertising, email sequences, and influencer partnerships to amplify reach. Khalil emphasized that testing creative variations—rather than relying on assumptions—led to their best-performing assets. She noted that ads featuring direct, passionate messaging from customers consistently outperformed highly polished designs, as investors resonate with authenticity and enthusiasm.

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“Anytime we put in an ad talking directly to the customers, they always outperformed anything beautifully designed or whatever it is, the passion of the people, it's palpitable and it resonates with investors and that's what they want.” – Kellee Khalil, CMO, EnergyX

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The Power of Community in Raising Capital

Brands that maintain ongoing investor engagement raise significantly more capital over time. According to KingsCrowd’sfounder, Chris Lustrino, companies that integrate retail capital raising as a core strategy—not a one-off—are more successful.

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“The issuers that we see do exceedingly well tend to be repeat issuers who actually make in their DNA, you know, raising money from crowdfunding through Reg CF through Reg A+, like literally a part of their DNA where each year or every other year they're gonna come out and at least syndicate a portion of the round, if not their entire round of capital raising for that year online to the general community.” – Chris Lustrino, CEO, KingsCrowd

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A standout example is EnergyX, which kept investor enthusiasm high across a year-long campaign. Their secret? A mix of real-time updates, exclusive CEO webinars, and investor Q&A sessions.

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“We had big months, a lot of momentum, but in the lull of August, our numbers weren’t looking like we were going to hit the full $75M. One of the things that's really interesting and powerful about these raises is momentum brings momentum, and nothing brings momentum like a closing date.” – Kellee Khalil, CMO, EnergyX

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Investor Engagement Beyond the Raise

Raising capital is only the first step. Companies that cultivate ongoing investor relationships build stronger communities and facilitate future raises. Island Brands launched interactive ‘Catching Waves’ webinars, giving investors a front-row seat to company developments. Similarly, EnergyX offers quarterly Zoom calls with their CEO, keeping 30,000 investors informed and engaged.

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“Your investors shouldn’t only hear from you when you need money. Ongoing updates—whether about a new hire, a key partnership, or a strategic milestone—sustain investor confidence and fuel future raises.” – Jon Stidd, CMO, DealMaker

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Key Takeaways for Founders

1. Messaging Drives Investment – If investors don’t instantly understand what you do and why it matters, they won’t invest. Clarity, authenticity, and storytelling that resonates are essential.
2. Omnichannel Marketing is Non-Negotiable – Successful raises leverage a mix of paid media, PR, influencer partnerships, and organic engagement to sustain momentum and visibility.
3. Authenticity Outperforms Aesthetics – Ads featuring passionate, direct messaging from real customers consistently outperform polished creative. Investors connect with genuine enthusiasm and belief in the brand.
4. Investor Trust is Built Over Time – Ongoing updates, transparent communication, and interactive engagement (webinars, Q&As, behind-the-scenes insights) foster long-term investor loyalty and stronger raises.
5. Deadlines Drive Action – The final stretch of a campaign can account for 40 to 60 percent of funds raised. Strategic urgency and clear closing dates are key levers for conversion.
6. Think Beyond a Single Raise – The most successful brands integrate online capital raising as a recurring part of their financial strategy, keeping investors engaged beyond a single round.

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The future of capital raising is digital-first. Brands that master storytelling, community-building, and multi-channel engagement are redefining success in online fundraising.

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Whether launching your first raise or scaling an ongoing strategy, the insights from industry leaders reinforce a fundamental truth: investors back brands they connect with.

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Transcript

Jon Stidd: All right. With that, folks, we're gonna get started here. We'll let others trickle in, but we've got a jam-packed webinar here and excited to get started with everybody. Just want to say welcome everyone to today's webinar on how top brands raise millions and turn their biggest fans into owners.

My name is Jon Stidd. I'm the CMO at DealMaker, and I've been immersed in capital raising and community building for about a decade now. So that started as the co-founder of the Ridge Growth Agency, where we helped clients raise over $500 million.

And then eventually the Ridge Growth Agency was acquired by DealMaker. So, here I am now in front of all of you, still championing the  direct to consumer capital. I'm really excited to be along some of today's incredible panelists. So we're gonna get into some quick introductions and then we'll share the agenda, and we'll get started here. So please do put any questions in the thread. We're gonna drop in some polls throughout, but  we'll also have time for Q&A at the end here. So we're gonna get kicked off with  some of the introductions and then get right into questions.

OK, so starting with Scott. So Scott from Maverick Brands, Scott is a 6-time founder with 4 exits across tech, healthcare, and consumer products. His most recent success was founding Island Brands, where he took those innovative skills to the equity crowdfunding space, where they led record-breaking capital raises. So Scott has some really great insights into how they did that at Island Brands and now recently, moving on to create Maverick Brands where he advises fellow entrepreneurs on how to raise capital, foster community, and drive brand awareness.

Welcome, Scott.

Scott Hansen: Glad to be here. Thank you.

Jon Stidd: Thank you. Kellee, the chief marketing officer at EnergyX. So many may be familiar with this already, but EnergyX raised a massively successful $75 million Reg A, and Kellee is the leader behind that, overseeing strategic marketing and community-driven approaches.

Her expertise in brand strategy and performance marketing makes her an authority on maximizing brand visibility before, during, and after a raise.

Next up we have Chris, the CEO at KingsCrowd, and as the founder and CEO of KingsCrowd, Chris has spent the last 7 years pioneering transparency and access in the private markets in a completely new way, right? So using data and financial tools to make the private markets look and feel like public equity markets.

