What is the difference between indiegogo and kickstarter

No Comments. Yes, I want the agency to help me succeed with my project. Get A Free Consultation. I hope you enjoyed reading the post! If you'd like to consult with me on starting a crowdfunding campaign, just book a call. Book A Call. Another major differentiator to research is the strength of the community for your particular project category on each platform. The most funded projects on Kickstarter span numerous categories: they include the Pebble smartwatch , card game Exploding Kittens , the Baubax travel jacket , and a reboot of Mystery Science Theater , to name a few.

Kickstarter supplies a breakdown of funding for each category on its website. More information about its success stories can be found here. Your crowdfunding to-do list will include everything from community-building to getting your product manufactured to processing fulfillment.

To get a sense of what it will take to run a campaign from launching your project to fulfillment, ask yourself the following questions:. Taking a grassroots approach to spreading the word about your campaign can work. Building up your social media presence, networking at events, and sending pre-launch messages through email marketing should all be a part of your marketing strategy.

Facebook Ads , targeting audiences who are likely to be interested in your product, can help drive more pledges to your campaign. You may want to consider hiring a marketing service to help you run ads.

BackerKit Marketing is a cost-effective ad option that puts your project in front of more than 1,, qualified backers that are interested in projects like yours. You have a lot of options open to you here, so finding the right partner can be a challenge.

As you start your search, consider scalability the manufacturer should be able to adjust your production run if you surpass your funding goal , location costs associated with domestic and international manufacturers can be drastically different , and whether or not the manufacturer has worked on projects like yours they may have existing molds that can be reused for your project at a reduced cost.

But you should do research into whether these features are robust enough for your needs. A pledge manager like BackerKit ensures that the data you collect during the survey is accurate and searchable. Will your project have a lot of individual items and options for backers? If so, consider a pledge manager. With BackerKit, you can itemize stock keeping units SKUs — the unique identifier assigned to each item you provide backers.

On top of all of this, you can use a pledge manager to raise additional funds through add-ons and pre-orders. Depending on the size of your project, how many item choices you have, and the number of people on your team, you may be able to handle shipping on your own.

People under age may also register a project on Kickstarter, but only under the guidance of an adult or a parent who can verify the identity and banking information, and assume responsibility from beginning to end.

Either way, Indiegogo is more open to discussion and allowing projects that are forbidden on Kickstarter. Indiegogo backtracked their international availability, and limited themselves to just 21 countries. Either way, the 2 platforms tie in their registration capabilities — or restrictions. One point each! The finished Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaign pages may look pretty similar, but the tools both platforms provide to make your vision a reality are vastly different.

Kickstarter has a very limited page builder. You only get 2 styles, Header and Paragraph. If you have basic web programming knowledge, you can play around with font and background colors and sizes, and you can make tables. And while both allow you to upload images and gifs, they do it slightly differently.

With Indiegogo, you can just double-click it and select a new one. However, it is much easier to upload gifs to Kickstarter. Indiegogo carries its image-candy into its perks — each perk can have an image. Kickstarter rewards are just a bland block of text — so think hard about presenting your rewards well on the campaign page itself! Likewise, Indiegogo also allows you more freedom when choosing the external images — Facebook share image, thumbnail, card image, etc. And finally, the options for updates follow the same pattern.

Kickstarter provides the same lacking interface as it does for the campaign page. While there are some pros and cons to having your own video hosting service, one thing is certain — YouTube is the second biggest search engine there is and provides great marketing opportunities to attract new users.

If you have an audience who will share your video and comment like crazy then even better. If not, it might be worth asking everyone you know to comment on your video, because Indiegogo will show off all those interactions on your crowdfunding page, and no comments is hardly an incentive for backers. This means that new potential backers will see every single pricing change in the past but not in the future, of course.

With these, you can create tailored perks to send to influencers, or via your direct sales channels. This works great if you want to incentivize your subscribers and provide them with additional limited benefits.

Indiegogo takes this one step further with add-ons. As the name suggests, these perks can be added to any other perk, and combined to give the backers more freedom in choosing the package they want.

This is perfect for creating super early bird deals that are only live for the initial 24 hours, for example. Kickstarter charges all backers at the end of the crowdfunding campaign if the goal is reached, so backers show a pledging intent rather than a pledge and are only charged when the campaign reaches its goal.

This means they can change their mind anytime right up until the end of the campaign and cancel the pledge. By comparison, Indiegogo charges the backers instantly. Learn how to create better rewards here. And for a great automation tool, that manages all your rewards on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, check out Perkfection. So, rather than wasting your time constantly monitoring and updating your rewards, Perkfection lets you setup your desired limits and automates your reward topups!

