Hello everyone,

We are excited to announce that we are partnering with Rocket Dollar. Rocket Dollar, was founded in 2018 with the goal of making it safe, simple, and fast for people to take control of their retirement savings.   

The team offers an innovative set of streamlined Self-Directed IRAs and 401(k) products. To learn more about the company, check out our discussion with Co-Founder & CEO, Henry Yoshida here. 

By partnering with Rocket Dollar, we are growing our reach to a new cohort of investors. These investors are looking to diversify their retirement portfolios with alternatives like private companies that list on platforms such as StartEngine. 

We will provide Rocket Dollar account holders access to rating reports, updates and special offers. With the team’s focus on empowering the individual through education, we feel this partnership is a natural fit for KingsCrowd. 

As we have alluded to before, building these types of partners is how we can scale KingsCrowd’s reach and help to efficiently grow the equity crowdfunding market. This is a terrific development for our organization. 

Onward and upward!

All the best,

Chris

P.S. To celebrate this great development coupon code KINGSCROWD3FOR1 at checkout will get you 3 months of access for just $1 tonight only!

We are happy to announce that we will be participating in StartEngine's final Demo Day of 2018 this Thursday, December 20th! 

We'd love for you to join and learn more about our project. You'll be able to ask us anything you'd like in real time. Come support us at 12:12pm EST, and register here for further updates.

Looking forward to chatting with you all soon.

Sincerely,

Chris Lustrino

Hi everyone,

Great news! This week, we were humbled to accept the opportunity to present at the AB Bernstein Boston office pitch event. For context, AB Bernstein is a top global investment management and research firm with over 3.5K employees globally and $550Bn in global assets under management.

We were selected to pitch as one of the top 3 startups the Boston team had seen all year. We are proud to announce that KingsCrowd was selected as the winner by the judges and crowd. This is another indicator of our ability to put ourselves on the map as a bright young star in the investment research and analytics space.

All the best,

Chris Lustrino

[The following is an automated notice from the StartEngine team].

Hello!

As you might know, KingsCrowd has exceeded its minimum funding goal. When a company reaches its minimum on StartEngine, it's about to begin withdrawing funds. If you invested in KingsCrowd be on the lookout for an email that describes more about the disbursement process.

This campaign will continue to accept investments until its indicated closing date.

Thanks for funding the future.

-StartEngine

Hey everyone,

Just a reminder if you become a paying customer by the end of tonight you will be added to our beta list of testers for the upcoming launch of our full ratings platform. 

Right now all StartEngine users pay just $1 for 6 months of TOTAL ACCESS to KingsCrowd. 

SUBSCRIBE HERE

Coupon Code: KINGSTART

All the best,

Chris

Hi everyone,

As December begins and November winds down we wanted to reflect on our progress by the numbers since we launched KingsCrowd. Below we have highlighted some key KPIs metrics we track and what we feel they say about the business. 

Total Website Visitors: 300% growth to 52K+ web visitors in November

One of the cool things about running an independent startup equity rating website is that startups love us. The fact that we conduct our own due diligence and receive $0 payment from startups or platforms means that our ratings really mean something.  

Why this is relevant is that a great deal of the spike in growth seen above in visits over the past couple of months comes from a handful of startups that decided they wanted to promote their deal rating report because they found it so valuable. 

We had no say in the matter at all and when we reached out to the founders they said the rating report was helping to raise capital. One of the campaigns that has been advertising our rating report has gone from $33K in investment to $69K since publicizing the rating. 

Whether or not we can attribute all of these gains to us, I don’t know. However I do know that this is a great sign for our business model. We have been able to grow our website visits over 300% without expanding the marketing budget. 

Creating use cases like this will likely lead to other startups doing so similarly on their own accord and help us to grow efficiently.

Thanks to the growth in website visitors and our acquisition of Crowditz, we have been able to expand our newsletter subscribers to nearly 2K. In the past we have found that most of our customers are individuals who join the newsletter and eventually convert as they become more familiar with our content. 

With this large spike in subscribers recently, we are hopeful that we can execute on driving meaningful conversions in the coming months to paid subscribers. 

What excites us about the above numbers is that we don’t think we have even begun to scratch the surface of what we are capable of as we haven’t even started pushing our digital marketing strategy, nor have we started to turn on the distribution channels we are currently working to open through partnership (e.g., financial publications, independent IRA accounts). This is to say we are only getting started. 

While we have not worked to heavily push paid subscriptions in the early days in order to attract more users and build trust with the equity crowdfunding community, we are proud to say that we are quickly approaching $10K in ARR.

Having early paying customers that often tell us how helpful our rating reports are, we think is a sign that we are finding product market fit. 

Another interesting stat, over 60% of our paying customers opt for our highest cost membership and almost a third are paying for a full year upfront. Early traction is a positive sign, and we’ve yet to launch our core product!

We think that the above metrics indicate signs of a really intriguing business that is only in its infancy but is showing its potential to become a sizeable and intriguing business. 

