Before DNA I was working at an advertising network with some of the top 100 advertisers in the industry.
The job and experience were top of the line, but at the end of the day, I knew I was just another vendor on a spreadsheet, who would get invited to the next campaign when my performance was exceptional.
I was passionate about digital marketing and knew I could create a business opportunity that focused on results and user experience, so I decided to leave my job and set off on my own.
The moment I left my cubicle, DNA was born.
Soon after, my team and I were running digital advertising campaigns for underserved businesses and markets, to later expand our services to digital marketing strategy and content marketing, and ultimately be one of the first digital marketing agencies to spearhead campaigns for seed startups and their equity crowdfunding campaigns.
To this day we’ve served over 400 clients and have conducted over 200 equity crowdfunding campaigns, but there is so much more to our story that I’m excited to share.
Falling into Equity Crowdfunding
We never set out to be a part of the fundraising world.
I consider it a niche that fell into our lap, and I’m so grateful that it did.
In 2014 my partner Tim Martinez and I set out to support underserved niches that need more innovation with digital marketing such as the continued care market. Though we were initially running programmatic advertising campaigns with budgets at $25K and greater, we also saw a need to help small startups who didn’t have the budget to run programmatic advertising.
In 2015, DNA started running Facebook advertising, which allowed us to offer advertising to smaller startups, test out campaigns at affordable budgets, and scale it to volume with the right advertising creative and funnel.
Working in the world of startups we quickly found entrepreneurs always asking us to support their capital raises such as being a part of their business plan, working on different marketing funnels, building out revenue models, or creating digital marketing strategies. That way our clients could take our work to investors and get the financial backing they needed to activate a much larger campaign.
We were even asked to build pitch decks and physically participate in investor meetings! So when we were first introduced to equity crowdfunding platforms at the Tech Disrupt LA conference in 2014, a light bulb went off.
I already had experience raising three million in seed capital for a gaming startup and personally worked on over 75 versions of their pitch deck, so to see the streamlined process equity crowdfunding platforms offered and to create marketing strategies that would drive investment through these platforms was a no brainer for me.
In 2014 we worked on our first Reg D campaign with Rayton Solar to target accredited investors or high-net-worth individuals for a seed investment. It raised $2.83 million and is still one of the top campaigns on fundable. Rayton’s Founder, Andy Yakub, was featured in the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, which he used later to secure Bill Nye as a spokesperson for Rayton for their Reg A+ campaign the following year.
From that point on, we never looked back from marketing for crowdfunding startups.
Enjoying the Momentum of the Current Equity Crowdfunding Movement
From that raise, we garnered a lot of attention from the Reward Crowdfunding world, getting whitelabeled, and running behind the scenes for many of the top Indiegogo and Kickstarter marketing agencies.
When Title III of the JOBS Act was passed in 2016, we were working on two equity crowdfunding raises on those platforms. Initially, we thought equity crowdfunding was going to take the world by storm. Little did we know it would be a slow start for equity crowdfunding to make a name for itself besides venture capital.
However, in the past 18 months, equity crowdfunding has seen rapid growth and interest in entrepreneurs who, in Kevin O’Leary’s words, want to “Always be Raising” funds to rapidly scale their business. COVID and the decline of venture capital were like adding lighter fluid for the fire—there’s been an explosion of willing startups and new platforms alike in the industry.
Which ultimately means, DNA is expanding rapidly as well.
Realizing The DNA Vision
If you’re working in the equity crowdfunding niche, the ultimate goal is to help the next disruptive, game-changing startup make a positive impact in our communities. It’s all possible with equity crowdfunding and a solid marketing strategy that will target and convert everyday investors.
But sometimes it’s easier said than done.
After working on both sides of the marketing table, I know that marketing agencies usually get a bad rap. They can be difficult to work with, failing to deliver on guarantees or never generating a return on investment.
That’s why we’ve created our three core values:
Be Easy to Work With: We’ll always have your back with the SOPs that fit your needs
Communicate Early: We’re ahead of the curve and are proactive on your campaign, as well as emails, calls, and project management platforms
Answer with Algorithms: Numbers are the only way to measure anything and everything we do is backed by metrics and hard facts
We’ve spent countless hours investing in our team and our culture to ensure we can provide all of the above, in a lean and effective marketing agency that will drive more users and investors to your brand.
Our three key services, digital marketing strategy, advertising, and content marketing are designed to hit every single aspect of your equity crowdfunding campaign.
Everything starts with a marketing plan, and we work hand-in-hand with you to create a strategy that will meet performance goals while staying within your budget. From there we work on executing your strategy through advertising and use content marketing to support all advertising efforts, create surround sound for investors who need multiple touchpoints before conversion, and stimulate social shares and high authority links from publishers.
Together all three services create a funnel that is filled with traffic from advertising and converted through high-quality content to new users and investors. By offering these services we hope to experience more exponential growth between now and October 2021 and helping the next Uber or Airbnb make it big.
Helping You Test, Optimize, and Scale Marketing Strategies For New Users and Investors
What does work is the relentless testing and optimizing in pursuit of hacking the algorithm and ultimately finding what makes your audience tick.
By continuing to offer solution-based and ROI-driven approaches we hope to continue to help the next generation of companies raise the millions they need to see their vision realized.
The bottom line is we’re your marketing scientists working the advertising scientific method to find the scalable pockets of performance that will drive the users and investors your business needs.
As scientists, we’ve learned a lot from trial and error and are happy to share all we know with you.
Feel free to pick our brain and contact us for anything you need.