StartEngine Has A Burner Account??

Good Morning!

Crowdfunding investment dollars have been on a tear in recent weeks, with last week’s total jumping 48%.

This appears to be the result of Republic offering another batch of Republic Notes - a profit-sharing token that gives holders a cut of any profitable exit on the Republic platform.

The $3M funding maximum was hit, which is a strong endorsement on Republic and the equity crowdfunding industry

StartEngine Has A Burner Account

Burner Accounts. These are typically anonymous profiles on social media to say the things people can’t say in public.

We’ve seen famous sports players, rappers, and other celebrities get caught using a burner account. But never have we seen a billion dollar company get caught with one.

Last week, I learned that StartEngine had gone viral on Tik Tok through an update from the company itself. Curious, I went to check out their Tik Tok account

I was surprised to find….nothing

Just 115 followers, and six videos with all less than a thousand views. This 5-month old newsletter does better numbers than that!

I soon figured out that StartEngine had created a separate account on Tik Tok called Wonderful Investing.

This was it - I saw a few videos with 200k+ views, and one with a whopping 2M.

But what’s interesting is that the account barely references StartEngine at all.

Mr Wonderful has a Secret Helper

The account’s content centers around Kevin O’Leary, who is a paid spokesperson for StartEngine

The videos are all clips of O’Leary talking about money, chopped up and optimized for short-form video viewing

Upon investigation, it looks like StartEngine has tapped into a 23-year old Tik Tok whiz to help them explode onto the scene

Michael Sikand is the founder of Our Future - a startup that was just acquired by Morning Brew. A fairly impressive feat considering Michael is just one year removed from college.

Our Future has mastered the art of turning any content into viral short-form video clips. Sikand and his crew have apparently been tasked with building StartEngine’s brand on Tik Tok to resonate with the next generation of startup investors

Is the Strategy Working?

The largest problem with Tik Tok is that there is low brand loyalty to creators. The algorithm is so good that users typically rely on it over curating a list of accounts to follow

This means that followers are not as valuable/important- it’s more about the content within the videos that go viral.

While some of the videos have blown up, their most viral video with 2M views has no mention of StartEngine, nor does it link to the platform. In essence, the video did nothing to help StartEngine except to give it’s account a bump in Tik Tok followers

The account has only recently started adding the StartEngine logo to the upper left corner of posts, so now there is a small amount of brand-building involved

So is their strategy working?

As someone building an audience myself, I know that there’s a 2-step process for success:

1. Build an audience

2. Monetize it

This is the order in which you must act, and you cannot deviate from that order. So I think it’s fine that StartEngine is building organic content now to curate & grow their audience.

How they begin to leverage the account will determine how successful of an investment this account will be

I would like to see the content center a little more around equity crowdfunding and StartEngine’s business, but I understand that we’re in the 1st inning of a long baseball game here.

What do you think? Is this worth StartEngine’s time & money?