Turning Clicks into Capital with Jason Fishman Episode - 548

Well, as a marketer, I would encourage audiences, founders, CEOs, marketers, even CFOs speaking with their marketing team to put together a marketing strategy. And I'd like to highlight a competitor marketing audit. Without that, you're kind of shooting in the dark. You're going off what your idea of your target audience is, and likely you're going after a different investor profile than you are for your core business.

You can have the best product in the world, but without investor trust, it goes nowhere. Scaling Trust reveals how the right blend of psychology, data, and storytelling transforms cold audiences into loyal backers ready to fund your vision. Welcome to Streams to Impact, brought to you by Steve Talker Capital. I'm your host, Dr. Allen. There comes a point in every high achiever's financial journey when you realize that success And doesn't secure freedom, but trust does. Whether you're attracting capital partners or the right opportunities, trust is the foundation that scales everything. Today's conversation explores how psychology, technology, and storytelling come together to create investor confidence at scale. It's a deep dive into the art and science of investor attraction and how understanding human motivation Innovation can turn even the most complex campaigns into movements people want to fund. Because when trust scales, so does impact. Now take a deep breath, feel the reins in your hand, and let's ride together into today's conversation. Just a brief disclaimer: all information shared on Streams to Impact is for educational purposes only. It's not to be construed as investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. Investments involve risk. You should not invest if you are not prepared to lose 100% of your investment, and always consult your legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making any investment. What happens when data-driven precision meets the timeless power of human storytelling? You get Jason Fishman, a marketing strategist who has mastered the art of scaling trust. As the founder of Digital Niche Agency, Jason has led more than 850 brand campaigns and 500+ successful crowdfunding raises. Helping founders and visionaries capture attention, attract investors, and drive meaningful growth, he's built a career on bridging two worlds, the analytic and the emotional, showing that raising capital isn't just about exposure, it's about alignment. When your message resonates with investor psychology, momentum follows. Jason's insights reveal what it really takes to build belief at scale, not only in your product, but in your mission.

So welcome, Jason. We are delighted that you are here with us today. So let's just start out, if you would share with us How did the path evolve into your focus on crowdfunding and investor acquisition from a marketing perspective?

Absolutely excited to be here, Allen. I started a growth marketing firm in 2014 working with startup mid-market businesses. I call it growth staged, and capital raising was a common part of the conversation, a common part of the discussion. With my background in advertising, ad tech, I was able to utilize different data partnerships to reach very specific individuals. So when I first learned about Reg D 506, a rule that allows us to solicit accredited investors, I saw my path. I said, hey, I could directly be of value to my clients in terms of introducing them, reaching new investors on their behalf. And we began running advertising campaigns targeting high net worth, high household income audiences, filtering by various investor behaviors and interests. The first campaign we ran raised $2.83 million for the client, Rayton Solar, that we were working with. This is back in 2015 on a platform called Fundable. But that put us on the map, if you will. Or the client was interested, introducing us to different issuers, the platform. We even got attention from the reward crowdfunding world, sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo. There's marketing agencies that focus just on those projects, those deals, and they said, hey, you had some outstanding results on those ad campaigns, why don't you run some ads for some of our clients? We were behind the scenes for the most part, white-labeled, worked on about 40, 50 over the next year, and those agencies actually brought us to our first Reg CF, Regulation Crowdfunding campaign. These laws went into effect in May of 2016. Reg CF today, Regulation Crowdfunding, you can raise up to $5 million from both accredited and retail investors, any adult. There's another filing called Regulation A+ where you can raise up to $75 million. To date, we've worked on over 500 deals across these filings. They've collectively produced 9 figures of capital. And all using content marketing, advertising, and outreach. So, the 2 worlds of capital raising, digital marketing really intersected there for us. We saw where we were of impact for clients and did more of what was working.

Well, an exciting start and wonderful introduction to that realm for you. I mean, congratulations on the growth over the years.

Thank you.