Christopher Lustrino: Right.

Jon Stidd: Before we get kicked off with some questions, we're going to get to know each other a little bit. We've got a quick poll here, so if we can get that dropped and everybody takes a look at the poll, we'll get to know each other a little bit more and we can cater some of our responses to your responses.

All right.

So have you raised online capital before?

We'll see how this nets out.

The race is getting closer here.

Oh.

About 50/50.

That's great. Well, thanks everybody for participating in that. I said, you know, we'd cater some of our responses. It is about 50/50. So I think what we'll find here is a lot of these will help folks with tips and tricks for repeating that strategy and building on it. And, for those not familiar, we'll make sure we touch on how to do that because we have the leading experts here today to bring us all through that.

So, our first topic, right, we're gonna talk about the importance of messaging and brand awareness.

So, as I mentioned, I'm the CMO at DealMaker, we are the leader in direct-to-consumer capital raises, helping brands put themselves at the forefront of their capital raise, right, doing that through self-hosted online capital raises, which puts your brand at the forefront of that, and that has all sorts of benefits for how you raise capital and how you build relationships with your investors in the larger community.

We're lucky to be co-marketing this webinar with the good folks at KingsCrowd. I'm gonna hand it over to Chris for a quick introduction there.

Christopher Lustrino: Yeah, thanks so much, Jon. I appreciate being here today.

So at KingsCrowd, we are a data company that has been solely focused on collecting 100% of the data on the Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A+ equity and debt markets. Since founding the organization, we have tracked and quantified and rated 10,000+ private companies that have used Reg CF and Reg A plus to the tune of about $3 billion, raised from 3 million individual investors.

So we quite literally understand what the markets look like inside and out and provide data tools to consumer-investors looking to invest in these markets intelligently, institutions who are looking to utilize our data whether it's for market intelligence, their own investing strategy, so on and so forth, and we have a full founder advisory arm as well, which is really about helping founders figure out how to structure their deal, how to build out all of the form filings they need, and how to provide ongoing investor relations to their investors once they've done a crowdfunding round. 

So we really do sit at the epicenter of the industry, with the focus of providing data-driven insights and solutions for this new ecosystem.

Jon Stidd: Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, a really important stakeholder in the community with where you all sit at the center of it and before you, you know, there was no data out there on this sort of thing. So somebody's got to collect it and deliver that transparency to the market.

All right.

Today's agenda, so we're gonna talk about how these experts look at raising a lot of capital in the space primarily from, you know, their audiences. But what do you do if you don't have an audience, right? We're gonna talk about some of those tactics as well about how to bring in investors to your capital raise and how to nurture them, bring them through the funnel and all sorts of life cycle marketing tactics, right? Because, you know, once they invest, that's not the end of the journey. So, today we're gonna talk about brand messaging, engaging those shareholders, what the capital stack looks like, and a lot of interesting perspectives here from folks with institutional backing on their cap table, so we're going to look at that.

And then of course we want to talk about the future outlook and also have some Q&A. So please keep dropping questions into the Q&A. I see a couple of them already, and we'll make sure that we answer those at the tail end here.

So, let's get started. Onto our first topic here. We're going to talk about the importance of brand messaging and marketing in these campaigns.

A lot of companies may start with a small audience, or they start with no audience at all, right? So, Kellee, for you, you know, brand messaging and marketing tactics are critical here, right? So we want to kick this off with a little bit of a bigger picture on how each of you sees this in your experience.

So, EnergyX leverages multi-channel marketing to reach a broad audience, but obviously there's some targeted aspects to that, you know, a lot of Elon fans who think about, you know, how EnergyX is pioneering lithium, right? But could you share your view on the brand strategy and how that's the foundation for a successful campaign? I think sometimes companies start a little too soon and they don't think about how their brand looks and feels first.

Kellee Khalil: Absolutely. I think when people think about a brand, they think logo, colors, maybe fonts, but what the brand really is, is how you are perceived in the market by potential customers, by potential investors, and building a brand is something that takes time and it's not an overnight thing. So I have been fortunate enough to be working with our founder and CEO Teague Egan since day one when he had the idea and really had built the brand from the ground up. And we had some really specific brand pillars that we started with, and we continue to bring into everything we do, which I think has set us apart in the space.

So one of those was really being focused on clean, impactful design.

What we do is direct lithium extraction.

A lot of people don't even know what lithium is. It's a very niche industry in the clean energy sector.

So we knew that it was really critical that whenever we were telling our story, one, it had to be in a way that was easy to view and see and understand, and that was visually very important.

But also we needed to be able to have a very strong message that was clear.

And because it is such a niche industry, we focus on education. So if you go to our website today at EnergyX.com, you will see our homepage talks a lot about the industry, the opportunity and why we are doing what we are doing because it does take a lot of education to bring someone into our world to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. And I think that is really important and critical for any business.

It needs to be clear what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're doing it.

If somebody cannot understand and grab on to the concept of what you're doing, it's gonna be really hard for them to say, OK, yeah, I'm gonna invest in that, right? When you think about, you know, us as individuals investing in public markets, right? Oftentimes, a lot of people have reservations about investing if they don't understand something.

So that's where having a very clear brand message, brand visual, really helps to build trust in everything you do. And so that was something very critical that we started from day one.

