Jeff "fuzzy" WenzelFounder, Fuzzy Wenzel Startup Consulting · Founder & CEO Driving Investment Acquisition Success

Equity Crowdfunding: Realistic Investor Expectations & Costs #shorts

27 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this short monologue, Jeff “fuzzy” Wenzel outlines the practical challenges and hidden costs of running an equity crowdfunding campaign. He emphasizes that such campaigns must target accredited investors, requiring a much higher average investment (e.g., $15,000) than the typical $1,000‑$1,500 small investor. To reach these investors, a company needs a massive sales and marketing operation: a paid, high‑quality contact database, a large sales team, and an email outreach engine capable of sending roughly 340,000 emails per month. Wenzel argues that without these resources, the financial model is unsustainable, making equity crowdfunding far more expensive and complex than many entrepreneurs anticipate.

Chapters

Your monthly nut to do this. 35,000, 36,000. That might get you a 2.8, you know, now maybe you're averaging $15,000 investors, right? If you're going to do this. But again, in equity crowdfunding, you're looking for accredited investors only. There is no way that you can get down to. Down to this, right? If you start, you know, let's say you're getting a thousand, fifteen hundred dollars, you're. Doesn't make sense, right? We're not. Not even in the ballpark. So you have to be averaging. So you now you come back and you go, all right, man, like what? We can't be doing this. These numbers don't make any sense, right? It's just not sustainable. I mean, you'd have to have a massive sales team. You need a database that you got to go pay for that. This is not counting paying for contacts, because where are those contacts coming from? And, you know, just the amount of mailboxes like you need, you're sending per month, 340,000 emails per month.