So you had mentioned that you can raise up to $75 million through crowdfunding. Is that $75 million category, if you go into that category, is that open to both accredited and non-accredited investors?

Yes. In fact, on Reg D, at first, structure exemption I pointed to, that's accredited investors only, and there's not a cap, there's not a limit. It's all based on your filing, your offering, your valuation, and what part of the company you're giving up. But Reg CF and Regulation A+ allow for both retail and accredited investors. Again, $5 million, $75 million. So it's still based on your offering, of course, and your valuation, and you have to go through audits. Different types of audits. The the Form 1A, the Regulation A Plus filing is in depth. Told it's about 80% of the work for for an S1 for you know going public. So it's it's not anything to be taken lightly. We're of course on the marketing side as an agency. So for us, it shows up in the form of delays. I encourage pre-launch. marketing, audience building during that period of time. I've worked with groups that have had 6 months plus delays, and we produced, you know, $8 million more in reservations and saw over half of that actualized during the first week the deal was live. So a lot of different ways to make use of that time, even just figuring out what channels are working best for you with that pre-launch marketing, the audiences, the messaging. There, there's a very important case to be made about starting marketing early there, but we're not involved in the filing process. And yes, we've even seen groups use that Regulation A+ filing to direct list and to go public from there. Public companies can even do a priced round with it. There are all different ways to, you know, really benefit from the use of Reg A, Regulation A, but it's a process at best. And I've seen companies begin that Form 1A process, procedure, and not get to the end, not actually be able to launch from there. Yeah.

Well, some big changes certainly over the last few years.

Sure.

In terms of really opening up the investor markets to a broader range of investors. And those changes really have been, been quite beneficial, I think, for investors and for operators who are raising capital. Well, as you look back over the years of your operation, what are some of the major hidden pitfalls? You've led over 500 campaigns, so what are some of the biggest mistakes you've seen that founders are making when they're attempting to raise capital online?

I'm glad you worded it that way— raise capital online— and there are similarities and differences to Doing this offline, I've seen founders say, "Hey, we're going to take this deal online. We're going to launch, figure out what we're going to do from there. Maybe we'll market. Maybe the round just fills itself out and closes." And that is a large misconception. When I look at the data for regulation crowdfunding. for Regulation A+. There's less of these insights and analytics available for Reg D, the accredited rounds. More has to be disclosed on the Reg CF and Regulation A+. I would tell you the top 10% of issuers are moving and get all of the investors. The bottom 50%, 5-0, are pretty stagnant. And encourage issuers, groups raising funds using these vehicles, to come out of the gate with over $100,000 raised on the round. Really, $250K, $500K, $1 million, $5 million says something in a much louder way. And without that being showcased on your page, your offering page, you know, basically a vertical pitch deck, pitch video perhaps at the top, it feels a bit like an empty restaurant. where the product, the company, the offering can look very good, but it doesn't seem to have the social validators there versus a campaign that has over $1 million raised, over a few hundred thousand dollars raised even. And every time a prospective investor gets there, there's more investments that have taken place, more funds. It's social proof. Digital marketing is built on social proof. We do not believe what we see online. So if we're able to showcase publisher logos, you know, as featured by investor testimonials, hey, I put funds in, here's why, this is what stands out to me about the founder. Let me tell you about my experience with the problem, the solution, and how these guys are gonna be at the forefront of this vertical. That type of investor statement really goes a long way. Being able to show the numbers. On a Reg CF campaign, it's a high volume of small investments, relatively speaking, $1,500, $2,500 as the average investment. You get 1,000 investments, retail investors, many of them will actually participate multiple times. You're looking at $1.5 million, $2.5 million, and likely a group wants to raise $5 million. They want to raise more on the Reg CF. To produce those 1,000 investments, as a digital marketer, I'd probably tell you you need at least 50,000. Visits to the offering page. So you're building a marketing plan determining, hey, where are my traffic sources? How am I getting people to the page? Understanding most of the visitors will not convert. How do I get very targeted, find the exact individuals that I want to go after and get them there in in mass, you know, relatively speaking. So not setting traffic goals and understanding where audiences are going to come from, assuming you're going to get too high of a conversion rate or too high of an average investment value. I would add to the list as well of, you know, not planning for marketing. And then again, that average investment and conversion rate, understanding the traffic sources. It's not something that you want to decide later when there's a lot more pressure and a lack of movement. It's something that you want to begin even in those pre-launch stages. And I'll just state it again, the more social proof, the more third-party validators you can get on an online offering, the better.

