Crowdfund Investing For Dummies
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Your website will be linked to your crowdfunding portal. Your website should reflect all the things you emphasize in your video pitch and can offer more details about your product or service, your business strategy, the milestones you seek to achieve, and so on. You can use text, photos, additional videos, graphics, a blog, and more to get your points across.

You want a clean, easy-to-navigate site that demonstrates to potential investors that you have answers to their questions, you’ve thought through the specifics of your venture, and you’re professional.

If creating or updating your website to achieve all these goals seems overwhelming, keep these things in mind:

  • Blogging platforms like WordPress make getting a website up and running relatively easy. Even easier than WordPress is Virb. With Virb, for $10 per month, someone with absolutely no knowledge of web design can create his own professional-looking website, fully customized with just a few clicks of the mouse.

  • Lots of people know how to create websites, and chances are that at least a couple of these people know you and support what you’re trying to achieve. When in doubt, reach out to your early supporters for help.

  • Likewise, your supporters can tell you whether what you’re creating is truly useful and easy to navigate. They can offer tips for improving your site that may be crucial to sending the right message to potential investors.

Be very careful about how you use your website. You have to prepare for a situation in which someone visits your website for reasons other than finding out more about the investment opportunity. Per Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, potential investors need to go to a crowdfunding portal or registered broker-dealer to learn about the crowdfund investment offering that you mention on your website.

You can — and should — promote your business venture on your website so customers and potential investors understand what your business does. But the JOBS Act doesn’t allow you to post a solicitation for capital on your own website; it allows you to reach out only to people who already populate your social networks.

So, use your website to explain your concept and strategy, to promote the vision of what you’re trying to achieve, and to let investors find out more about who you are. But do not use it to request money. Let your funding portal handle those requests for you by tapping into your social networks.

Otherwise, you could receive a very unpleasant letter from the SEC asking you to take down your pitch because you aren’t following the rules, and at that point your fundraising opportunity is dead. Capiche?

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Sherwood Neiss, Jason W. Best, and Zak Cassady-Dorion are the founders of Startup Exemption (developers of the crowdfund investing framework used in the 2012 JOBS Act). They deeply understand the process, rules, disclosures, and risks of capital formation from both the entrepreneur's and the investor's points of view.

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