Equity is ownership in a business. If you hold equity, you own a share of the company, usually as shares. You benefit if it grows in value, gets sold or pays dividends, and you can lose what you put in if it fails.
I'm starting to notice a trend. More and more people I speak to are watching content creators become entrepreneurs and are doing well.
Founders who start with distribution
Historically, the hardest part of being a founder was distribution. You built the product, then spent years working out how to reach customers. Creators with big audiences start the founder journey from the other end. They already have people who know them and trust them. If the product is good, selling it becomes much easier.
Many of them also know their niche deeply. They know the space and the people buying in it, and that helps them build better products.
Followers want in
For a long time, followers have watched influencers and celebrities get rich in front of them. That is starting to change. More people want to be part of the life of these businesses. They want to build wealth alongside the creators they follow, not just watch.
My prediction: we will see a new generation of social media followers become investors.
That raises a fair question. Isn't this risky? Yes. All investing is risky, and trusting the founder doesn't change that. But if audiences are asking for access, we should work out how to offer it responsibly. I think many people will go from following a brand to putting capital into the companies behind the brands, and that will change how investment works. The infrastructure for audiences to invest in the businesses they follow is still early, and it needs to be built properly.
A story: Funmi Monet
Earlier this year, a friend asked me to do diligence on a perfume entrepreneur. I reached out to the perfume expert friend Regina, who pointed me to Funmi Monet, a perfume creator on TikTok.
I messaged her and asked if she had anything coming up. She did. She was launching her own perfume brand, and it wasn't her first launch. A previous product had sold out, and she was set to do it again. Regina and I spoke with her, and we heard her pitch. We took it to a small group of people I work with, but we couldn't fill the allocation.
Her brand, Influxious, has since launched at Sephora, and the stock reportedly sold out within hours. That is what an audience that trusts you can do for a good product.
What I see at Borderless
More of the customers coming onto Borderless are raising from people who already follow them. They built that trust over time, and now they use Borderless to organise those people in one place. One of our customers has spent a long time building a large online audience. Her challenge was never finding customers. It was organising her audience, and she uses Borderless to do that.
What I expect next
Over the next two years, I think we will see more influencers and creators become entrepreneurs, and more audiences who want to build wealth alongside them instead of watching them build it alone.
I'm excited to be building for this next group of entrepreneurs: people who already have an audience and need a way to organise it. Many of them don't know how to raise from a large group of people. We call that collective investing, and it is what Borderless does well.
Over the next 12 months, we want to build resources that help creators turned entrepreneurs raise capital from their audiences compliantly. Raising money from a large audience can quickly become a regulated activity if you don't know what you're doing. There are many skills to build beyond growing an audience, and I think we can help.
Work with us
If you've been building an audience for a while and you're thinking about raising from it, reply to this email. I'd love to show you how Borderless can help you organise your investors properly and at scale.
Joe