RAD AI helps marketers create the best possible version of any marketing communications—whether it’s a blog post, email sequence, or influencer marketing campaign.

We create what's called an AI-informed persona, which are interest, topic and category-based personas. When a client comes to us, we generate personas based on their marketing objectives and the campaigns they want to run. Our technology tells us exactly how to speak to their customer, why they should speak with that customer, and the topics that will elicit the best possible response.

After generating the personas and creative strategies that speak to their target customer, our platform generates a list of KOLs (key opinion leaders) that index in the top 1% to those personas and creative strategies.

In short, our software removes bias and saves marketing teams time and money in selecting the right personas to target—then crafting creative strategies to entice that persona to take an action.

For RAD, it was an easy decision to raise a community round as an additional source of funding. Despite the “advice” we received from others, taking control of our raise and betting on ourselves was, and always is, the way we think about fundraising. We were confident the crowd would respond favorably and we already have a culture of communication and transparency.

We raised our first Community Round in 2020. We were in between our first seed capital from a venture fund, we weren’t quite ready for additional venture money, and the pandemic had just started.

As mentioned above, with so much feeling out of control, I liked the idea of betting on myself as a founder—controlling the narrative, opening a round on my own terms, and creating a system to market the raise. We raised roughly $977,000 from around 1,000 investors. By all accounts, I thought our first raise was very successful.

In 2023, we completed an acquisition of a Series A company called Atomic Reach. That, coupled with us having real client wins to report on, was a perfect storm to report on real traction and open a second community round. This time, we decided to try raising as close to $5 million as possible.

For me, the Wefunder Studio team was an easy decision to make, because anybody that can make my life easier is always going to be a welcome addition—whether it's helping me quarterback the fundraise or becoming part of the RAD team.

It was incredible to have an internal team at Wefunder with whom I could strategize on how to monetize the raise as we hit different milestones. They intimately understand what works and what doesn’t work. Together, we put a scalable system behind the raise that identified the right investors and helped me coordinate webinars, investor pitches and one-off communications.

Like anything in life, if you don't put a system and process behind it, then you're going to get mixed, inconsistent results. There’s a cadence for doing updates. There's a cadence for emailing investors directly. There's a cadence for reporting revenue and client wins, and how you distribute that information to your investor base. There's a cadence of finding other founders on the platform that you can do strategic alliances with.

There are so many nuances to the fundraising process—But having a good group of people that I could see as my inside team was a really easy decision.

We started working with Wefunder Studio when RAD was just under $2 million raised. After working with them, we ended up at $4.35 million. We approached Wefunder Studio with 6 more months to the fundraise, exploring the question of “How do we get this thing as close to $5 million as possible?” I asked myself, “What am I not seeing that we could be doing?”

Wefunder Studio put together a tactical plan behind updating investors, email sequencing with news, pitching press, releasing information about new hires, and even a tactical plan for all the different vendors that we were going to test. Some things we tested didn’t work—then other things we tested got an exponentially favorable return.

For example, one third-party vendor that Wefunder Studio introduced us to yielded $400,000 in new investment capital. Two other vendors they introduced us to produced 7-to-1 returns on the investment. When we passed the $2 million mark, the Wefunder Studio team also brainstormed an additional message to get out to the Wefunder community that brought in another $70,000. We continually made adjustments to the raise and when appropriate, made introductions to other founders.

On top of all of that, they saved me anywhere between 12 to 15 hours a week, which is a huge number for me.

Wefunder Studio gives you a great administrative backbone with a strategic element to it. But if you, the founder, think that you can just cruise on autopilot now and leave it to them to handle your raise, you’re wrong. You still are very checked in, but it's more about you're checked in with a highly competent team that can add value strategically.

The world of crowdfunding is peppered with mediocre players. If you can enlist some smart people who are on the inside at Wefunder, it's both strategic and time-saving. Could you do the work yourself? 100%, yes. But having a great team that works on the inside and is incentivized for you to be successful is always the right move, in my opinion.

I want the smartest, best possible people on the inside helping me. And that's the way I always looked at the Wefunder relationship: I've got a crew that works internally at Wefunder that understands how to run crowdfunding campaigns, and I'm very hungry and motivated to run a successful crowdfunding campaign.

We've got close to 5,000 investors today as a result of our two community rounds. We have a combination of VCs, accredited investors, and normal, everyday investors. As a founder, the more options you have, the better. Simple as that.

You would think that because the clients we sign up are enterprise-level, it would be harder to see serendipity from adding thousands of investors to your cap table—but we’ve gotten three meaningful deals with clients as a result of our community round investors.

Making myself open and available to potential investors is a key mindset that makes us successful. I think it's a falsehood when people say they're too busy, because the amount of money that you have in your bank account as an early-stage company is like blood in your veins.

By the end of our raise, I don't think we left any stone unturned. And that's the way you should feel at the end of a crowdfunding campaign.