case studyJune 2021
Vampr
Size of the team:
At launch, 12 – now, 16
Business model:
D2C
# of customers:
105,000 monthly active users
Amount raised/revenue pre-Wefunder:
$1.85M total ($520,000 raised in first Wefunder round)
Accelerator alums:
N/A
Post-close care:
Update investors once every six weeks, with varying levels of detail. They take these updates seriously, expecting that this makes people more inclined to invest again.
The Encore Round 🎤
Vampr is a social-professional network for creatives – now with 1M users spanning 190+ countries. Their community has made over 6M connections and produced hundreds of thousands of collaborative projects along the way. This past April, they closed their second (!), stellar Wefunder raise, raising $742K from 860+ investors. Naturally, we had to chat with their co-founder and CEO, Josh Simons, about the tactics they used to make it happen.
Day of Launch Tips
Josh credits the coordination of these tactics to securing $144K in the first 24 hours after they launched.
- Ping your email lists.Since this was Vampr’s second raise, their first mass email went out to their existing investors. They then emailed their huge user base, as well.
- Add a homepage banner.Day of launch, the team added a banner right onto their site to announce that their Wefunder round was live.
- Tap into an existing angel network.The co-founders were able to get a warm intro to Neil Patel’s Angels & Entrepreneurs network. Their marketing team sent an email out to their members the morning Vampr launched on Wefunder.
Tactics for pushing past the plateau
- Line up substantive Update content.Prior to launch, the team had drafted a few Updates featuring really strong content. Their plan was to prioritize sharing those and sprinkle in smaller, less consequential Updates along the way. In their first raise, they’d noticed that engagement wasn’t spectacular on Updates that were little more than announcing a fundraising milestone but more meaningful, longer pieces with videos and photos performed well. For example, An Update on their intentionality in hiring a diverse team performed really well in this second raise.
- Circulate content across channels + audience.Josh coordinated with the A+E network to sync their sharing of Wefunder Updates with an update on the Angels + Entrepreneurs site to anyone following the raise there. He attributed a good chunk of their total raise to this two-pronged strategy. Whether or not you tap into an angel network, specifically, timing posts across channels (ie. a Wefunder Update + social media posts) could result in a larger bump in investments/reservations.
- Get the most out of socials.The Vampr team created both an Instagram ‘Highlight’ and a Twitter ‘Moment’ featuring only content they shared related to the raise. Josh said these worked well to capture the velocity and momentum of the entire raise for prospective investors who might’ve found Vampr via Instagram ads or users who just stumbled upon the account.
- Host an event.Around the holidays, the team hosted a “Christmas Drinks” event over Zoom. He mentioned that, while not all of your investors will attend, that you’re even hosting something speaks volumes about the premium you put on engaging and bringing value to your stakeholders, no matter their check size.
Tips for ramping it up near close
- Ramp up ad spend.The team enlisted an ad agency to spend a huge chunk of their advertising budget right at the end of their campaign – ~$20K in the final week alone. They saw really strong ROI on this final push, noting that urgency ads work well (especially if users have been primed with ads earlier in the raise).
- Up those updates.The team drastically increased the frequency of updates as they neared close. A few weeks out, they shared weekly content, and eventually ramped it up to daily right before close.
General Advice from Josh
Stay malleable! Don’t be afraid to make strategy adjustments along the way; experiment with different tactics and see what sticks. Also, understand the “climate of the moment,” find out which platforms & platform features are hot and which have lost their traction (when in doubt, ask a Gen Z connection! ;) Also, be ready to put in a good amount of time into their Wefunder round – you’ll get out what you put in.
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