| Indiegogo was a client of mine, and I know a decent amount about the crowdfunding space. The way Kickstarter and Indiegogo do things has fuck-all to do with limiting innovation or stopping people from creating real products. Without violating my NDA, I can share the following: Both companies have the same set of goals: to provide a marketplace for innovative ideas. They have different ways of achieving this. Kickstarter does this by allowing select projects to be associated with its brand, which due to their selective nature, confers a perception of trustworthiness to potential funders. You know that there's very little chance of a Kickstarter project being a scam, and moreover, that the project you fund will probably make good on their promises. This is why they've stopped allowing product mockups -- to lower risk for funders. Indiegogo is more liberal, allowing your project to succeed or fail based on the strength of your network, rather than the additional trust conferred by the brand itself. While the guys over at 'gogo are really focused on preventing fraud, the very nature of 'every project can be funded' means that more projects will fail to ship. In my experience, Indiegogo is really great for projects where the goal is not some type of new product, but rather some sort of well-understood goal. Like saving a clinic for pregnant woman in San Francisco, or raising money for a child to get a lung transplant. Kickstarter is more about innovation -- Cards Against Humanity, the Pebble watch, etc. Same goal, different ways of getting there. Basically, Kickstarter is Apple, Indiegogo is Facebook. |