Selling alt assets through education with Yieldstreet

What

Yieldstreet is a New York-based alternative investments platform for retail investors. Founded in 2015, Yieldstreet has raised more than $600M in equity and debt, including a $150M Series C in 2021, with funding from Gaingels, Soros Fund Management, Greycroft, and others.

Serving more than 400,000 users, Yieldstreet has facilitated over $3.5B in investments on its platform, including over $1.1B in 2022 alone.

Why 

To Milind Mehere, Yieldstreet’s Founder and CEO, the company provides access to successful investment vehicles that are typically out of reach for everyday investors. “If the best investors in the world believe in private equity and private markets, then why is it not more widely available?” Mehere asked.

Key to Yieldstreet’s mission is the question of aging; investors of different ages have corresponding priorities, such as building a long-term retirement plan, or ensuring passive income after retirement. “We view our consumer engagement on a continuum depending upon who you are and what your goals are,” Mehere said. “That’s generally how any consumer should think about their portfolio.”

And fintech is aging gracefully too, Mehere suggests. We’re “entering the golden age of fintech,” he said, which will offer innovative private-market solutions as well as other products.

How

To Mehere, marketing and sales for alternative-investment platforms like Yieldstreet have to be informative as well as accessible. 

“It's not so much about marketing as much as it is about education,” he said. 

While the past three years have offered significant tailwinds for alternative investments—especially crypto—consumers have to overcome certain assumptions in order to successfully take advantage of Yieldstreet. Encouraging consumers to diversify their portfolios beyond the traditional 60/40 stock-and-bond split, for example, or educating them on different asset classes and what they offer. 

To accomplish that goal, Yieldstreet has offered webinars, published short- and long-form articles, built out an informative onboarding series for new customers, conducted deep dives on asset classes, and released a podcast that interviews industry experts. To Yieldstreet’s content and marketing teams, offering enough information so that clients can explain their investments coherently to others is a sign of success. 

In the face of headwinds, which have heightened consumer scrutiny about alternative investments like crypto, Yieldstreet has opted to respond with transparency. Its statistics page offers a deal-by-deal performance; of its more than 450 investments, almost 275 have fully matured and have been paid off. 

“The best way to deal with headwinds is to show people how the platform has done over time,” Mehere said.