And in building our brand, we really focused on telling our story and leveraging media. So very early on, we did a lot of public relations outreach and we first started in local trade magazines, so mining reviews and it took time. But over time we've built up a reputation of our founder and CEO being really an iconic entrepreneur in this space. I mean, he's even been called the “Lithium King” by the Wall Street Journal. So these are the things that we've built over time. That's, you know, 6.5 years of building.

And so I do think it's really important if you're thinking about raising capital, not just your brand, but your story is really important.

And having press and media behind you is also really helpful to gaining momentum. And you're not going to go straight to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which we've been featured in both, which has helped a lot during our capital raises. But you can start somewhere by getting local trade publications to talk about what you're doing that helps you to hone in on your messaging and to make sure that if you're able to articulate it clearly to a journalist and that journalist is then able to turn that into an impactful story, that's a good litmus test that your brand is resonating, and so that's something that I would suggest that everyone think about doing if they're trying to go down this fundraising path.

Jon Stidd: Yeah.

Kellee, thanks for sharing that. I love how you got into the foundational tactics. People often don't start with the brand pillars, right? And then, you know, just like you said, the benefits of this being digital is we get to broadcast it everywhere, right? But somebody seeing that needs to quickly understand that. And that's gonna tie back to your brand pillars. So if you're able to convey your message succinctly and on brand, that's really the foundation that people need to go out with.

And I think you can skip a step and all of a sudden you've created this website that's, you know, talking about lithium, and that you're like, you know, people don't understand that. So you’ve really got to start foundational and build up from there and similar with the PR tactics, right? It's a laddering up strategy of how you get those larger publications on there. So thank you for sharing some of those tactics there.

Kellee Khalil: Definitely. 

Jon Stidd: Scott, we're gonna transition over to you on this one.

I just want to preface it with, I can still recall the ad of, you looking kind of down the barrel in the aisle there opening up the freezer door and pulling out the beer for Island Brands. So I just, I love how you think about storytelling and authenticity. Can you share, you know, how you built that and then maybe dive into some of the unique marketing channels or tactics that you were putting on there because it was clearly some good storytelling, and I bet that had a big impact on where you were putting some of those assets.

Scott Hansen: Yeah, so dovetailing kind of off of what Kellee was touching upon, you know, storytelling, clean design.

And, really, you know, finding a way to provide some social proof are really core tenets, I believe, of a successful equity crowdfunding campaign.

But that storytelling part, you know, you're going to find a community that you otherwise wouldn't have known.

You know, your core tenets of your brand already have a community, albeit small or large, but you're going to try and find more people to expand that community.

And, you know, people these days, there's a lot of noise out there and we found it really helpful to create excitement around our story.

So when we would do things, that were, you know, big goals that we would hit, we would present those to our community and grow our community by telling that story and growing that followership that we're converting into investors.

For instance, when we were able to get all of our products onto Carnival Cruise Lines, we didn't just announce that. We used an omnichannel approach to really tell that story about where we started and how we got to where we were able to get all of our products, you know, fleetwide on Carnival Cruise Lines.

I'm a brand guy at heart. Now sitting in the seat with Maverick Brands and having an agency dedicated to helping brands tell that story and grow awareness for their projects and build their communities out. I think a really smart way to do that is with humour and fun, and things that generally people are attracted to. Kudos to EnergyX to raise that incredible, successful, $75 million on lithium batteries. There's not a lot of, you know, exciting things, I don't think about batteries, but, if you have that social proof, that's one of the key parts, and being able to tell it in a way that attracts people. We were fortunate to have organic opportunities through public relations, including a really wonderful expose and Forbes that not only provided that social proof for our followers, but we told the story that I believe people wanted to be a part of. And with Maverick brands, we really focus on trying to understand those brands that are trying to raise capital, how do we present and grow their community through that omnichannel, programmatic, digital world. But I do think, Jon, ultimately, I think humour, excitement, and keeping it simple, are some of the core tenants for making sure that message travels.

Jon Stidd: Certainly, and I loved how you talked about social proof, right, and, and the updates and the ongoing updates, right? And it ties back into a little bit of what Kellee was talking about with that foundation, right? Because the benefit of an online capital raise is your distribution is the whole internet, right? On the flip side of that, when somebody comes to that website, it needs to feel personal, right? And that can be something that you do through social updates, right? Engaging your community. We're definitely gonna touch on that a little bit more next and how you build and nurture community.

Scott, you spoke briefly, the programmatic aspect, advertising, right? Obviously, you know, the foundation of that doesn't matter if you have the best ads in the world, if they don't get to the website and feel a cohesive brand, right, and see your storytelling on there, showcased firsthand. It's not gonna work. But, you know, I've mentioned that video of yours that I really liked. I bet that had some success on Instagram, right? You know, what were some of the channels that you were leveraging that on? And obviously, you know, that thread of storytelling, ladders up, it makes it easier to create those assets, right? That's why I love that video that you made. It was very personal, right? It's you looking down the barrel in the, in the store aisle there. And it's social proof too, you know, you're, it's like, it conveys that you're obviously also, in the market, right? Literally in the grocery store market, so I'd love to hear you talk about maybe just how you think about the advertising channels that you were on, and any learnings from that.

Scott Hansen: Yeah, so there's really nothing secret about leveraging methodical discipline.

And so we would, every quarter, lay out a very detailed content calendar and the story that we wanted to tell, and obviously that would ebb and flow depending on some of the things that were going on in the business itself. But when we lay out that content calendar, and you touched on it, distribution is key.

