Why Values-Based Marketing Works in Equity Crowdfunding

Why Values-Based Marketing Works in Equity Crowdfunding

I recently joined Andy Field, Steering Committee Lead of the Global Equity Crowdfunding Alliance, for a conversation on the GECA podcast. We covered the origin story of The Crowd, what makes crowdfunding campaigns succeed, and where I think the industry is heading. Here are the things I keep coming back to.

Why I started The Crowd

After 22 years running Zenzi, my values-based marketing agency, I went in-house at Aptera Motors and led the campaign that raised over $140 million from more than 20,000 investors. What I saw in that process, and what I’d seen throughout my career working with founders, was that crowdfunding was being treated as a transaction. Get the page up, run the ads, close the investors.

That approach misses most of what makes crowdfunding actually work. I started The Crowd to do it differently.

The transactional trap

Most founders, when they start thinking about a crowdfunding campaign, jump straight to the product. Here’s what we built, here’s the market size, here’s why you should invest. What they skip is the why. Why does this company exist? What does it believe in? What is it trying to change?

That’s where the real work starts. When you know your why, you know who your investors are. Not every investor is the right investor. The ones who are deeply aligned with your values, who believe in what you’re building, those are the ones who come back. They increase their investment. They become ambassadors. They bring others.

The ones who find you because of a generic ad and a generic pitch are far less likely to do any of that.

Going all in

One thing I tell every founder I work with: crowdfunding only works if you treat it as a top priority. Not a side project. Not something your team manages while you focus on the business.

I talked to someone recently who told me their StartEngine page was going live the next day and asked what they should do. That’s not a crowdfunding strategy. The founders who raise real capital are the ones on webinars, doing facility tours, showing up for their investors, and being genuinely transparent about both the wins and the hard stretches. That transparency builds trust. And trust is what converts a follower into an investor.

The community multiplier

At Aptera, investors started volunteering to help before we even asked. Someone wanted to start a Discord. Others wanted to show up to EV events. We printed business cards and sent them out into the world to represent the brand. Leadership thought it was risky. It wasn’t. It was the most cost-effective marketing we ran.

When you give people a genuine way to participate in something they believe in, they do. That community became a force multiplier for everything else we were doing. Our overall marketing spend ran closer to 5% of what we raised, well below the 10 to 15% benchmark you often hear, precisely because the community was doing work that paid media cannot replicate.

Going global from day one

One thing I see founders consistently delay is thinking about global investors. It gets positioned as phase two, something to consider after the domestic campaign is running. I think that’s a mistake.

At Aptera, global investors were part of the strategy from the start. People aligned with your values don’t all live in the same zip code. If your mission resonates, it likely resonates with people in markets you haven’t thought about yet. Identify the supporters you already have in other regions, even a few, and build from there. They will help you find more.

Where the industry is going

The tools are getting better. Platforms are building more sophisticated analytics that let founders see exactly where investors are in the funnel, where they’re dropping off, and how to reach them at the right moment. That intelligence changes how you run a campaign.

AI is going to play a bigger role too, not just in writing copy, but in automating the operational components of a raise: email sequences, investor response, ad testing, reporting. The founders who benefit from that most won’t be the ones handing everything to a tool. They’ll be the ones who give the tool a clear framework, a defined voice, and a set of values to work from. That’s where human judgment still matters, and probably always will.

Check out the full conversation on the GECA podcast here.