I spent two and a half years as performance lead at Birchal, and I’ve now run ads for 34 crowd-sourced funding campaigns. Companies I’ve worked on have raised over $32 million between them. So when a founder asks me what makes a raise succeed, I don’t give them theory. I give them the one thing I’ve watched decide it over and over.
It’s the campaign’s ability to generate EOIs through paid ads.
That’s it. Everything else is downstream of that. A crowd-sourced funding raise lives or dies on how many expressions of interest you can bring in before you open, and how cheaply you can bring them in. Get that engine humming and the raise looks after itself. Get it wrong and no pitch video, no PR hit, no clever perk saves you.
So what decides your ability to generate EOIs?
Two things, really.
The first is having a genuinely great investment opportunity. Not a good business - a good opportunity. Those aren’t the same. Plenty of solid companies make terrible raises because there’s no reason for a stranger to care right now.
The second is communicating that opportunity properly - through the ads, the emails, and the investor updates. You can have the best story in the country and still stall if it’s told badly, or told to the wrong people, or told too slowly.
When both of those line up, you get cheap EOIs at volume. For context, I aim for around $30 per EOI on the ads, and roughly 22% of those EOIs convert into actual investors. Once you know those two numbers for your campaign, you can more or less forecast the whole thing with the raise calculator.
The market matters more than founders expect
Here’s the part that’s a bit uncomfortable: some of this is out of your hands.
How well a raise goes depends on how the market and the industry react to the opportunity. The best campaigns I’ve worked on were in hot industries. A few years back that was cannabis and craft breweries - I ran raises for names like Cannaponics, Medigrowth and X-Hemp on the cannabis side, and drinks brands like Stryda Brewing, Antipodes Gin and Florcita Tequila. Cannaponics ended up raising $5.184 million, funded to 1037% of target. When the market’s leaning in, ads convert and the whole thing gets easier.
If you’re not in a hot category, the next best thing is to be novel. Doing something different. Something people want to talk about. Comment-worthy beats worthy-but-boring every time, because it’s the comment-worthy stuff that spreads and that people feel something about.
People don’t invest for the money alone
This is the thing most finance writing gets completely wrong.
Everyone assumes CSF investors are running spreadsheets, weighing returns, thinking like a fund. Some are. Most aren’t. People invest in a crowd-sourced funding raise for social reasons as much as financial ones. To help bring something into existence. To feel part of a brand they already love. To back the underdog. To tell their mates they own a slice of it.
If your campaign only argues the financial case, you’re speaking to a fraction of the people who’d actually back you. The raises that pop are the ones that give people something to belong to.
What this means for you
If you take one thing from this: a successful crowd-sourced funding campaign is won on EOI generation, and EOI generation is won on a great opportunity plus great communication, ideally with a bit of market tailwind behind it.
That’s also why the ads aren’t a box to tick at the end. They’re the engine. Which is exactly where most raises leak time and money - I’ve broken that down in how to run a successful CSF campaign. And if you’re still weighing CSF against other options, see CSF vs VC, angels and everything else.