Growing Investment Interest Starts with RSVPs

At Stonks, we’ve seen RSVP count emerge as a strong indicator of an event’s ability to generate higher levels of investment interest.

While this relationship may not be the most surprising — more RSVPs usually lead to more event attendees and more potential investors expressing interest — it provides an area of focus for demo day hosts and startups looking to maximize investment interest leading up to an event.

The median RSVP count for events generating $5 million or more in investment interest is 1,061 RSVPs. That’s compared to the median RSVP count seen at events generating less than $5 million in interest of 388 (a difference of more than 2.7x). This 388 is not very different from the smallest RSVP count seen within the $5M+ interest events of 363. Additionally, we see:

• 75% of events generating less than $5M in investment interest had fewer than 516 RSVPs
• Only 25% of events generating $5M+ in investment interest had fewer than 697 RSVPs

Looking at the above distributions of RSVP counts for events in the two buckets, we see more of the same. Very few events on platform see high RSVP numbers and corresponding low levels of investment interest.

There is clear value in using other metrics to measure event performance and investment interest directly (attendance, accredited investor attendance, overall pitch performance, introduction requests, etc.). With so many other metrics available and some more directly linked to investment interest, the benefit of using RSVPs as a proxy comes in the form of visibility. RSVP count provides a view into event performance before the event begins and is one of the few event-tracking metrics that is available prior to the start of an event.