Lessons Learned

This is why I built a tech stack for capital market CEOs

Navigating capital markets is incredibly difficult. We took our company public in 2022 and have seen the best and worse it has to offer. That’s for another discussion. One of the biggest challenges is selecting the people you are going to war with. Finding the right mix of legal help, warriors and strategic partners is never easy but it’s made increasingly more difficult in the snake pit that is capital markets. There are a lot of bad actors and a lot of people promising things they’ve never been able to deliver.

IR firms have been hit hard by the data volatility in the marketing world. They have been forced to rely on the old email lists they’ve accrued over the years, and they pretend that’s an advantage. But it’s not. If you can’t get your company and all that it offers investors in front of the right people, you will forever struggle to raise capital and build the liquidity that is so vital to the health of any company seeking growth.

That’s where we come in because identifying these audiences was far easier before the iOS update that sent data accuracy spiraling out of control. Platforms suddenly couldn’t find the right person that is doing multiple investments of a minimum dollar amount that leans into your vertical with their investment dollars. The platforms no longer had app tracking data which allowed them to creep in on all of our data through our banking apps and brokerage account apps. While that’s a great thing for all of us, it crushed the big IR firm’s ability to hold the lock and key to the retail/private equity investor kingdom. The smaller IR firms have such a niche audience that crossover investment never happens. It is the equivalent to trying to sell emerging adtech to a group of elderly Pharma investors. Sure, they’ll all be impressed with your presentation, but they won’t have a clue what you’re talking about as they enjoy the filet and wine you served them for their time – the primary reason most showed up at all. It’s a snake-pit.

That’s why you – despite all of their objections based on decades of “experience” – you need to keep control over your narrative, and you need to define the audience worthy of your time and outreach spend.

Trust me when I tell you that they cannot email their way to investment. It simply doesn’t work. But where does that work, really?

Let me share what I learned through my journey taking a company public and ultimately what we built to deliver results.

• A real generational shift has occurred in both the retail investor market and in the positions held at firms with institutional money. The old money is really old, and the young money is dumb money.
• The “good old boy network” is real but nobody will actually grant you access to it. They will pretend they are part of it, but they will never kick the door open for you because doing so would eliminate the need for them.
• Those monetizing mentorship are doing so with at least a dozen other companies, and they are hedging their bet even in your industry. These people will always have their business at the center of everything they do even when they are doing it on your dime. And nobody’s name is worth the price of access unless they have major credibility in your industry specifically. And if they do, they are working against you whether they mean to or not.
• You went public or you created a Reg A, use equity to find out who is truly bought into your business and your market play.
• The folks doing your audit or your legal work are not marketers and they are not fund raisers. While they mean the best, their recommendations come from history. Unfortunately, most of that is ancient history.

These are just some of the learnings I have had over the last couple of years but these, and many more, informed me on exactly what you need in order to drive investor interest and liquidity. At the core of everything is one fundamental to all of this: keep control. Nobody cares about your business the way you do, and nobody understands your goals and your audience they way you do.  And IR guys actually talking to investors are deciding between a dozen companies on which to tell that investor about and advocate for. They are serving many masters; you have one.

So, what we built is part latest tech, part marketing and part investor relations that come together to give you the 2 things you need the most: a true-key service and control with transparency. Our audience ID capabilities are unmatched and our solution for the cause of the bulk of volatility in digital marketing are buttoned up and proprietary. Nobody else solves the issues of errant data and bot traffic like we do, and no other firm delivers ownership of the audience data that can be democratized across all of your efforts except us. We’re it.