We received this question on Creator Club a couple of days ago:
I don’t know what book Mary's been reading… because had she read my new and revised Crowdfunding Secrets, she’d have found the answer there!
Nevertheless, thank you for the interesting question, Mary!
And although we already answered her on Creator Club, I thought, "Why should I limit the response to just her?"
This is a valuable question, one that a lot of new campaigners struggle with:
Indiegogo vs Kickstarter… what do you choose?
And I want to share the answer with you in today's email as well.
Today, crowdfunding is mostly synonymous with Kickstarter. It’s the biggest crowdfunding platform there is.
Kickstarter campaigns have already raised over $6.7 billion with over 222,000 successful projects and 21 million backers — of which over a third support multiple campaigns.
Initially focused exclusively on independent films (hence the name) Indiegogo grew beyond that to provide more opportunities to backers than Kickstarter.
And for this reason, Indiegogo is usually perceived as a less strict and more flexible platform.
There are a lot of factors that will sway you one way or another, not least what Mary pointed out above.
But I want to break down the 5 questions I ask that help me decide which platform to launch our partners’ campaigns on.
Is the product primarily a ‘design’-based product? Is there more emphasis on the way it looks than its functionality? The philosophy behind it?
Then Kickstarter is probably your safest bet!
If it’s more of a tech product, rough around the edges and intended to deliver better functionality than looks — Indiegogo is the place for you!
Mind you, that’s not black/white.
There are lots of successful tech products on Kickstarter, and some good design ones on Indiegogo… but it definitely helps to play to each platforms’ audience.
Kickstarter has its own video service built in. So your main campaign video is hosted on Kickstarter, and played using their native video player.
This works great with Kickstarter’s integrated design!
On the other hand, Indiegogo doesn’t host videos — it lets you share your YouTube videos to your campaign page.
If you’re bringing traffic to your campaign page from YouTube — or vice versa — having this integration can help your campaign’s performance!
Indiegogo has a LOT of reward functionality.
You can create secret perks — available only through an exclusive link — add-ons which backers can add to their initial order, and hide inactive rewards.
Kickstarter recently added the add-on functionality, and has time-restricted perks (so you can have a reward available only for the first 24 hours of your campaign)... but that’s pretty much it!
If you’re planning on releasing exclusive perks to your VIP subscribers, or to journalists and influencers for their communities, or want to build complex “prices go up” strategies, then Indiegogo is the one for you!
Whichever platform you choose, we created Perkfection to help you manage your rewards. It also automatically keeps them in that golden “Only 5 left” region that can increase conversions by up to 23%!
Kickstarter’s UI hasn’t changed since the 90s…
OK, it wasn’t around in the 90s, but you get my point!
There’s limited functionality for you to design your campaign page and rewards. It’s buggy — have you noticed all the messed up linebreaks on people’s campaigns, it does that automatically! — and it has a lot of elements that actually dissuade people from backing your campaign!
This is great if you don’t want to spend much energy thinking about your campaign page (or update) design, and just plug-and-play a look that works.
But if you want to let your creativity fly, Indiegogo offers a lot more options to create a unique-looking campaign page and update look.
And the last and probably most important point… where is the majority of your traffic going to be coming from?
Kickstarter has an amazingly tight community. And they love supporting their creators.
In fact, many Kickstarter campaigns see over 30% of their funds come from organic Kickstarter traffic…
I mean, the platform attracts nearly 16 million people every month — nearly 3 times more than Indiegogo — and if your campaign ends up in their promotions, they could all end up on your page!
The media also loves Kickstarter, so campaigns on this platform are usually easier to get covered by the top journalists.
But, and this is a big but… Indiegogo is much more advertising-friendly!
So, if you do have an advertising budget — which I 1,000% recommend — Indiegogo offers you more options in terms of retargeting and tracking your conversions from Facebook.
I hope that answered your questions, Mary.
And this is just one of 100s of questions (and answers) I scanned over today in the Creator Club message boards!
Creator Club is a community we built with some crowdfunding expert friends. It's perfect for crowdfunding (and ecommerce) creators like you, thanks to its:
In order to build a tight community, where everyone knows and helps each other, we found that opening access in windows worked best.
Like this, creators join at the same time, and work through the material together.
And now, I’m opening the doors to my newsletter subscribers once again… but only for 2 weeks!
So check it out here, and sign up fast:
We received this question on Creator Club a couple of days ago:
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