Indiegogo, perhaps, ranks second after Kickstarter in popularity among crowdfunding companies. The site Indiegogo appeared in 2008 in the US city of San Francisco and since then has been developing rapidly in all directions. Site leaders said they plan to expand their activities outside the US, and will help them in this $ 40 million of additional funding received in the form of sponsorship investments.
Despite the fact that the Kickstarter brand is much better recognized in the crowdfunding world, Indiegogo also has something to boast about. After all, it was with them that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, concluded a contract at one time to help find funding for aspiring American entrepreneurs. Such large financial market players as Metamorphic Ventures, ff Venture Capital, Insight Ventures, Khosla Ventures, MHS Capital and even the management of Zynga, which has created the so-called “fun farm” game so popular, have repeatedly invested in the company.
It is important to note that Indiegogo supports the Keep it All fundraising model, which means that even if the target amount of savings was not achieved, the organizer can keep the collected funds. Kickstarter, on the other hand, works exclusively on the All or Nothing model, when, if the goal is not reached, all the funds collected are returned to payers, and the organizer does not receive a penny.
Despite the fact that projects of enthusiasts from 190 different countries are presented at the site Indiegogo, the site itself until recently supported only English and American dollars as the main currency. The company added support for the euro and the pounds only at the end of 2012, and for the following 2013 profit growth was crazy 300%. The creators of the portal felt that it was time to introduce new languages and foreign currencies into circulation.
“We are just continuing to develop an open financing platform that we founded six years ago,” Slava Rubin, founder and president of Indiegogo, modestly stated in an interview with the Mashable portal.
Open funding sites are for many inventors and enthusiasts the only opportunity to realize their ideas and projects. Over the past years, thanks to Kickstarter, Pebble smart watches have been released, collecting about $ 10 million from users, as well as the Ouya game console, which scored 8.6 million. Indiegogo, in turn, allowed to implement such an amazing thing as, for example, a compact medical scanner , something resembling its prototype of the fantastic television series Star Trek. Also, thanks to Indiegogo, it became a real motion capture of the face with a regular webcam and even a gadget for reading the thoughts of animals.
Perhaps, one day, Indiegogo will appear in its Russian-speaking incarnation, allowing domestic enthusiasts to try their luck in raising funds to make their dreams come true, but for now we can only hope that Russian legislation will not prohibit such initiatives in our country. Very much Russian politicians like to ban everything lately, directly, as in that sad but very truthful joke: “2016. The deputy of the State Duma, having learned that he had nothing more to forbid, just kicked the dog. ”
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