I suspect that that is not limited to just online, that whether— I mean, it's social proof or you just have proof of concept, you have to have that going forward. And if you have that established already, then doing it online, you just take that same validation and carry it forward. So I think what you are really referring to is this aspect of trust and That's always a challenge to establish, particularly for new operators. Well, how do you establish trust when you have no track record? I mean, you can be an extraordinarily trustworthy individual and you can have a trustworthy company, but without a track record, it's extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate that to potential investors. So, in In building this trust, you know, there is this aspect, of course, data, there's the automation you've been talking about, but there is the human connection that is always going to be really that deciding factor. So how do you bring all of these things together in an online social media rich environment?

Yes. And social media is a top traffic driver. It's also a place that investors go to search around and do their due diligence. If they put a, you know, Google keyword in there around your company, likely gonna see a social media page pop up somewhere in the results. And when they get there, if there are new posts on a daily basis, a few times a week, uh, talking about your traction, your movement, new goals hit, new customers, new clients, new testimonials, team bios. Or if they get there and there's nothing, it tells them something. So really coming up with a strong content marketing program, social media posts, having an email newsletter and drip system that prospective audiences could sign up for, distributing long-form content. Our clients will use a monthly webinar, a live event, some featuring guests, other thought leaders in the space. Anchor investors, especially if they have a large engaged audience of their own. Articles every couple weeks, a weekly update on the update section of the offering page is very common. Some of them are built differently. Press release— with the press release, you kind of manufacture some of those as seen on logos. It may not be a traffic driver for you, but being able to point to some publishers that showed up through syndication could help. Starting with that pre-launch, starting with the strategy, if you're seeding relationships with different financial email newsletters different podcasts, different websites, different places where you could tap into their audience base and then later point to the clips, point to the content, point to the logo of where you were, you know, seen talking, quoted, what have you. That really goes a long way. These tools, Reg CF, Title III of the JOBS Act, was made to democratize access to capital for founders. As well as access to growth-stage deal flow for retail investors. You hear these stories of, you know, what if you invested in Facebook during their first year in business and what that would have looked like for you, that potential upside once they IPO'd, once they went public. So the investors really get a lot out of this. And I can tell you there's investors with over 100 deals in their portfolio. I was at a conference in DC around this. There's a very well-known investor who invested in a different deal every day last year through Reg CF. There's definitely some larger portfolios in the space, but you can stack the resources ahead of time of, okay, which publishers could potentially talk about us during the live raise or beforehand, and we could feature it on our offering page. How can I reach out to my first-degree network and tell them, hey, I'm running a regulated investment crowdfunding campaign. Here's why. Here's how they work. I need to be able to bring a strong enough audience. I ask that you back the campaign and at any level. These are commonly $100 minimums, $500 minimums, $1,000 minimums, probably be the highest you'd see on a Reg CF. So even if someone's invested, even if someone isn't, you know, let's say a very active accredited investor, they're able to put in a couple hundred dollars, $500, just to back you, that could really mean a lot. You're able to get, you know, 100 people that, you know, think, you know, friends, family, peers, past employees, past employers, past partners. I know founders who were calling fraternity brothers that they hadn't spoken to in 30 years. I mean, you can really put together a large list, and if you're able to bring in 100 people average of $1,500 each, $150K raised off that. It does not need to be, hey, I know this individual and they're going to put in a quarter million dollars. That's great. I would still encourage this on top of that because then you have a volume, you know, instead of 250, maybe it's 400, but from 101 investors instead of 250 from just one. There's absolutely a strength in numbers. Many of these offering pages point at how many investments and how much capital has been raised. So if it's just one one investor, it could create concern, question marks around it. I was on a panel where someone said, hey, if your mom won't invest in you, why would I? And, you know, it doesn't need to be your mom, does it? But you get the idea. Your friends, your family, the people around you, if they believe in you, you're kind of holding out on them. If your company is going to grow in valuation and appreciate over time, look to get these folks, look to get these individuals involved in addition to the publishers, in addition to clients and customers who can really show, hey, this is moving, this is happening. It could be an earlier-stage company, but with the right amount of investors behind it, with some momentum that you're able to point to during the content marketing distribution, and with, you know, a high enough amount of investors showing up, you could really position yourself well to use these exemptions, then scale with digital marketing from there.

