Everyone’s been running community rounds wrong for a decade
Before launching a community round, founders should gauge investor interest. There are a host of benefits from doing this.
If you’re anything like me, chatGPT (or whichever equivalent LLM you use) has changed my life. It’s given me superpowers. Things that I didn’t use to look into, I now look into. Things that I didn’t think I could do, I now think I can do. Things that I didn’t use to research how to do, I now research how to do.
A recent example. I’m currently in Japan. Yesterday, I was in a taxi, and the TV in the car was showing a sumo wrestling tournament. Pre-chatGPT me would have watched the tournament, intrigued, but thoroughly confused. And I would have stayed confused. Post-chatGPT me typed “please tell me about sumo wrestling” into chatGPT. After chatGPT’s initial response, I typed “please write 10 times as many words”. And now I know about sumo wrestling. (I think I will stick to soccer. Ruben Amorim, if you’re reading this, you are my hero. Also, I am surprised that you’re reading this).
Another example. From the Wefunder world. The other day, a founder asked me “what am I specifically allowed / not allowed to say, when the Regulation Crowdfunding rules mention not talking about the terms of the offering off the platform?” Pre-chatGPT me would have just asked someone smarter than me like Jake Suggs. But post-chatGPT me typed “please show me the specific place in the Regulation Crowdfunding rules that reference communication about the terms of the offering off platform” into chatGPT. And hey presto, I had my answer.
Wikipedia has existed for a long time. And I know it’s there. And of course, sometimes I look at Wikipedia articles. But I wouldn’t have looked up about sumo wrestling in Wikipedia. I would have just remained in the dark about it. But because it’s so easy to get the right level of information about a topic from chatGPT, now I look into stuff like this. Way more.
And similarly, the Regulation Crowdfunding laws have been searchable online since 2016. And I know where they are. I might even have known roughly what section the description of “terms of the offering” could be found in. But I wouldn’t have trawled through them in my pre-chatGPT world. It would have probably taken me 3 minutes of searching. Whereas with chatGPT I got the result in 10 seconds.
And that’s for a task where the result is known (i.e. I know that this description of “terms of the offering” exists in the rules, and I know roughly where to look for it). Where the answer (or even the existence of an answer) is not known, then the benefits of chatGPT are even more pronounced. Let’s say I want to find the Total Addressable Market size for elevators in Canada. I might search around on Google for 20 minutes, and still not have an answer. With chatGPT, it’s the same 10 seconds.
And so my point is this – even though the ability to research stuff online has existed for decades, the specific product (user interface) of chatGPT has made me much, much more likely to research stuff online than I used to be.
The ease of doing something has unlocked the potential of it. And even enabled me to realize the potential of it, in new and transformational ways.
And it’s the same with the strategy for running a community round.
The 2021 Reg CF rule changes were Wikipedia
When the Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) rules were first rolled out in 2016, you couldn’t start publicly talking about your fundraising (intentions) until you had filed a Form C. This was bad.
Happily, in 2021, the SEC changed the rules to allow for “Testing The Waters”. This allowed companies to gauge investor interest before deciding whether to launch a Reg CF raise. For example, founders were now allowed to email their customers and say “Hey, we’re thinking of running a community round – would you invest?” (as long as they included these legal disclosures).
On the Wefunder team, we moved quickly to capitalize on these regulatory changes (as we are wont to do), enabling founders to build a “Testing The Waters” profile page before they filed their Form C.
We also encouraged some founders, who were still undecided about whether they wanted to run a community round, to send out a survey to their users ahead of time, to gauge their interest. Here’s the link in our fundraising guide where we suggest how to do that.
But this was Wikipedia.
We didn’t quite “get it” yet. The “lift” of setting up a survey wasn’t even that great. But there was a lift. And it was on the founder. And it didn’t look that cool.
So we didn’t really push the initial “gauge investor interest” survey as the go-to strategy.
I wrote a longgggggg blog post about how I would run a community round just a few months ago. I didn’t mention an initial survey at all.
I was wrong.
Wefunder’s new landing page tool is chatGPT
At the start of 2025, Wefunder rolled out a new tool to build landing pages for founders considering running a community round. It plays the same role as the survey has always been able to play. But the Wefunder landing page tool is chatGPT.
It makes the execution of this initial investor interest survey so much easier, and better…
…And this product improvement has unlocked my realization that this is the right way for the vast majority of founders to approach running a community round.
I wish I had been smart enough to figure this out when the law changed in 2021, but I wasn’t. I find it really fascinating that it was this (actually rather small) product change that enabled me to figure out the strategic breakthrough.
(Side note – every startup and situation is different. This new “landing page survey” approach will not be the right strategy for every company raising on Wefunder. Superhuman, Athletic Brewing or Angel City would definitely max out the $5 million legal Reg CF limit in 24 hours. No survey needed. But I now think it applies to the vast majority of companies running (or considering running) a community round on Wefunder. And these companies are the focus of this blog post).
The new strategy for running a community round
So here’s the big idea – before launching your community round, send a survey to your audience (email blast, social media post, etc.) to gauge their potential interest in investing, if you were to launch a community round in the future.
(Obviously, I would recommend you use Wefunder’s new landing page tool to do this. It will save you time, and integrate seamlessly with your “formal” community round, if you do decide to launch one at a later date, based on the initial survey responses. But you don’t have to use the Wefunder tool. You could send the same Typeform survey we’ve always recommended. Or easily make your own landing page).
There are so many powerful benefits to this approach of starting with a survey to gauge your existing community’s initial investor interest.
(1) Commitment Issues
Some founders don’t know if they want to run a community round yet. And nor should they. Maybe there won’t be that much investor interest from their community. And community rounds are less fun (and a lot more work) without…well…you know…community.