In order to continue to accelerate growth of the above numbers we are focused on the following:

Distribution:

• Solidify partnerships with several new distribution channels in Q1,2

  • Financial publications

  • Self Directed IRAs

  • Family offices

Marketing:

• Roll out KC digital marketing plan

  • Working in tandem with digital marketing agency that has driven crowdfunding success

Product Development:

• Integrate Crowditz analytics / capabilities into KingsCrowd

• Built out institutional analytics product (custom pricing)

• Complete development of the KC rating platform (priced at $50+/mo.)

• Add product features (e.g., talk with an analyst)

Team:

• Hire an investment analyst / ops individual in Q1 or Q2

• Hire an lead developer / product individual in Q1 or Q2

  • Timing based on capital raised, 2-3 more positions will be filled once next round of capital closes. 

Here is to an exciting future.

All the best,

Chris

Hi everyone,

We are reaching out to you because there was a development in the world of ICOs this week that I wanted to call out to help reiterate our commitment to you the investor in the equity crowdfunding market.

In a report published by Reuters, it was brought to light that many ICOs pay to get rated and essentially deceive investors of whether or not a deal is actually good.

We were sad to see that but it was a great moment for us to reflect on what makes KingsCrowd so powerful. As you may know we never accept payment from startups or platforms to get rated. That decision is instead based on our in depth due diligence process.

Despite being asked many times by startups to pay for a rating, we believe the only way for the equity crowdfunding market to be efficient is to have an independent ratings and analytics platform that is unbiased. That way we can best serve you the investor with the truth.

If you ever have any questions about our due diligence process please feel free to reach out at hello@kingscrowd.com. And of course if this value proposition resonates with you, be sure to invest while you can.

And just as a reminder time is running out to use our special offer for 6 months access to any of our memberships for just $1! See below.

Coupon Code: KINGSTART

Checkout here: https://kingscrowd.com/user/subscription

Happy investing,

Chris

Hi everyone,

We hope you had a terrific Thanksgiving weekend. We sure did. Other than loading up on family and turkey, we had time to reflect on the numerous reasons why we are thankful as an organization. 

Be it our 34 new investors in this current round to date, the acquisition of Crowditz, our nearly 2K subscribers, the $120K+ we raised this Fall, or our various partnership discussions that are proving fruitful, we have made tremendous strides as a business. '

As a recognition of our gratitude we want to offer a holiday special to all StartEngine users.

For a limited time only we are offering 6 months access to any of our memberships for just $1!

Coupon Code: KINGSTART

Checkout here: https://kingscrowd.com/user/subscription

That’s up to a $120 value for just $1. Better yet, if you sign up this week ONLY, you will become an exclusive early beta tester for our rating platform currently under development. 

This is a perfect chance to help shape the future of KingsCrowd! There is no better way to bolster the strength of your investment than to become a vocal customer. 

We are on a mission to make your life as simple as possible and make sure you can invest confidently. 

More updates to come. Happy investing. 

All the best,

Chris

Hi everyone,

It’s been a great week at KingsCrowd. Between the announcement of the Crowditz acquisition and several strategic investor meetings in Seattle, Austin and San Francisco we have been taking many positive steps forward for the business that will hopefully continue to play out over the coming months. 

One thing I continue to hear both from our customers and potential investors in KingsCrowd is that they want to get to know more about the team, which I get. The reality is, when you invest in an early stage business much of what you are investing in is the people. 

That’s why we always try and interview the startups we rate because the team can really make or break it. With that in mind I wanted to let you know about 2 upcoming Webinars where you will get to have this more personalized interaction with us.

The first is a webinar we will be hosting on Wednesday December 5th. More details on time and a sign up form will be circulated in the next week. 

The second webinar is the StartEngine Demo Day, which we will be partaking in on December 20th. StartEngine will be providing details on this very soon.

Both Webinars will focus on KingsCrowd and give you more insight into who we are and what our vision for the business is. 

Our hope is to make all of our followers investors and we will do whatever it takes to ensure you can make a confident investment decision in KingsCrowd.

Onward and upward. 

All the best,

Chris

Hi everyone,

KingsCrowd has some big news to share. In case you didn’t see the press release we have officially announced our acquisition of Crowditz today, the leading data and analytics provider for the equity crowdfunding market. 

Hey everyone,

Thanks for following KingsCrowd over the first couple weeks of our raise. It’s been a great experience on StartEngine thus far and we are just getting started.

Tonight we will be attending the Bostinno 50 On Fire event as a finalist in the Fintech category. Yes, we were named to the top 5 best Fintech startups in Boston alongside major names like Flywire, which has raised $100M in a series D and Notarize, which recently raised a $20M series B.

Kings & Queens of the Crowd,

What a first week it has been and we're just getting started. We have already brought on 19 new investors to the KingsCrowd team. Appreciate the early support and excited to have you apart of our mission.