Well, you had mentioned the importance of social media. I'm wondering if you have any recommendations as to which social medias are most effective. I mean, there's of course the major platforms out there, but it's, from my understanding, it's really not very smart unless you really have a well-developed marketing team to do that. Yeah, I mean, to go out there and, and just randomly post on every single one of them, that you really need to focus upon the social media platform that, that you're going to use and that you can use consistently in a very structured way. So do you have any recommendations on which social medias work best for specifically crowdfunding?

Well, as a marketer, I would encourage audiences, you know, founders, CEOs, marketers, even CFOs speaking with their marketing team to put together a marketing strategy. And I'd like to highlight a competitor marketing audit. Without that, you're kind of shooting in the dark. You're going off what your idea of your target audience is. And likely you're going after a different investor profile than you are for your core business. So it's a matter of understanding who you're going to be targeting, where they go online, what messaging you're going to be reaching out to them with across any of these channels. And for me, that really begins with the competitor marketing audit. There's a platform online called KingsCrowd, K-I-N-G-S-C-R-O-W-D, where you can research any of the Reg CFs to date. There's been over 10,000 since inception. May of 2016 is when everything went into effect as regulated by the SEC and FINRA, and you can look at the results from any of those to date. In fact, on KingsCrowd, you can search by whether they're live, what platform, what FINRA-regulated portal, what marketplace of offerings they were on, or if they self-published, industry, revenue, valuation, multiplier, geolocation. You can see all of this info for every one of those issuers. I would encourage you to look at the live issuers in your industry. Also, the live issuers that are leading the space. That Regulation A+ filing you could search for on there as well. There's only been 70 of those deals this year. Again, reflecting an in-depth administrative process. Also, They're very large campaigns. We've worked on multiple this year that were over $50 million in how much they've raised. Another one that raised a full $12 million and now is adding another $50 million. Another one that raised $20 million. These are the big leagues, if you will, for the investment crowdfunding space. There's actually a lot you can take even though there's not as many of those deals live. But for any of these, you want to look at their charts. You want to look at their timeline. You want to look at their share price, their valuation. For me, how much they raised the first week, how much they raised each month thereafter, how much they raised in total, and from how many investors, what's the average investment. Then I want to do the marketing audit. I could go on to websites such as SimilarWeb and see how much traffic they have on their primary site. If that is where their investment opportunity, investment offering is hosted, great. It's going to tell me a lot about the demographics, the traffic sources, where people are coming from. There are search analytic platforms like SEMrush, SpyFu, SEOmoz. There's a long list of them. You can look at the organic keywords they're ranking for, the search ads that they're running. You can actually see what your target audience is being presented with when they're searching for those keywords on Google and similar social— similar search platforms. That's where we get into social. I actually like to check Facebook Ad Library first so I can see if they're running advertising on Meta. And on Facebook Ad Library, you could Google this, you have to select all ads in the first dropdown, but from there you could see every advertisement that every advertiser on Meta is live with today. So, you know, you search, you could put in Reg CF. You could put in Regulation D 506. You could put in invest, investor. If it's on a platform portal like StartEngine or WeFunder, Republic, you could put that in and every advertisement that features those words will show up. There may be a few things that are a bit random, but you'll be able to see the investment opportunities on there. You'll see the text above the image, above the video. You'll see the creative, that visual. You'll see a headline underneath it, maybe a newsfeed link description underneath that depending on the ad format. You could see what's physically moving for issuers and having investors convert today by looking at these