More and more people are now realizing the importance of buying locally and supporting local businesses, and as a result, platforms such as Mainvest are increasingly under the spotlight for taking this a step further, by allowing the community to invest in small local businesses.
By allowing individuals to start investing in lucrative local businesses from as little as $100, innovative concepts such as Mainvest stand to fundamentally change the face of the high-streets, taking it back from chain outlets, owned by faceless corporations, in favor of local small business owners.
Small, niche, and undercapitalized local businesses on the high streets face an uphill battle when competing against larger, well-established peers. This is in addition to the range of other challenges, so, it’s no wonder why a vast majority of them go out of business within just three years.
Crowdfunding platforms such as Mainvest, when paired with local outreach and marketing can do wonders, and offer a much-needed lifeline to such businesses. In this article, we cover how harnessing Mainvest and tried-and-tested webinar strategies can result in successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Understanding Mainvest
Mainvest is a crowdfunding platform that lists 100s of vetted small businesses looking to raise funds for their ventures. Unlike platforms such as Kickstarter, Mainvest offers investors with a revenue sharing note in the businesses they choose to fund, allowing them to earn a lucrative ROI, often in perpetuity.
Not only do investors get access to high yielding opportunities in real small businesses, often with infinitesimal growth potential, small businesses themselves gain access to much needed risk capital, which has long been earmarked only for tech startups with innovative IPs.
Most equity crowdfunding platforms require participating investors to be accredited, which means to say have a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence, or have an average yearly income of at least $200,000.
Mainvest, however, allows non-accredited investors to use the platform, and invest up to $2,500, depending on their income and net worth. This isn’t a problem, considering investors can get started for as little as $100, although accredited investors will be at an advantage, with no limitations on how much they can invest.
Promoting Crowdfunding Campaigns
While Mainvest has a robust community of investors of its own who regularly invest in promising businesses, most crowdfunding campaigns do require additional effort in-terms of targeted marketing and promotions.
This is especially true for small local businesses with a limited reach, and ability to scale, that makes them less appealing to global investors.
Fortunately, there are plenty of fundraising avenues for such businesses, particularly involving local outreach. A practice that is well-received in this regard is organizing a webinar to pitch your business idea and plans to prospective investors.
A webinar works great, because attendees can listen live, ask questions, and even express concerns live on-air. Presenting a webinar personally further helps in building a rapport with investors, and instilling faith in them, before asking them to invest in your fledgling upstart.
Distributing & Syndicating Webinars
While a webinar can do wonders for your crowdfunding campaign, getting attendees interested, and gaining traction is far from straightforward.
A great way to get started is by tapping local Chambers of Commerce and community organizations, by attending their events, and inviting people to your webinar. In addition to this, there are ways to ensure a wider reach, and a steady stream of leads and prospective investors for your business via webinars.
Mastering the art of generating leads through webinars takes quite a bit of time, but with simple done and forget syndication services, your webinar content can go places and start working for you, in ways you could have never imagined.
Final Words
We are at the cusp of an explosion in risk-capital for small, niche local business, and for small town entrepreneurs, this means that the sky’s the limit for their dreams and ambitions.
There are a lot of nuances and intricacies of this concept that need to be understood and worked out, but one thing that we can say with certainty is that the venture model of funding businesses is all set to be disrupted over the course of this decade.