StartEngine Launches White Label Solution As It Looks Towards Market Dominance

StartEngine is making big moves as it launches white-label solutions

Shopify or Amazon? Both have their unique advantages, but it’d be silly not to have both for any store looking to scale. Amazon is great because millions of businesses advertise to the site, and Amazon’s massive audience helps drive revenue to existing businesses. But Shopify or some other website is similarly vital because you get to keep all the lead information (your customers are yours, not Amazon’s), and you can better monetize the audience. This means marketing campaigns can be more effective, and you own a URL driving lots of traffic, which helps add value to your brand in the long term.

StartEngine is a leading equity crowdfunding platform that has traditionally taken the “Amazon” approach to equity crowdfunding. Hundreds of startups come to StartEngine, then launch on their site to raise funds. This has led them to become one of the top equity crowdfunding sites in the world, but the ‘Shopify’ approach known as “white labels” has become increasingly popular. White labels allow you to effectively launch a raise on your ‘own’ website for all the same reasons one might want their own Shopify store. It's effectively launching an equity crowdfunding site, on an equity crowdfunding portal, but if StartEngine.com only had 1 raise on it. Then StartEngine just launches hundreds of different websites and portals.

Two leaders in this space are DealMaker and Issuance. Issuance is a new player on the block but has quickly grown in prominence due to its wildly popular ‘GoingPublic,’ which is a show that allows you to watch founders pitch their startup in real-time, and you can invest while watching.

But DealMaker is certainly the reigning champ in this regard. Having raised billions collectively, the company has been landing some of the biggest companies in the equity crowdfunding space and is a juggernaut in the equity crowdfunding space.

DealMaker has carved out its market effectively due to being the only one in this space. This gives them a massive first-movers advantage as others look to play catch up, and there’s likely not a ton of space for many others. For example, right now, StartEngine and Wefunder hold as much as 80% of the market share for the ‘Amazon' portals. While it’s likely they can leverage their existing models to help drive deal flow to these white-label solutions for those interested, DealMaker has already made its name and impact on the space.