ads. You can then look at their social pages on Meta, days and times of week that they're posting, types of content that they're getting most engagement around. When you're on their site, you could see what other social platforms they're pointing to, where else they publish. Even looking at the traffic attributors, you can see where it's coming from. I would tell you, per the nature of your question, organic YouTube, LinkedIn are definitely standouts. If you're creating engaging video content, long form as well as the shorts on YouTube, and have a decent audience there, it's probably one of the traffic drivers that's delivering. LinkedIn and the professional network, what you can do with outreach on LinkedIn, I believe is Nothing short of underrated. The content and how it pops up and populates to your audience as well, and the types of long-form content you could do and how LinkedIn prioritizes you there, I would definitely point to. I wouldn't prioritize those advertising channels though. I actually see stronger performance from Meta. Something about reaching somebody while they're scrolling on Meta that the click-through rate and the conversion rate are substantially higher. I've built the database At this point, I used to just use third-party data. I still do, but I have my own database of over 1.8 million. I call them historical equity crowdfunding investors. I could tell you where they invested, how many deals they've invested on based on data collection and matching that I've done. I can upload that as a custom audience to Ad Manager on Meta and run advertising directly to those individuals. And it's very performance, very direct response oriented. I know roughly every dollar, $2 I spend is a visit to the offering page. I can prospect them over to the funnel. I can then retarget them and bring them back and back. It's probably going to be 7 touchpoints or more before they convert. For an investment, that's still very good. And then I'm shooting for on a Reg CF campaign, a 10x return on advertising spend or higher, even higher than that for Regulation A+ because the average investment tends to be a bit higher. Sometimes 2-3 times higher, so the returns can be 2-3 times higher than that in many cases. So I like the analytics. It's more of a performance engine than posting organically. I would absolutely do both because again, people are searching for you. What they find is going to tell them something. There's that mid-funnel concept— people who are considering the investment, maybe even intending to invest. And you can really see a higher conversion when you're doing good content marketing mid-funnel. But look at what your competitors are doing. Determine which channels you want to start with from there. Have a good organic and paid strategy, content and advertising strategy. And then optimize towards what's working best for you. Be very closely connected to those analytics, to those results.

Well, excellent information, Jason. So what a masterclass in digital influence and investor psychology that Jason has shared with us, uh, and reminded us that while technology can amplify our message, only trust can multiply our impact. So whether you're a founder seeking funding or a professional seeking freedom, today's conversation underscores One timeless truth: growth follows people. When people believe in your mission, your leadership, and your integrity, the capital naturally follows. So if you would like to connect directly with Jason or learn more about his team helps founders attract investors and to scale campaigns, you can find him at digital niche. Agency.com, and that is— niche is spelled N-I-C-H-E, so that is digitalnicheagency.com. You can find this information also in our show notes. His work is transforming the way entrepreneurs merge marketing, storytelling, and technology to raise meaningful capital. And if today's conversation sparked new ideas about scaling your wealth and aligning your investments with purpose, don't let it stop here. So take the next step and watch Beyond the Paycheck. It's the mini masterclass that reveals how high-income professionals legally redirect taxes into appreciating income-producing assets. You can access it free at go.steettalker.com. Beyond-Paycheck. You'll find that in our show notes as well. Because freedom isn't about working harder, it's about structuring your wealth to work for you. So until next time, keep building prosperity with purpose. And as always, ride with integrity, meaning, and impact. Jason, thank you for being with us today. Thank you.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Alan.

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