So there's not like one area where we were going to tell a particular vignette or a story. We would push that messaging, through our public relations team, through omnichannel, across all social, organic, and then it was kind of the theme of what that messaging was, we would also bring that into the physical market.

So, we would, we would have certain things that we would pick each quarter, and we would make sure that that messaging flowed through very consistently.

And then, of course, there's a tremendous amount of  KPIs and measurements across all of those channels, both virtually and in the real world, that we would gauge to see what was working and what wasn't. You know, one thing that, you know, I always stress to founders that come to us now that, you know, want to engage Maverick brands to help them with a successful outcome in a campaign is there's really no easy button.

It's not just meta, it's not just organic, it's across the board and you, you really need to do the work and you have to measure, you know, what's working and what's not because these campaigns are not a straight line either. Of course, moment plays a huge part, but if you want to have a sustainable, successful outcome, you have to kind of roll with the standard deviation of the campaign because they don't all go in one direction, you know, some messaging you'll learn may not be working as well as other messaging, and in fact you need to kind of pivot.

Running a campaign is, is really a, like a full-time job in and of itself, and Kellee can mention, you know, so, you know, that's just one of those things that  I think is important to impart on people that are about to go on this journey.

Jon Stidd: Yeah, certainly. So I love that you talked about KPIs, right? Underpinned by cohesive storytelling and getting that message across there because, you know, you need to have something cohesive that looks and feels like your website, and then when you have it on those advertising channels, you said it, exactly spot on, right, with what I've seen from, you know, over 100 of these marketed campaigns now, where there's typically not, you know, one breadwinner, right? You know, you're looking at these KPIs and you're continuing to invest and try to optimize and tell your story better across all of them, and you know, Kellee, I has a lot of experience there. 

Kellee Khalil: Yeah, I was gonna say first for anyone listening who's not sure, we're talking about key performance indicators. It's how we measure the success of each marketing channel that you're running against and something that we really leaned into at EnergyX when we are running paid media on something like Meta, Facebook and Instagram, right, or Google, or through partnerships through newsletters which DealMaker you know has been a great partner in helping us secure great placements, you know, for, you know, I would say good pricing right if you need to be willing to test.

So oftentimes, you know, I'm very committed to our brand that we've built our colors, our messaging, but you need to be open to trying new things and then letting the data tell you what's working based on click through rate, based on how many people who saw a specific message converted into your investment funnel, and so testing is really, really critical and I will say we had some images that when I looked at, I was like these are ugly this doesn't make sense like, but they piqued curiosity and interest and people were clicking on them and so we really leaned into it and said, OK, how can we leverage this for other stuff. So the message is yes, brand is important, storytelling is important, but testing is also very, very important and not being attached to that.

And yeah, you'll be surprised and we learned a lot of really interesting stuff along the way.

One more thing I wanted to touch on was Scott talked about the cadence of an offering right when you first start to end it and EnergyX was very successful in that we hit the max of the $75 million. I mean we actually oversubscribed and had to refund dollars which was painful for me to do, but, about 6 weeks out before the campaign was over, I had a conversation with our CEO, and the way it was tracking, right? We had big months, a lot of momentum, but you know, in the lull of August, our numbers weren't looking like we were going to hit the full 75, and he was concerned. Do you think we're actually going to hit it?

And we did successfully, but one of the things that's really interesting and powerful about these raises is moment brings moment and nothing brings moment like a closing date, right? Like the last, final opportunity to get in and that was something that I know Jon and the dealmaker team told me a good chunk of capital is gonna come in in that final week.

We didn't know that it was gonna be over 15 million in the last 7 days, which was really, really incredible. So, there is definitely a cadence to how the offering lives and when you're on that ride, I mean it is exhilarating but also nerve-wracking if you're planning your business against this capital to scale your operation. So, it's definitely a journey that you go on and it's not an overnight success. It's building blocks over time, learning, iterating, looking at the numbers, trying new stuff, and you just have to stay focused and stay in the game.

Jon Stidd: Yeah, Kellee, thanks so much for mentioning the data and the scaling up there and the willingness to test. I was kind of smiling when you were talking about ads that, you know, you may not have picked it as being the winner, but it wins, right? And then, you know, that's a huge part of scaling up and closing the campaign because as you mentioned, a large part of it comes with that closing date coming at the end. So, you know, we see anywhere from 40% to 60% of that capital being raised in the final month.

And, you know, unfortunately, it's, you know, closer to that final day than you would like it to be. So having those assets that you've tested behind, right, and those storytelling elements or those visual elements, and really having that ready so that you can scale up behind those ads in the end is a really important thing to do as a building block to your campaign so that you're ready for those big closing moments.

I think, as we talk about data there, that's a great segue over into, to Chris, right? So, you know, from an industry-wide perspective, you all have this data. Have you seen anything that correlates to brand and funding goals, or maybe what you've seen with, you know, brands that have really strong communities, which is almost an oxymoron, right, if you have a strong community, probably have a really strong brand. So what can you share from an industry-wide perspective, that you see through the data that KingsCrowd provides. 

Christopher Lustrino: Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a few things to highlight here. First off, you know, there were over 1,500s that got done last year across CF .

And if you look at that, it's kind of interesting to look at the different quartiles. There's a very large portion of companies in there that are raising, you know, $60,000 or less, right? The median amount, I think, hangs around $150,000 or so, but that upper quartile, that upper 20% are raising anywhere from a million dollars to $25 million to $75 million plus.

The question becomes, right, what is it about those companies in that upper quartile?