The Wefunder landing page tool is gloriously non-committal. Announcing your community round after you’ve filed the Form C is a brash New York accent barking “Hey You! Want to invest already? We’re live!”. The Wefunder landing page conjures the most self-effacing, deferential English accent imaginable: “Umm, excuse me. I wonder if I might trouble you to…umm…well…inquire as to whether there might be the remotest possibility of you perhaps considering investing in our startup at some vague point in the future, if we do ever decide to open up a community round (which we of course might not)”. It’s (younger!) Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, in website form.
(2) Data Rules Everything Around Me
Founders often ask me “how much do you think we will raise on Wefunder?” I have worked at Wefunder for seven years, and seen literally thousands of Wefunder raises. There is probably no person better-qualified to answer that question in the world than me. And there are times when I have literally no idea. One CPG company raises $1.2 million. Another, which looks very very similar to me, raises $100K.
Running a survey before launching a community round gives you an order of magnitude more data with which you can make decisions like whether you should raise on Wefunder, how much should you target raising, and how should you approach the raise strategically.
Of course, if two companies have the same survey responses, there is still a wide range of potential outcomes in terms of how much they will end up raising if they do launch a community round. But the uncertainty around the range of outcomes is massively, massively reduced.
(3) Target practice
One of the decisions this initial survey data can give you is how much you should target raising in your community round. This is so critically important.
One of the biggest mistakes I have seen founders make in running community rounds is to get the ordering wrong here. They say “I want to raise $1 million” and then launch, hoping that there will be that much investor demand. Rather than first asking how much investor demand there is, and then adjusting their target raise to be more in line with that investor demand.
This also feeds into the amount of effort that it will take for a company to hit their fundraising goal on Wefunder. Let’s say you run the initial survey, and you register $200K of likely investor interest. If you launch with a goal of $2 million, that sounds like a lot of work to bridge that gap. And you may well be unsuccessful. But if you launch with a goal of $250K, it should be relatively quick and easy. You always then have the option to increase your target above $250K if you want to – for example if you’re seeing strong pickup from the Wefunder investor base. But you will now be doing so from a position of strength and over-subscription. Just as with conventional fundraising, scarcity and pressure and urgency and FOMO are powerful.
Of course there’s a balance. Sometimes you just need to raise $2 million, and you don’t have (m)any options. Or you just love the branding / marketing of community rounds. And so you just want to go big out of the gate, even if you haven’t validated the investor demand for that large of a raise.
But for most founders, gauging investor demand from their community first, and then, in series, setting their target community round allocation is going to be the better strategy.
(4) Great Expectations
Another benefit – because the upfront survey gives a decent estimate of the likely investor demand from a startup’s existing, easily-accessible audience, it sets much better expectations for the founder.
Firstly, in terms of how much investment will come in on Day One of the raise – a critical question, because getting off to a strong start is usually imperative.
And secondly, in terms of the marketing channels that will be effective, or necessary. If a founder is targeting raising $1 million, and the initial survey to their audience yields $500K, they can be very confident in their organic investor demand, and focus significantly on their existing audience from a marketing perspective. But if the initial survey yields only $75K in likely investment volume, that should completely recalibrate the founder’s approach to the raise. As mentioned above, they might significantly lower their target raise in the light of this new information. Or at the least, they might realize that they will need to invest significantly more time and energy in raising larger checks from angels, or even invest in paid marketing, to bridge the gap.
(5) Ready, Fire, Aim
An initial survey is also a nice trial run before your formal launch.
It’s the first time you communicate your (possible) intent of running a community round, and you will probably get some valuable feedback from your audience – what questions do they have? Is anything unclear? How do they communicate about the idea, or frame it?
It matters less if the messaging of the initial survey isn’t perfect – because it’s a non-committal (Hugh Grant voice) survey. But it can help you ensure that the messaging of your formal launch in a few weeks’ time is perfect.
(6) No More Negative Signal
One of the biggest concerns I hear from founders about running a community round is that “it might be a negative signal”. It was Mark Twain that said “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. I wrote a long blog post about how, in my humble opinion, reports of negative signal have been greatly exaggerated. But my opinion on this point is literally worthless.
But my upfront survey is not worthless – it is a silver bullet that completely solves the negative signal problem.
Because the potential “negative signal” of a community round is not letting your customers invest in itself. It’s a weak community round. A dragged out, public failure. And the initial investor survey eliminates the risk of that.
As stated in the points above, if there’s not enough potential investor interest from your survey / audience, then don’t launch a community round. Negative signal eliminated.
If there’s $200K of investor demand, then launch with a target goal of $250K, and quickly over-subscribe. Negative signal eliminated.
If there’s $1M+ of investor demand, you can launch with more confidence of the emphatic and immediate positive signal.
Pirouette just raised $8M on Wefunder through a combination of Reg CF and Reg D. It took them about a year to do it. I think that their founder Conor cares a lot less about “negative signal”, than he does about the money in his bank account. In my experience, the best founders don’t give a shit about negative signal. They know that, on one hand, as Paul Graham puts it in this blog, “accept offers greedily”. And on the other hand, the best VCs should be lining up to invest in them. But for founders that are more fragile about how tier two VCs might perceive them if they run a community round, running an upfront survey to gauge investor demand should lay their concerns to rest.
Thomas Kuhn wrote a book about the structure of scientific revolutions. He talked about how there is an existing paradigm (let’s say Newtonian physics), and then more and more data gradually builds up that seems to undermine that paradigm. And then eventually, it clicks, and there is a paradigm shift (to Einsteinian and quantum physics).
After seven years of approaching them a different way, this initial survey approach represents a paradigm shift in how I think about the best way to run a community round on Wefunder. I’m excited to see the results.