Darren Marble on building an interactive investing show
Darren Marble is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Crush Capital, a media-fueled fintech platform that produces interactive investing shows and operates the Issuance investing platform. The conversation covers how Crush Capital won its first distribution deal, brought viewers into the investment process and adapted to changing expectations around live shows and online investing.
Build traction before seeking capital, and take responsibility for opening doors rather than relying on others to do it. Crush Capital’s first distribution deal took three years, and the experience shaped how the company approaches growth.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
My partner Todd M. Goldberg and I run Crush Capital as co-CEOs. We’re a media-fueled fintech platform, which really means we’re a studio that develops and produces interactive investing shows.
The idea came from a simple frustration. People watch pitch shows and want in on the deal, and they can’t get in. So we made Going Public, the first show where viewers could invest in the featured companies while they watched. We’ve made three seasons of it, and Season 3 was licensed by X.
What makes us different is that we control both sides, the show and the deal. Crush Capital makes the content, and Issuance, my investing platform, runs the raise through Reg D 506(c), Reg A+ and a FINRA-registered Funding Portal for Reg CF. Issuance has worked with 150,000 investors across 150 deals. Getting TV and compliance right under one roof is hard, and most people pick one and partner on the other. We decided early that we didn’t want to depend on anyone else for either half.
Our next step is a big one. We’ve signed a deal with a major streamer for a show that we believe will transform capital markets and entertainment.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
We announced Season 1 of Going Public in 2020 with Entrepreneur.com as our distribution partner, and we opened it up for companies to apply. Within the first week, hundreds of companies submitted applications. Some had been featured on Shark Tank. One was a Y Combinator graduate that had raised $20 million in venture capital by the time it signed on to appear in Season 1 of Going Public. That told us founders wanted this as much as viewers did, and we vetted the companies from there.
Today the track record does most of the selling. Going Public alumni like Hammitt, Trebel and Proven Skincare kept growing after the show and went on to raise institutional capital. When founders see that, it starts a lot of conversations.
On the Issuance side, we don’t wait for deals to find us. A lot of our new business starts with fresh SEC Form D filings. Our agents build the list and find verified emails, and a person on our team approves every note before it goes out.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
Early on, Todd and I relied on production companies to introduce us to buyers. Our early production partner wasn’t super helpful with making introductions, so we decided to do it ourselves.
That decision changed the direction of the business. We went to market directly, and we went straight to Ryan Shea, who ran Entrepreneur Media as CEO. We got him to agree to distribute our first series on Entrepreneur.com.
The mistake was leaning on someone else to open doors for us in the first place. It taught me that nobody is going to fight for your company the way you will. If you hand that job to someone else, you’ve handed them your fate. Since then we’ve made a point of staying in control of our own destiny, and that’s how we run Crush Capital today.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
The biggest change I see is that streamers are moving into live programming. Some of them are losing business to YouTube, and they’re answering with live, interactive shows.
That’s good news for us, because interactive is what we do. We already ran a live finale for Going Public Season 3 in Las Vegas, with Mike Tyson hosting. We’re leaning into this change and we’re excited about it. I expect some of the next shows we announce will be live.
Investors have changed too. Nobody wants a 40-page PDF and a wire form anymore. They expect investing to feel like buying anything else online, so we built the Issuance checkout to take under 60 seconds.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
The first thing I’d tell them is to go from zero to one. That’s Peter Thiel’s thesis, and I think he’s right. You have to solve a problem, and often get paid for it, before you can generate respect and command attention.
For us, that was signing our first distribution deal with Entrepreneur Media. It took us three years to get there.
A lot of founders make the mistake of going out and asking for capital before they’ve shown they can go from zero to one. Generate traction first. You have to make it look like magic out of thin air.
What I’d tell them to ignore is the hype about overnight raises. Hammitt, Trebel and Proven Skincare didn’t get where they are off one episode. They kept building, and the institutional money came later.
And don’t quit. Our superpower at Crush Capital is that we don’t quit, ever.
Thank you to Darren Marble and the team at Crush Capital for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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