And I think a couple of things stand out to us. The first one might not be intuitive. Everyone always says this and it kind of drives me nuts. Oh, consumer businesses do great and nothing else will. And that's simply not true. What we're finding in the data is that people who are deploying the most dollars in this market tend to be repeat investors, actually tend to skew accredited even though this is, for non-accredited writers for everybody, and they're looking for good investments. They want good deals that are well priced, that have good fundamentals, that are telling a story about providing real upside. They're not just looking for a fun thing to be a part of the community. They're looking to believe there's upside in this investment.

So first off, you have to attract investors with a good investment thesis, a good story, and structure the deal where the terms are attractive overall.

So that's one of the first things any industry can do well. We see biotech do extremely well, we see business software do extremely well, and we also see consumer products do extremely well.

But on the flip side, we see consumer products do extremely poorly too, and that comes down to overvaluing and not putting the right amount of effort in, so on and so forth.

But amongst that upper quartile of companies, these are the companies that I think are structuring the deal well and then putting in all the efforts that we're talking about. And one of the other underlying factors that I think also gets overlooked is there are companies who come in and kind of think they could do a quick flash in the pan. Hopefully, we can raise a few dollars, you know, we need 500K if we did that, you know, that would be great, that would get us where we need to be, and then we wouldn't need this silly money again and they're gonna move on. Companies that think in that mindset never do well in this space. 

The issuers that we see do exceedingly well and tend to be in that upper quartile or what we call repeat issuers who actually make in their DNA, you know, raising money from crowdfunding through Reg CF through Reg A+, like literally a part of their DNA where each year or every other year they're gonna come out and at least syndicate a portion of the round, if not their entire round of capital raising for that year online to the general community.

And they're figuring out all of these modicums of how to have success and how to build an investor audience and then nurture them and take care of them through the life cycle of their company. So providing continuous quarterly updates, monthly updates, and then when they have an active raise, even more updates than that, maybe it's even weekly.

And so repeat issues we're seeing are raising larger dollar sums and are having a lot of success, and they're just, they're the ones who are committing and recognizing that if you want to raise capital successfully in this space, you have to make investments of time, capital, and effort in order to be successful.

So that's been really interesting to see, and I think we're seeing that kind of upper echelon of companies doing that starting to rise to the top, and unsurprisingly working with the right service providers and supporters around them as well.

Jon Stidd: Certainly. And thanks for that, Chris. You all are making it pretty easy as a moderator, kind of transitioning the topics for me because I did want to talk about building and sustaining a shareholder community, as part of the next section here.

So Chris, you teed that up wonderfully talking about, you know, the importance of bringing in an investor, those ongoing updates, and when you launch your new round, you know, how do you ensure that they are a repeat investor and there's some tips and tricks to doing that, but it comes from consistent communication. So, Kellee, I'd like to segue over to you for that one. I want to talk about some of that consistent communication and share some thoughts on what people should do in between rounds, but first I want to touch on, I think it's really important to note, you know, the EnergyX campaign was almost a year long you know, yeah, one year exactly, right?

And you talked about some of the lull periods, right? It's not all the sort of, you know, fast-paced final month.

What were some things that you all did throughout the campaign, communication strategy wise, update wise? How did you engage the community during the raise, during some of those lulls?

Kellee Khalil: Yeah, absolutely. Well, our first capital raise that we did was a reg CF not on DealMaker but on a marketplace platform, and we raised $2 million. That was really how we figured out how to raise, you know, capital directly from investors.

One of the challenges of that was that we didn't own the customer relationship we were, sending updates through a platform we didn't have their email addresses so there was a layer of disconnect.

So what was really critical when we selected DealMaker as a partner was the fact that they let us own our relationship with our investors, which was so important. That was one of the biggest things.

2) was our data, and then 3) was our brand being able to be at the forefront of it. So those were the three considerations.

As far as communication, one thing that we did that was successful leading up to the round was we put up a waitlist page, which I know some people are asking about this testing the waters, which is DealMaker's kind of version of that waitlist page, and we were able to generate demand from people just isiting our website, they were filling out the website they were filling out a form expressing interest in investing, and that gave us an indication that there was demand here for us to open up another round and as Chris mentioned, we realized after that first round that this was something that we were going to be doing all the time.

So we set up our website in a way that we could capture demand when we were not actively out in the market. That's really important because it's all about building up demand. So that cadence of the offering when it launched month one, we had a big month because there was a lot of pent up demand of people being interested, they missed out on the last round a year and a half before, maybe they've been following us on social media and in the news and they've seen that we've gotten traction. So month one was a big month for us which was really exciting. We didn't even do much marketing at all; we just hit up our list, right?

And so, and then you know over time we started to roll out marketing partnerships and that's how you start to build, you know, the top of funnel demand really bringing in new awareness in places where people are investing in similar types of companies.

Some of the tactics that we used to create momentum was really targeting big company announcements. So we had a huge milestone of the business reached where we acquired our first lithium reserve. So we went vertically integrated, we went from not just being a technology company but to owning the resource, which was a huge milestone for the business, and I think it happened in November, like a month after the campaign launched, but we did not message it until February.

We wanted to make sure that we could message it properly, that we could leverage big media outlets, and that was a big push that drove a lot of demand in.

And as a result, we actually had a slight share price increase while our offering was open, and that also created demand because people wanted to make sure they were in at the lower price.

