043 Empowering You and the World through Crowdfunding – Indiegogo

Indiegogo.com is the 722nd most visited website in the America, and one of the most visited websites in the world.

Because Indiegogo gives possibility to peoples’ dreams.

There are over 300,000 campaigns on Indiegogo as we speak.  They send millions of dollars each week to over 100 countries.

People, like you, ask others to financially support their passion, their project, or even to help someone suffering from illness.

Recently 2,500 people raised money for Syrian refugees.

There are three types of projects on Indiegogo. Entrepreneurial Projects:

Like Flow Hive which raised over $12 million to fund a way to get honey directly from the bee-hive.

Or Sondors Bike raised over $6 million, for a new type of electric bike.

Maybe if you got funding you could get your project off the ground.  Imagine thousands of people from all over the world who wanted to help you?

That’s the idea the Slava Rubin and his cofounders had back in 2008 when they began INDIEGOGO.

Slava understands how difficult it is to raise money for a new idea. He was rejected by VCs 93 times.  And he wasn’t just somebody with an idea.  He graduated from Wharton and was working at Goldman Sachs, at the time.

Slava understands how difficult it can be because he was born in Belarus, a small country in the former Soviet Union. Other famous entrepreneurs from Belarus were the painter Marc Chagall, the TV pioneer David Sarnoff, actor Kirk Douglas, composer Irving Berlin, and media maven #Gary Vaynerchuk. 

So Slava Rubin’s vision was to fund creative and worthy projects all over the world, to allow everyone to ask and everyone to give.

A second category of projects at Indiegogo are Creative Projects – many films have been supported – for example: Miles Ahead about Miles Davis career

A third category of campaigns are Social Impact campaigns:

Like A campaign in German to make a better future for people in the Philippines!

and Code.Org providing an hour of coding to students across America, raised $5 million.

Then there is Generosity.com (formerly Indiegogo for Life) is free personal online fundraising. It is for personal emergencies and we host those completely free.  Which is for someone who wants to raise money for a friend’s recovery from a disease. Indiegogo does not charge for campaigns here.

Here are my questions and Slava’s answers!

What are the factors that make a great Indiegogo campaign?

Have a great pitch. If you use video as part of your campaign you will raise 114% more money.

Start fast: If you raise 25% of your goal within the first week, then it’s five times more likely that you will reach your target.

Keep telling your story: If you update your campaign at least every five days you will raise four times more money than if you update every 20 days or more.

Find an audience that cares: Reach out to your own network first, and then Indiegogo will help amplify your reach.

It looks like a no-brainer now, but how did you come up with Indiegogo.

++Fall of 2006, I was visiting my friend from college Eric Schell, who I had worked with after Wharton. He and Danae Ringelmann, our other co-founder, were at business school in California. Eric asked Dene to tell me about an idea she had, to come up with a mutual fund, the right to vote on the investment into artistic projects. I told her that you can’t reform the finance industry you can’t do it from inside the finance industry. She repeated her idea, and I said, well there’s this new online service called YouTube that has democratized video, and there’s a service called Prosper which is a peer to peer lending. I think what I hear you saying is ProspoTube, where you could use video and social media in a peer to peer manner to present an authentic story to say what they want to raise money for; and if people want to fund that idea then they can fund it. She said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.”  I said: “okay that’s not a finance company,