Equity crowdfunding is won outside the portal.
HookVerb is a marketing and technology consultancy for issuers. We work with companies preparing a Regulation CF or Regulation A+ offering, companies whose offering is live and not moving, and companies whose Kickstarter or Indiegogo backers are ready to become shareholders. The work starts with the plan: who will invest, what they need to believe, and what the numbers have to look like for the raise to pay for itself. Then we build what is missing, from the tracking and the funnel to the campaigns, alongside your team or in place of it. You do not need counsel or a portal lined up first.
Run by Bryce W Jones
We worked on
We partner with
$200M+
raised from the public on offerings where HookVerb team members ran the plays.
Billions
in revenue committed through pre-orders, won on the channels a large public raise depends on.
Over a Decade
of selling consumer products and securities to the public online, as marketers and as engineers.
About
About HookVerb
HookVerb is a marketing and technology consultancy for issuers, built around one problem: getting the most out of an equity crowdfunding offering. Most issuers treat a raise as a finance project with a launch date. The ones that hit their target treat it as a marketing campaign with a securities offering attached. The portal handles compliance and the transaction. Everything that decides how much money arrives happens upstream of it, and somebody has to be accountable for all of it at once.
An investor is a customer with a longer decision and a higher price, so the same questions apply: who is the buyer, what do they need to believe, where do they already spend attention, and what happens after the first click. HookVerb answers those questions in writing first. Then it builds what the answers call for: the tracking that survives the handoff to the portal, the offering funnel, the CRM and the investor data, and the campaigns that run on top of them. Alongside your team where you have one, in place of it where you do not.
Further reading: How to market an equity crowdfunding raise.
Start here
Where are you right now?
Issuers reach us in three states. The work is different in each one, and the first thing we do is figure out which is yours.
You are preparing a Reg CF or Reg A+ offering
The decision to raise from the public is made. There is a date, or nearly one. Counsel and a portal may be engaged, or may be the next thing to sort out.
The weeks before the open decide the total, so the plan comes first: who will invest, what the story is, and what the budget has to be for the raise to pay for itself. Where a Rule 506(c) round runs alongside the public offering, the same campaigns already reach both audiences. The accredited side needs its own route through the funnel, and the verification step designed into it rather than discovered afterward. Then the pieces the open needs. A reservation list, a creative library deep enough to test, an offering page that converts, and tracking that survives the handoff to the portal. Where you have a team, we direct it. Where you do not, we build it.
Your offering is live and the number is not moving
The offering is open, the portal's own traffic has been absorbed, and the daily total has flattened.
We read the funnel in order: traffic, offering page, investment start rate, completion rate, and the close. Most stalled raises are losing money in one or two places, and the fix is usually cheaper than more spend. Often the first problem is the data. A raise that cannot say where its investors came from cannot scale the channel that is working.
Your backers are ready to become shareholders
A Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign is live, funded, or finished, and the next round of money has to come from somewhere.
Backers are the warmest investor list a company can own. They bought the idea before it existed. We build the bridge from backer to shareholder and stand up the equity offering around it. We do not run rewards campaigns.
Diagnosis
Why raises miss their number
Failed raises fail in a small number of predictable ways. These account for most of the money left on the table.
Nobody owned the whole raise
Counsel, the portal, the marketing team, and the founder each did their part and assumed someone else was watching the calendar. Filings, creative approvals, and launch day drift out of alignment, and the open slides into a month nobody chose.
Launch day opened to an empty room
No reservation list, so the first week had nothing to convert and the offering page looked abandoned to everyone who arrived after. A raise spends its whole middle recovering from a quiet open.
The story changes depending on who tells it
The deck, the ads, the offering page, and the founder's interviews each describe a different company. Investors need one sentence on what you do, one on why now, and one on what the money builds.
Attribution broke at the portal handoff
The portal is a separate domain, and tracking fails there in ways nobody notices until someone tests it. A raise that cannot say which channel produced an investment cannot scale the channel that is working.
Success is being measured in clicks and leads
Leads are cheap and clicks are cheaper. The only number that pays for the round is cost per completed investment, and the gap between a started investment and a completed one is where most raises leak.
The close was improvised
Raises are not linear. Money arrives at the open and at the close. A closing window planned in advance, with a real deadline and a reason to act that did not exist before, can carry a third of the total.