Additionally, we leveraged a lot of in real life conversations through YouTubers and podcasters who were deeply passionate about clean energy, electric vehicles, lithium, rare earth materials, and by strategically timing these conversations that we had in these podcast release, it was able to then kind of build more momentum and bring people into our investment opportunity.

And then of course, at the end, like I mentioned, the fear of missing out is real and so as we were coming close to the end of the campaign, we just made sure that our customers knew, hey, your window is closing, it's gonna be over soon.

Now that we're not in the market, we don't have an offering live. We take communication with our own investors really seriously, so they're part of our own email database and we make sure to message them quarterly with our business updates with the more juicy kind of confidential information.

We also offer quarterly Zoom updates with our CEO where he will hop on and talk to people.

We are very lucky in that we have a very charismatic, well spoken CEO who is so passionate about what we're doing, but also deeply passionate about our investor community.

And that feeling of a 1 to 1 connection has been so powerful in driving the success of our races.

So I'll pause there. I know I said a lot, Jon.

I'll give everyone else an opportunity to chat.

Jon Stidd: Kellee, thanks so much, your last note there goes back to that sort of, you know, trust that you're trying to establish, right? And it's about communication, right? So Teague coming on to talk with investors between rounds, right? Because you can't see anything. 

Kellee Khalil: He's like, Guys have questions, drop it and he is like so unfiltered and open, and I think people really are drawn to that having that 1 to 1 access they feel like they're part of our journey. They feel like they're part of the team and we invite our investors who are in Austin, if you're in the area, send us a message and we'll give you a tour of the facility. We invite them to our local events like they really are a core part of our community and what we're building and we see them as huge assets and we have 30,000 investors.

Jon Stidd: Incredible. Yeah, and that's, you know, I say it like this to founders, you know, you can't just reach out when you're asking for money, right? So you can't, you know, you have to have these intra-round updates, right? That continues to build and strengthen your community. Kellee touched on this briefly. Obviously a foundation of that, right? It is a CRM, right? You may be using an email service provider like an ESP could be a Clavio of how you do that, to make sure that you're able to engage your audience and understand who they are and be able to send them thoughtful communication based on that. And then I'll touch on one thing quickly before moving on to Scott here, but Kellee, you also mentioned  those inter not the in-round updates, the updates in around, right? And Scott had mentioned this of how they, you know, think about what updates that they want to send out and the story they want to tell. I just want to stress, not everyone has to have purchased a lithium reserve to, you know, send out an update, right? Ongoing communication is so important. Obviously trying to make it impactful when you do it. It should be… 

Kellee Khalil: a key hire. It can be a key customer that you signed. It can be anything, but that was a big moment builder for us. But we try to let people know we hired a new team, we're opening a new facility, we signed this new partner wherever there's something that is tangible that shows people progress and moment, it gets them excited.

Jon Stidd: It does, it does. So Scott, moving over to you on this one, I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and feedbacks for, you know, how you think about updating your shareholder community base and, you know, what I think is unique that you could also touch on is, perhaps how potential acquires viewed your community, right? So, you know, island brands had the exit there, there may have been other acquires in those talks. I'd be curious how people viewed that community as an asset of Island brands.

Scott Hansen: Well, I want to start by saying that Kellee nailed it. I mean, she totally gets it. I'm not tooting my own horn when I was, you know, when we were doing our campaigns with Island, but we tested a lot of different ads and tested a lot of different things. And I was getting fatigued because my ads worked better than any other ads. Now UGC ads, you know, user-generated content was also something that we deployed to help spread the message and, and create ripples through our community which then were telling their friends.But, key indicators that having that passion that I had for our project, people felt like they, I was talking directly to them and…

Kellee Khalil: that performed the same. It's the exact same. Anytime we put in an ad talking directly to the customers, they always outperformed anything beautifully designed or whatever it is, the passion of the people, it's palpitable and it resonates with investors and that's what they want.

Scott Hansen: And that's ultimately where we saw a lot of opportunity, to really engage was, you know, bringing that message directly from the CEO of the company, me at the time.

But one of the things that we did that I thought was great to continue to foster the community was, live webinars and we call it the Catching waves, and I would come to them live from different markets that we were expanding in, sometimes I'd come to them at meetings that I was having with buyers. I mean, we did some fun stuff and we really brought our followers to the front row of our story and wanted them to be a part of it.

And like Kellee had said, we saw massive upticks in the closings of our different campaigns, really an outsized amount, because there's a FOMO, a fear of missing out that they may not get in on this round or they may not get in at all. And so it's that, you know, engagement and one on one, at least, that you can provide. Now, in terms of the community itself, you know, I had in conjunction with our capital raises, through crowd, you know, crowdfunding, we also did institutional raises.

And so, you know, it was, it was an interesting litmus to see what institutional investors, how they reacted, you know, to having, you know, north of 8000 investors, that we had on our cap table. 

And you know, it's really interesting now having this, you know, the kind of purview that I have now as the founder of Maverick Brands and helping other founders in these campaigns, you know, one of the questions they come up with is how do you exit with all these investors. And, you know, when we started looking at different opportunities to really scale. The company and bring on that institutional investor.

I was very adamant that right from the get-go, that if an investor, an institutional investor, wanted to come in and entertain an opportunity to be a part of our story, that they had to leave all of our crowdfunding investors intact.

I was not interested in having them bought out. I wanted them to come along for the ride. And when we did the private equity deal that we did with Irelandland about 11 months ago, that was my first core tenant, in talking with, you know, anybody that wanted to put a letter of intent to buy the majority of the company or, you know, recapitalize it the way they did, and with all the growth capital, is that these investors are your most ardent advocates, if you take them away, you're going to take away top line revenue, you're going to take away all the evangelism, you're going to take all these amazing things away. They are the reason why the company is where it is today.

