Our Crowdfunding Network Is Growing Part 22

We made a ton of progress with Fundrise this week. After many email threads, conversations, etc. we have decided to pursue a 506(c) exemption for our new fund. Many considerations were needed, but ultimately things came down to a handful of items:

1. You can do a TTW-like document for a 506(c) both on your website and on Fundrise

2. The Title IV uncertainty is basically impossible to plan for right now

3. The state securities commissions are moving to band together to lower the bar for reporting requirements right now. Texas is set to meet in May for this topic

For now it is just easier to send non-accredited investors to other companies that have the infrastructure set up to take in those dollars or to put them on a list and let them know they can invest when the government gets everything cleared up. This may take years.

We're up to 129 investors with $8.6M on Fundrise. This has been kind of a light week for new requests for whatever reason.

Our 1122 Linden deal has a new bank account and we have moved the first dollars from BankBox to our account to pay vendors this week. So our first crowdsourced deal has officially taken in real dollars to start building a new project in Austin. The overhead and back and forth was quite low here so I am very pleased with things overall.

We saw a soft launch of our Inner 10 Capital site today. It needs some spit polish and the flows will need to be iterated on, but overall it is clean and will be functional soon. I hope to start formally marketing for investors with the new site in April, but getting things tweaked and optimized will probably take the balance of 2014. We need to set up some Crowdbouncer integration for reasonable tests and we have some back-end CRM stuff to do, but the bulk of the key features will be ready to go soon. We'll be launching some PR campaigns probably in the May time frame as well and hopefully we can develop some marketing plans to track progress over time.

Groundbreaker and Forefund Capital are still portals we're exploring working with in some capacity, but we need to marshal our energy to pick the best of breed for now. Right now that is Fundrise and iFunding along with launching our own brand and site.