Paid spend went to strangers first
Budget aimed at habitual startup investors before the company's own customers and followers were fully worked. The warmest audience converts first and cheapest, and its early checks are what make the offering credible to everyone else.
Services
What HookVerb does
The plan for the raise, the investor marketing that carries it, and the technology it runs on. Every engagement starts with the plan. What we build or run after that depends on what your team already has, and the plan and the work come from the same people, so they never drift apart.
How it works
The arc of a raise
Every campaign is scoped to the company, but a raise has a shape, and the money arrives in the same pattern almost every time.
Before there is a raise
What is being sold, under which exemption, at what target, on what calendar, and who needs to be around the table. Issuers that arrive with none of this settled are not behind. This is the part that is easiest to get quietly wrong and the most expensive to correct later.
Before the offering opens
Build the list, settle the story, verify the tracking, and stock the creative library. Six to eight weeks of work that decides how the first week goes, and the first week sets the pace for everything after it.
The open
The warm list converts first. Early investments are what every later visitor sees when they land on the offering page, so the open is engineered rather than announced.
The middle
Small tests across audiences and creative, read weekly, with budget following evidence. Retargeting for the large majority who visit the offering and leave. The channels that earn their spend get more of it.
The close
A real deadline, a reason to act that was not available before, and every channel aimed at the whole list at once. A well-run close can bring in a third of the total raised.
Clicks and leads are diagnostic numbers. A raise is judged on what it raised and what it cost to raise it, so these are the numbers on the report.
CPCI
Cost per completed investment, the number the round is run on.
Start → complete
The portal drop-off rate, where most raises quietly leak.
Average check
Tracked by channel, because the cheapest traffic rarely writes the biggest checks.
Owned share
How much of the total came from audiences you already had.
Compliance
Where marketing stops and compliance begins
HookVerb is a marketing and technology consultancy. We are not a broker-dealer, a funding portal, an investment adviser, or a law firm, we do not offer or sell securities, and nothing we produce is investment advice. Where an issuer still needs securities counsel, a funding portal, or a broker-dealer, we can make an introduction to firms we have worked with, and that is all it is: you engage and pay those firms directly, and they answer to you. Campaigns run inside the boundaries your counsel and your portal set: testing-the-waters rules before an offering is live, the required legends and disclaimers on creative, offering material that says what the filing says, and no projections or promises of return in an advertisement. Every asset we make goes to your counsel before it goes to an audience.
Team
Who's behind HookVerb?
HookVerb was founded by Bryce W Jones, a marketer and an engineer. He leads the strategy work and built the tracking, reporting, and web infrastructure HookVerb runs on, which matters more in a raise than in ordinary marketing: the handoff to a portal on another domain is where most campaigns lose the ability to tell what is working.
Bryce was Head of Digital Technology at BOXABL for four and a half years, leading the team responsible for its web, software, hardware, and internal infrastructure. Over that period the company raised more than $200,000,000 from the public, stood up multiple manufacturing facilities, and took billions of dollars in pre-orders, at the scale and through the channels a large public raise depends on.
Members of HookVerb's team have spent more than a decade selling consumer products and securities to the public online. Examples of that work include boxabl.com and spotitearly.com.
Members of the team also operate the studio DevNoun, which has launched companies like Form Vessel and evabl and supported startups such as SpotitEarly.
Fit
Who this works for
A good fit
- An issuer with an offering on the calendar or already live. Counsel, a portal, and a target are things we can work out together if they are not settled yet.
- A company people already have some reason to care about. Customers, a waitlist, a following, a founder people listen to: any one of them is enough to start from.
- A raise large enough that marketing is a rational cost of capital, with a budget that exists before the money is raised.
- A willingness to be measured on completed investments and dollars raised rather than on impressions.
Not a fit
- You want a budget spent and no questions asked about the plan behind it. Spend without a settled story and working tracking is how raises lose money quietly, and we will not run it that way.
- The marketing budget only exists once the raise succeeds. The weeks that decide the open all come before any money arrives.
- The offering closes in three weeks and is well short of its minimum. At that point the deadline is the only lever left, and on its own it is not enough.
- You want a number promised in advance. Nobody can promise one honestly, and anyone who does is telling you something untrue.
Start raising
Send the deck, the offering page, or the live campaign. You get back a written read on what is going to decide the total, and what we would change first. If the honest answer is that you are not ready to raise yet, that is what it will say.
FAQ