And, and we did it together, you know, we did it as a team at Island Brands, and as the CEO of Island Brands, and now the story continues and Island Brands is now expanding globally throughout the Caribbean, and as a matter of fact, I still keep in touch with, with investors because I was, I was very much an open book, you know, investors they find my cell phone, you know, they text me and it was a lot of work to stay in touch with people, but even yesterday, I mean, every week, there's not a week that goes by that I don't have a handful of my crowdfund investors, you know, reach out to me and ask me a question.

I had one, literally yesterday, stop by the Island Cabana Bar near our HQ and drop off a gift for me. He happened to be in Charleston and, and was on vacation and wanted to drop something off for me.

I had someone text me, and this is something we didn't touch on. Who are these crowdfund investors? They're really interesting people. A lot of them are entrepreneurs that want to help. I had one of our investors that came in multiple times, text me yesterday and asked me a couple of questions, and he needed a sounding board on, something, he's an entrepreneur. He happens to own amusement parks throughout Florida where they actually serve our beer now, and he had some interest in some other things, but, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I evangelize the fact that this community is your community that's actually the, you know, look, I raised investor, you know, institutional capital, $20 million on top of what we did with crowdfunding, and someone just writing a check isn't necessarily effectuating the business, right?

You know, these folks are out there and they really want to be a part of something and, you know, this is the future of you know, if you're not raising capital through equity crowdfunding, I think it's really a mistake because you're building the community that's gonna help you grow the company beyond just the dollars that they're giving you.

I don't know if I answered your question. I kind of rambled on there, but, you know, I get really excited about the community. The community, you know, when I started Maverick Brands, and it was kind of a natural thing, you know, our three things we talk about are awareness, capital, and community. The community is the residue of the design of the campaign, but the most important part of everything and that community continues to follow us today even beyond island brands. So it's, it's exciting.

Jon Stidd: Yeah. And I love that you touched on that, right? We see community spring up in all sorts of different ways, whether that's, you know, stopping by to drop off a gift or, you know, we've had a community member of  of a customer of ours, help with some IP and patent law for, for a brand that they had invested in, right? So, as you mentioned, you know, it is the foundation of it. I love how you talked about bringing them to the forefront of your journey, right? Not everybody may be able to go, you know, show them the new markets they're expanding in, but how do you replicate that story and opportunity to bring them into the journey? Doing it through webinars is a wonderful medium for that. So I'm really glad you touched on that.

And then, Scott, you also brought up, you know, the future, right? How important this is, like, you know, you think it's, you know, an important part of the capital stack for businesses to be raising capital this way, and it really is future-proofing the business, you're building this community. I want to take that as a chance to hop over to Chris.

Chris, anything to expand on there, you've obviously seen in the data that, you know, community drives these campaigns. So, and you mentioned that in your first response. So if you have anything to add there, and then I'd ask you to kind of skip ahead on the subject matter there and any trends that you see around the industry just with KingsCrowd’s, you know, position as a focal point, and aggregator of all this data, there must be some trends, as we look to the future.

Christopher Lustrino: Absolutely. I think one of the really big things that our data suggests; because we run a rating algorithm that scores these companies on key fundamentals; right? And what we've seen over time is that the quality of these businesses continues to improve. And a lot of people thought, you know, these are the companies that were essentially Indiegogo companies, right, and that on a piece of paper and now they're pursuing money from the general public.

And what we're seeing in the data is that actually the majority of these companies are well established companies, companies with real traction. I mean, there were probably over 500 companies last year that had between a million dollars and $300 million in annual revenues.

And all of that is to say is, you know, this is not just friends and family, or in between friends and family and raising institutional capital. This could be used at any point in the life cycle of a business. And I think that's super interesting. I don't think people thought that would be the case.

But when you think about the logic of traditional venture capital, right, venture capital for the past 20-30 years has had a lock on being the only source of capital for private companies.

And so whether you were a company who was doing $3 million in revenue looking to grow to $30 million, right, which would be a 10, a 10X for investors, venture capitalists wouldn't be interested in your business, right? But where else could you go for capital? And outside of knowing a few rich folks maybe in your town, there would be no way to access capital for your business.

Well, now this is filling a gap where we have passive investors who are interested in going in alongside these companies in lots of different stages of their life cycle.

So you can be a business with a million, $5 million, $10 million, $20 million in revenue, who's looking to 5 or 10x revenues and be a multiple $100 million dollar business, but isn't necessarily wanting venture capital, or is looking to get venture capital later on down the road, or private equity investments down the road, but is looking to get capital right now from their community or just from passive investors who are interested in what they're doing.

And so, what the data is laying to bear is that we're seeing more and more experienced founders and more and more companies with real traction coming to market and raising capital in really interesting ways. And we're also seeing that valuation metrics are actually quite healthy. Revenue multiples on many of these businesses are actually not that crazy, and they're coming out with competitively priced deals. In fact, last year, companies that were venture backed raised in the crowdfunding space versus companies that were not venture-backed who raised in the crowdfunding space; the companies that weren't venture-backed had 50% lower valuations than those that had venture backing. AKA it was saying that companies that were coming to market without that institutional backing were actually coming in with better revenue multiples and were pricing themselves lower, which I think speaks to the fact that in investors in this environment are looking for competitively priced deals because they can see the whole market of opportunities that are out there, and that's actually driving better pricing for investors in this market, which I think is a really exciting learning. 

