Finding Wealth - How to Find High-Net-Worth Individuals Online

Imagine a game.

The stakes are high. The rules are simple. The players are few and hard to find. The prize could be a financially lucrative sale.

‘Finding High-Net-Worth Individuals’ may be the most complex, difficult, and rewarding game in Finance.

It’s challenging due to the environment high-net-worth (HNW) individuals experience online..

When you’re trying to locate HNWs online - you’re not just competing with other offers.

You’re competing with noise. Bad actors. Spam. Fatigue. You’re effectively up against the digital experience of wealthy individuals in the modern day.

Given how high-net-worth individuals have been aggressively marketed to online, it’s not surprising HNWs work hard to keep a low profile digitally.

Vanishing Wealth

First thing to understand is that many high-net-worth individuals have put a lot of work into not being found online.

They don’t do this in a paranoid way. They just invest in being intentionally, digitally invisible.

High-net-worth individuals use lawyers, trusts, SPVs, and other intermediaries. 

They use personal privacy services to remove their information from data vendors. 

They use numbered, information segregated, & individually tracked email addresses to find and neutralize data leaks. 

They use AI tools that immediately detect and notify them of dark web matches to their personally-identifiable information (PII).  

In short - they’ve made digital disappearing an art form.

And it’s not hard to see why.

If you're a high-net-worth individual in the U.S., you're part of a highly-targeted audience. Everyone wants your business —advisors, brokers, tech startups, alt-investments, random cousins. All of them - constantly pitching you something.

Inevitably - HNWs opt for online invisibility. They have to, in order to remain productive and protected.

And that means you’re not just trying to earn their attention. You’re trying to earn attention from someone inside a protective bunker of intermediaries and technology.

Stop Trying to Make HNW Cold Emails Work

Let’s address the elephant in the inbox.

“Why can’t we just email HNWs?”

The reason is: “Why did HNWs disappear online in the first place?”

Cold email might work for B2B SaaS. But when it comes to HNWs who regularly make large investments?

Cold email is the trust killer.

When you’ve spent time crafting a beautiful website. Built a brand that conveys institutional quality. Encouraged HNW prospects to read educational content pieces.

Why would you then fire off an unsolicited (and unasked for) cold email?

You’ve suddenly remade yourself in the image of Junk Mail.

When you look like spam, you’re indistinguishable from actual spam. 

When a HNW prospect puts you in the folder labeled  “Internet Sales Pitch”, you won’t earn your way back into good graces as a trusted advisor.

Trust, once broken, doesn’t get repaired. It gets replaced.

Starting Offline for Online

HNWs are making themselves digitally scarce. What tactics work for finding High-net-worth individuals online? 

Having spent a decade on the problem - I can say the best solution is to start offline and work backwards.

Let me explain.

When we were scaling Crowd Street from 1,000 accredited investors to 100,000—I tried everything possible to find high-net-worth individuals online: 

• Demographic & behavioral segmentation

• Programmatic demand-side platforms

• First, second, and third-party data providers

• Intent-based targeting

None of it worked. The data was too messy. Too aspirational. Too noisy.

What did work?

Real-world conversations,  relationships, and identifiers.

One of Crowd Street’s top UHNW investors owned a private plane (registered with the FAA). Another UHNW donated to a non-profit (reported in a Form 990). A third joined the UHNW member organization Tiger 21 (and was quoted in a testimonial).

The effective strategy involves using offline data to build a list of real-world-qualified prospects. This offline list can then be matched to digitally “actionable IDs”  using specialized data-onboarding services like LiveRamp to match personally-identifiable information (PII) to hashed emails, first-party cookies, and user IDs. 

Once a digital match is made - real engagement can begin.

Engagements Before Conversions

You’ve managed to successfully connect online with a member of the invisible minority.  You’ve identified and digitally confirmed a high-net-worth individual. You’ve validated their offline net worth, segmented them from a pool of unlikely & likely uninterested prospects, and successfully connected their offline identity to an actionable online ID.

You’ve connected the dots to a ‘digitally invisible ‘ HNW.

 What’s next? What do you put in front of them?

The answer is - you provide them value. You give them what they want - not what you want.

As we know from earlier - what do you give someone who can buy almost anything?

You give them expert knowledge.

Thoughtful, useful, educational content on your area of expertise. The kind of informative articles that make readers realize “Huh. I didn’t know that.”

You want to be a source they trust in a sea of noise.

The name of the game is prioritizing value (theirs) - over conversions (yours).

Solutions from Problems

You can think of it as playing the long-game if that’s your way of viewing things. For me it's been a natural evolution from problem-focused Product Strategy.  

When you’re building new products from scratch, you quickly learn a hard truth.

The best solutions start with a customer problem. 

• Problem: Horses are an expensive (and messy) solution to transportation.
  
  

• Solution: The Ford Model T is created - the ultimate blue-collar affordable (and 100% non-pooping) transportation solution. With 15M units sold 1908-1927, the model T was the highest selling vehicle until the VW bug (in 1972).
  
  

The worst solutions don’t address a customer problem.

• Solution: Decentralized Blockchain Apps
  
  

• Problem: Global Corps. Big Government? Techs love Blockchain. Financial data is too centralized (and secure)?

  
  

It’s not that these problems don’t exist. It’s that they were not the problems that led to invention of decentralized blockchain apps. 

They’re post-hoc problems created for an existing solution. Historical inventor rewrites - attempts to justify adoption of an ‘interesting’ technology.

A thought experiment to validate this line of thinking. List all the decentralized blockchain apps that transformed Finance over the last 10 years. Shouldn’t take long.

Finance loves real solutions to real problems.

Almost as much as Finance loves apparent solutions to real problems - the kind that make real money in the process (aka: most of Venture Capital).

The fact that decentralized blockchain haven’t taken over the world - means it’s not a (real) solution to a problem. (AI on the other hand….)

Ok - that was a big tangent. Why did we take it? 

It’s about solutions to real customer problems.

The Giving Solution

Your customers - high-net-worth individuals - clearly have a real problem. 

To them the Internet is a spammy, AI-ridden, depersonalized,  untrustworthy space.

The problem is confirmed by looking at the privacy solutions HNWs use online: lawyers, trusts, SPVs, intermediaries, individually tracked emails, and AI dark-web spiders.

The problem is that HNWs lack ways to form new, real, trusted, online educational relationships.

Your best solutions should be inspired by this problem. How can you provide HNWs with a truly valuable, and informative relationship?

Find ways to genuinely engage with HNW prospects online. Create highly personal content - the kind that could never come from – AI.  Give generously of your time and expertise and prioritize providing value over driving conversions.

This game doesn’t reward speed. It rewards sequencing.

Access → Educate → Build Trust → Wait

You can never break character. No hard sell. No urgency. No pitching. Be a trusted resource instead.

Success comes from continually providing value to your HNW prospects.

That’s the fundamental shift. You’re not chasing. You’re educating. You’re not pitching. You’re building relationships. You’re not converting leads. You’re earning credibility.

When a high-net-worth individual finally raises their hand and asks “Where are you investing?” you’ve earned your position at the table.

You haven’t made a ‘Sale’

It’s  ‘Trust’ - the essential foundation to long-term relationships - online and off.

Next Chapter - we’ll dive into the specific tactics used to win-over HNWs without selling.