Today we’d like to introduce you to Christian Durfee.

Hi Christian, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?

My name is Christian Durfee and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of InvestLink Social. I was born in the small city of Duluth, Minnesota, home to 291,638 residents. Growing up, my family emphasized the importance of education and curiosity. With both my parents as teachers, I was fortunate to learn about all different subjects and topics. This helped me express my fearlessness of dreams and goals, knowing that knowledge is the key to success. We were very active in our small community of Duluth, and living in a small community means supporting local small businesses. It was a privilege to go shopping with my mom on a Sunday as a kid and run into countless local business owners who were normal individuals in our neighborhood. I had always admired how they had an idea and were able to turn it into reality, which consequently, started my interest in entrepreneurship. Even as a child, my “dream job” was to own a bakery.

In late Middle School / early High School, surrounded by like-minded friends and using the tools my parents taught me, I embarked on different entrepreneurial endeavors to get “rich” before graduation. From mowing countless lawns from sunrise to sundown to hovering over a steaming hot shirt press in a freezing garage, fulfilling customer t-shirt orders to deliver to school the next day, there was nothing my group of friends and I wouldn’t try to see if it would stick. After many trials and failures, and ideas dwindling, my grandfather mentioned to me that there was a new news anchor in town who wasn’t from the area, and the unique thing about this anchor? He wore bow ties. This conversation provoked the idea of learning how to sew bow ties and sell them to my peers for high school dances. One thing led to another, and through hard work, dedication, and knowing the right people, my small bow tie company took off. I was carried in multiple stores, featured on the news, and even had that anchor who provoked the idea, wear one of my custom bow ties on the air.

After all of the quick success, I realized I was struggling to keep up with demand, and felt very lost since I was uneducated on different verticals of how to grow a business. It was overbearing and I needed to step back to take the learnings from the experiences and readjust for the next venture. A few years after the bow ties had calmed down, I was attending college at the University of Minnesota. Living in the university community, I noticed many students hungover and wishing for a “cure” not only on weekend mornings but many weekdays as well. The hassle of getting up off of the couch, hungover, and walking to a nearby convenience store was usually a massive task most weren’t willing to take. With this in mind, a business partner and I started a hangover subscription kit company. These kits would have five different hungover remedies in them for the cheap price of $10 delivered right to your door. To no surprise, especially selling to a market with little disposable income and being skeptical of our kits, the first few years of the company were a real grind. However, through learning, curiosity, networking, and the teachings of the bow ties + my parents, in the third year, we scaled the company to over 40 college campuses, major spring break and travel company partnerships, and multiple b2b distribution contracts. We rode the success throughout that year and with the peak during my graduation from college, I decided to sell my shares.

However, before selling my shares, we tried to raise money as our success was peaking. With knowing absolutely nothing about raising money, we were able to get an investor meeting through one of our strategic partners. The meeting turned into us talking to, not with, the investor for 45 minutes straight and ended with the investor telling us that he was not interested in consumer products, only tech investments. It blew my mind that he had a thesis and criteria for investment, but this was a learning moment. This created a hunch and forced me to look into the problem of fundraising. I found that 82% of founders identified capital as a significant challenge, less than 20% of founders are successful at fundraising, and even worse, less than 2% of underrepresented founders (women and minority-owned companies) raise a single dollar. Through networking with founders and investors, I confirmed this hunch, assembled my team, and founded InvestLink Social, the social networking platform that connects founders and investors to assist in the fundraising process.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

I like to think of entrepreneurs as firefighters. Each day, there’s always a new fire they have to put out. On top of that, they have to juggle so many different obstacles from bookkeeping, sales, finances, marketing, operations, team members/employees (if they have any), and other misc responsibilities. Not to talk about the external image that entrepreneurship carries, especially if things aren’t always going perfectly.

Many of the struggles I have experienced along my journey have been external and internal. There are many growing pains that I had to learn with leadership, management, and being open to working with new ideas. Many times, you have to wear different hats, and many of those hats are foreign. My formal education and preliminary experience were in marketing and community building. When I started leading a technical engineering team and had to take control of finances, there were many tasks I had no idea how to do or what they even were. You can fall into imposter syndrome fast, it’s about how you pick yourself up, call on your resources, and educate yourself in circumstances so you can lead the ship right.

One other challenge that I and many other entrepreneurs have struggled with is the feeling of loneliness and pressure. So often, many people misunderstand what entrepreneurship is, and/or they compare themselves to others in the same field. It feels like everyone is succeeding while YOUR idea that YOU came up with isn’t working and is dumb. It’s a very lonely place to be in and creates a lot of interpersonal struggle. The important thing to remember is that failure is NOT a bad thing, it’s a way to learn and get better. And just because someone is posting about how well their business is doing or the milestone they are hitting, doesn’t mean that everything is perfect in their world – most of the time, they are fighting through the same problems you’re fighting through.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

InvestLink Social is the social networking platform where founders and investors can connect, network, learn, and grow. We assist founders in expanding their network through our match-making and social communities and help expand their business “know-how” with our educational resources and mentors. On the flip side, we act as a vetting system for investors of all types and sizes through our smart profile matching, in-depth and accurate data profiles, and ways to work with entrepreneurs from start to finish and beyond.

We provide a premium experience of social networking, smart searching for your next investment/funding/partnership, extensive and verified data, and real-time messaging. We have been called the exclusive LinkedIn with no spam.

We’ve been able to help countless founders and investors connect as well as investors to investors and founders to founders. A story we’re proud of: a first-time, woman founder came to us in one of her darkest entrepreneurial moments. She had an idea for a Tinder-like app for animal shelters. She had no technical experience and needed help building the technology so she Googled different development shops and started working with a firm. After months of working with this firm, they ended up scamming her out of thousands of dollars (even worse, it was money her dad gave to her from his will), and she was left empty-handed. She had found us through a mutual connection, and through our network and knowledge, we helped her with funding, got the code she rightfully owned from the scam firm, set her up with a trusted development shop, and helped her launch to market.

What’s the best part about InvestLink Social? We’re free to use. You can join our platform for free today at: https://www.investlinksocial.com

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?

In the next 5 to 10 years, entrepreneurship will bring extensive innovation to our everyday lives. During COVID, we saw a spike in small business filings and that trend has stayed true throughout these past 4 years. With relative ease of access to business tools, and the ability to create and sell within a matter of minutes online, we’re going to see more and more people take the leap into starting their own business.

On the investment side, I suspect that we will continue to see more money flooded into private-company markets. Members of local communities are going to diversify their investments into local businesses and large venture capital funds rather than their entire portfolio in the public stock market. This is why we are building InvestLink Social, allowing low-barrier access for accredited individuals to find private investment opportunities right at their fingertips.

These next 5 to 10 years are going to be pivotal to the way we live, eat, breathe, and sleep. So many ideas are going to hit the market and change everyday life, especially technology-first companies including AI, VR, and AR.

Pricing:

• Free to join

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.investlinksocial.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-durfee/

Image Credits

Startup Grind, Max Avery