This differentiating feature — compared to typical e-commerce — is one of the things that brings superbackers back time and again. This connection is generally managed through updates, publicly displayed on the crowdfunding page, messages, and comments. Both platforms offer the same features, but Kickstarter has a few cards up its sleeve. With Kickstarter, you can save your updates as drafts, and return to them later.

And when you send out messages i. Or have the old, more affordable price listed? Oh no! With Indiegogo, on the other hand, emails are sent immediately. Both platforms allow you to run campaigns between 1 and 60 days long.

However, both platforms recommend keeping your campaign length below days. The longer it goes, the less urgency your backers feel. Another similarity they share is the ability to extend your campaign length. One benefit Indiegogo offers is the possibility of going to InDemand, and extending your campaign indefinitely. This statistic is one of ours calculated from official figures and estimates and suggests that Indiegogo gets an average of 12 million unique visitors a month.

By contrast, Kickstarter attracts between million around 2. Each platform has its own categorical strengths. And if you get a little popular, Kickstarter will start featuring you higher and higher in its search results, bringing you thousands of new potential superbackers looking for the next best thing. This means that on Kickstarter, your campaign has more opportunities to garner a bit of press coverage discover some tools that will ease your work during your Crowdfunding PR efforts.

Remarketing or Retargeting is a powerful tool to target your ads e. Facebook ads to visitors who have already visited your website. It works by inserting a pixel code into your webpage, where it detects all the visitors and creates an audience of people who visited the specified webpage.

You can then show them a separate ad campaign that answers their doubts, gives them additional information, and warms them up further to ensure a conversion. Point to Indiegogo! Back in , Kickstarter released a new Project Dashboard which gives campaigners access to a more powerful analytics system. It shows lots of important stats regarding the campaign. The biggest — most influential change — Kickstarter released is referrals.

Have you heard of them? Referrals are personalized links that let you define custom audiences and see where backers are coming from. Maybe they saw your Facebook Ad or a blog post. Either way, now you can differentiate them from those who just discovered your campaign page while browsing around Kickstarter.

Though Indiegogo announced its analytics dashboard much later, the long wait was compensated by a series of cool improvements. One of those updates was that since campaigners can integrate their Google Analytics accounts with their Indiegogo campaigns. It allows you to monitor traffic in real-time directly from Google Analytics. This definitely makes it easier to hit two birds with one stone. Any problem or question you might have while running your campaign, is presented in detail on both platforms.

You can easily get your question answered as a guest. This often leaves both backers and campaigners on their own in case of urgent questions. Kickstarter is happy just copy-pasting sections of their guidelines in their first few responses, without really analyzing your request as an individual. Really, they both need to wake up and start doing a better job at responding to their backers and creators.

Probably the biggest difference between the two platforms is their approach to money and when you get it. Kickstarter releases funds only after the campaign reaches its funding goal. Indiegogo provides you with an opportunity to choose between receiving funding as it comes in, or waiting to see if you hit your target.

However, Indiegogo also holds onto Reserve Funds in case they need to make refunds. As a campaigner, it is much less risky to go with flexible funding i. From a backers standpoint, fixed funding all or nothing is way more attractive and comes with a lot less risk, so bear that in mind when making your decision. But Indiegogo does offer both options, so it gets extra credit for that.

So what percentage does Indiegogo take now? The platform was using Paypal to process payments from backers. That was one of the reasons that prompted Indiegogo to start supporting Stripe for payment processing. Kickstarter understood the advantages of Stripe over Paypal earlier than Indiegogo. Stripe was far more accommodating. It actually does seem to grasp crowdfunding a bit better.

Indiegogo has also seemingly done well over the past few years. Keep in mind that there is also a list of prohibited items that are not allowed on the platform, including products that claim to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent an illness, energy food and drinks, alcoholic rewards, political fundraising and coupons.

By contrast, Indiegogo supports most any project or product ranging from local community projects to building an app. Similar to Kickstarter, Indiegogo also has a list of prohibited items, including vaporizers and pipes, weapons, alcoholic perks, and forms of lottery and gambling. There are thousands of impressive projects and products on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. For instance, Kickstarter products must feature a fully functional prototype. Indiegogo does not require this step; products may simply be conceptual with non-working prototypes.

Indiegogo has also extended its business model to compete against programs like Amazon Launchpad by offering a platform for products that are in line to be shipped.

In , Indiegogo went a step further and separated cause or charity campaigns from personal campaigns, forming a new platform called Generosity. Can you ship worldwide? How much funding do you need? How much are the platform fees? Kickstarter authorizes campaigns from only 22 countries. Indiegogo, similarly, supports project creators residing in 21 countries.