Re:Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo – A Creator's Perspective
by danso on Friday November 09, 2018 @06:33PM
(#18418934)
This is interesting to read, because from the perspective of a backer, Indiegogo is much less concerned about its users being scammed, allowing for creators to pitch products with the barest of evidence that they're acting in good faith. They also have lower standards for what can be sold, and basically allows manufacturers to treat it as another distribution channel -- e.g. a storefront for things you can already find on Alibaba [0].
KS obviously has its own problematic campaigns -- if you aren't doing anything overtly scammy, they aren't going to try their hardest to look for reasons to stop you and lose their percentage cut of the campaign funs. But they do have standards when the bullshit is outright. Too many examples to list, but one of the most prominent and hilarious examples is the SKARP laser razor. It raised $4M on Kickstarter before KS was finally pressured to act on the obvious fake engineering and faked prototype [1]. SKARP immediately found a new home at Indiegogo [2], where it raised $500,000 and, 3 years later, has produced nothing while its creators have gone completely dark.
Indiegogo straight up has fewer guarantees about accountability, allowing creators to not only opt for "flexible funding" (they keep whatever money they get even if the campaign fails), but to continue collecting pre-orders after the end-date, and to change up the campaign rewards so that anyone looking at the page a year later won't know what was actually promised when the campaign first raised the bulk of its money. Waterseer, which was one of a batch of bullshit "water from thin air" products, had pitched a $130 violation-of-the-law-of-physics [3] when it raised $330K+ last year. Its homepage now pretends to sell a completely different product, with the creator pretending like the previous fake product never existed, and Indiegogo has apparently agreed to join in the coverup, allowing the creator to completely change the page and content with no mention to current or past readers that anything has changed. Here's the old page, and here's the current page [4], here's a copy from Internet Archive [5]. Indiegogo seems to have no qualms with creators wiping out the past -- KS at the very least forbids changes to the campaign page after the fundraising ends.
KS obviously has its own problematic campaigns -- if you aren't doing anything overtly scammy, they aren't going to try their hardest to look for reasons to stop you and lose their percentage cut of the campaign funs. But they do have standards when the bullshit is outright. Too many examples to list, but one of the most prominent and hilarious examples is the SKARP laser razor. It raised $4M on Kickstarter before KS was finally pressured to act on the obvious fake engineering and faked prototype [1]. SKARP immediately found a new home at Indiegogo [2], where it raised $500,000 and, 3 years later, has produced nothing while its creators have gone completely dark.
Indiegogo straight up has fewer guarantees about accountability, allowing creators to not only opt for "flexible funding" (they keep whatever money they get even if the campaign fails), but to continue collecting pre-orders after the end-date, and to change up the campaign rewards so that anyone looking at the page a year later won't know what was actually promised when the campaign first raised the bulk of its money. Waterseer, which was one of a batch of bullshit "water from thin air" products, had pitched a $130 violation-of-the-law-of-physics [3] when it raised $330K+ last year. Its homepage now pretends to sell a completely different product, with the creator pretending like the previous fake product never existed, and Indiegogo has apparently agreed to join in the coverup, allowing the creator to completely change the page and content with no mention to current or past readers that anything has changed. Here's the old page, and here's the current page [4], here's a copy from Internet Archive [5]. Indiegogo seems to have no qualms with creators wiping out the past -- KS at the very least forbids changes to the campaign page after the fundraising ends.
[0] https://entrepreneur.indiegogo.com/how-it-works/indiegogo-ch...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/13/kickstart...
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21s...
[3] https://www.popsci.com/this-device-may-pull-water-out-thin-a...
[4] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/waterseer
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20170328234943/https://www.indie...