So anyway, all that is to say is the quality and breadth of companies in this space just continues to improve, and it's not what people think it is. It's really, really quality private companies across the spectrum of what that may look like.

Jon Stidd: Thanks for sharing that, Chris. I appreciate it. Yeah, you all sit at such an interesting nexus of, of having all this data. We love the trends that you're able to stop because of that, particularly around, you know, more quality companies coming into the space is really important for the industry.

We're gonna skip ahead here to Q&A, right? We don't have a ton of time left, just over 5 minutes. I wanna, you know, say thanks to all the panelists here. We have to skip ahead to Q&A because you've offered such great substance and strategy and tactics, for all of these. So, I'm gonna cherry pick a little bit on the questions. Some of these just have more thumbs up than, than others on them. What I promised to all the listeners is we'll grab all of these questions and answer them as a follow-up, in the email that you'll get a notification on. So I'm just gonna grab this one here. There's one around metrics, so, it was, as Kellee was talking, those 2 or 3 metrics, that you use to guide your most important decisions, and how do you avoid wasting too much money on the wrong campaigns or, you know, before you get to those learnings?

Kellee Khalil: So one thing I will say, and again, this is a shout out to the DealMaker marketing team who was an incredible partner in our fundraising process, they have built an incredible dashboard that gave me access to real-time data on where we were spending our money and what the returns were in almost real time by channels. So the key metrics I looked at every single day, I mean, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and check the dashboard. It was quite an addiction I had to the data.

But we would look at top of funnel metrics. So that means traffic that would come to the site, how many people were coming to the site, and what was the cost to get that click. So, And then for all the people that came to the site and clicked, how many people started the investment process and it went down from there, from starting the investment process to signing the documents to funding and looking at the cost every step of the way and so what was really powerful is with their marketing and and analytics tools it allowed us to see what sources were the most powerful so a lot of questions I saw was what was the distribution of spend between partnerships and Twitter and Meta and so we were able to on a weekly basis adjust our partnership spend and our distribution of marketing dollars based on what was working that week and what creative was working. So the metrics were really the cost to acquire an investor at the end of the day that was what mattered the most that we had positive return on ad spend  and our target was, I don't want to say it doesn't get people to get frustrated, but we had a very, very high return on ad spend, but it was close to 7. So for every dollar we spent on marketing, we raised $7 which is unheard of in e-commerce marketing. It's like I've never heard of it. If you have a 1 to 4, you're excited, right?

So, I think that spread was really due. To the strength of our brand, the story, and the passion of our, of our community.

Jon Stidd: Certainly. Kellee, thanks so much for sharing that. I was smirking a little bit because I worked in e-commerce before this and familiar with the return on ad spend, and you all raising capital outperform some of those e-commerce brands. They would, they would love for, for a 7X there. We've got 3 minutes left. I want to touch on one last question. I'm sorry we didn't get to everything like I said, we'll follow up there.

This next one, Scott, I think you're particularly well suited for this given what Maverick Brands does now advising companies raising capital. When you think about time allocation that a founder needs to spend doing this, right? It's a big part of it. Can you touch on that in the last few minutes here? What a, what a company should think about spending in terms of, you know, resource time on a campaign?

Scott Hansen: So, when we did an analysis, as we started getting into this, you know, we, when I say we, my wife was the director of marketing at Island, our creative director at Island. We all banded together after we did the deal with Island  to form Maverick to help other founders because there're so many people that want to do something like this, but they just don't know what they don't know. And, it's a lot of work, so we developed a very disciplined playbook to bring them through.

One of the things that we really set expectations on in the beginning is, you know, what you put into this, and it, it sounds common, but it's just so true. What you put into it is what you're going to get out. And we did, we did an analysis on , you know, conventional fundraising. If you were to go out and, and try and raise capital outside of the, you know, digital ecosystem, you know, what does that cost? And, we were able to show that you get outsized ROI doing it this way.

By the way, you also get the benefit of an awareness and community, which really, this is a huge marketing event that goes and finds your community. So again, it's awareness, capital and community. The fact that DealMaker and shout out to you guys have created this streamlined approach that allows companies like us to be able to see all the data. And, and, you know, like, like, Kellee, I was addicted to looking at the data every day because that's what's informing you on where to go.

Kellee Khalil: The worst part is when the campaign's over and then you don't have that dashboard to look at. It was two weeks afterwards. I was like, what am I going to check now?

Scott Hansen: That's right. But, at the end of the day, there's a lot of time you have to invest, but the more time you put into it, is where, where you're going to get your ROI.

Now, we also, you know, dovetail in there because, you know, not every brand has the capacity to be able to run one of these campaigns effectively. And so that's where we try to streamline this and create, you know, an outcome, aligned with, with their goals.

Jon Stidd: Certainly, yeah, it is a large time commitment. We're right up on time here. I just wanna send a really big thank you to all the panelists, right? Chris, you sit at such a nexus of KingsCrowd with this data that you all have access to and aggregate really and empowering investors to make decisions. And Kellee and Scott, your foundational experience, having, you know, run these campaigns yourself. Just want to say thanks to all of you. This was a ton of great insight that you're able to offer here. We'll send a follow up to everybody who's on the email and make sure we get some of those additional questions answered.

Right on, thanks everybody.

Scott Hansen: This was great, Jon.

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