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Kickstarter vs Indiegogo?
12 years ago
General
Sorry, more questions!
For anybody who has used either Kickstarter or Indiegogo, what was your experiences? I am more familiar with Kickstarter (having backed a project in the past, and watched several projects I was interested in but couldn't contribute to), but a friend of mind suggested Indiegogo when I get ready to launch the campaign for my first run of art dolls. If I get some feedback on both platforms from people who have used them on either side it'll help me figure out which to ultimately use.
From what research I've done, Kickstarter has a significantly larger user base overall and has a higher success rate for funding, but has some limitations (though it looks like anybody, from anywhere, can back a project? It's just limited to the US, Canada and the UK for people starting a project? Not an issue in my case). I'm not sure I'm a fan of Amazon as the only means of receiving the funds, but I haven't read anything particularly bad about it either.
Indiegogo is smaller, but literally any project of any type can be posted...so there's a lot of competition to get backing from the smaller userbase. Good that they pretty much allow backers to use any form of payment, but I also found some disconcerting mentions of Paypal and Indiegogo being dicks about the funds in a way that is completely counter to the whole concept of crowdfunding (ie, creators need the money in order to do the project and deliver the finished product to backers, but the funds wouldn't be released until the backers got their rewards).
For anybody who has used either Kickstarter or Indiegogo, what was your experiences? I am more familiar with Kickstarter (having backed a project in the past, and watched several projects I was interested in but couldn't contribute to), but a friend of mind suggested Indiegogo when I get ready to launch the campaign for my first run of art dolls. If I get some feedback on both platforms from people who have used them on either side it'll help me figure out which to ultimately use.
From what research I've done, Kickstarter has a significantly larger user base overall and has a higher success rate for funding, but has some limitations (though it looks like anybody, from anywhere, can back a project? It's just limited to the US, Canada and the UK for people starting a project? Not an issue in my case). I'm not sure I'm a fan of Amazon as the only means of receiving the funds, but I haven't read anything particularly bad about it either.
Indiegogo is smaller, but literally any project of any type can be posted...so there's a lot of competition to get backing from the smaller userbase. Good that they pretty much allow backers to use any form of payment, but I also found some disconcerting mentions of Paypal and Indiegogo being dicks about the funds in a way that is completely counter to the whole concept of crowdfunding (ie, creators need the money in order to do the project and deliver the finished product to backers, but the funds wouldn't be released until the backers got their rewards).
I went with kickstarter because of the larger user base, and it was worth it.
I am leaning toward Kickstarter mostly because of that larger user base. This will be my first time doing something like this and Kickstarter seems to be most likely to help it succeed. I'm largely an unknown, so being buried in a pile of "help me with my life!" sorts of fundraisers on Indiegogo isn't all that appealing.
It's obviously important to keep track of those pledges and have a strategy for returning them. Our funding wasn't successful so we had to do that. But it's still a viable strategy for getting around the Amazon limitation.