Why do you use Kickstarter? (KS VS IGG)

Here are my funding graphs too, in case anyone finds them useful/interesting:

DIGISPARK:

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DIGIX:

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DIGISPARK PRO:

4776add1c3df886aec9b0a8cf191b51954d0fb7a4371.PNG891×862

Thanks @digistump for the replies! Interesting to compare against @ryanteck’s data.

Yeah so it’s a matter of “If I want to make X at $y price point, I must sell Z” otherwise it doesn’t make sense to get started (at that price point). In a real way, crowdfunding is crowd scaling - or accelerating a project to a certain price point in a short period of time. Meaning it takes some money to prototype and polish, but once ready, crowdfunding becomes an accelerator so you can skip the scaling period of selling over time and building your market for the economics of scale to kick in

You basically hop over that initial period where people would pay a premium for early access. If you think back over any technology, it started at a premium price point, and came down over time. Cars, computers, cell phones, etc.

Basically what we used Tindie fundraisers for. Getting the scale

I think its slightly different being in the UK to how quick the payment is processed. Another annoying thing was the Surveys just to get an address. This was standard with IGG.

I’m pushed towards kickstarter just because its kickstarter but my IGG page is looking nicer.

Thanks for the invite as well Emile, always cool to talk with others about their crowdfunding experiences. We did our first two years ago, and finished a second one in October of this year.

With regards to crowdfunding vs just preorders, there is a lot of hype around crowdfunding sites like IGG and Kickstarter, which leads to people stumbling across your project without the need to directly market towards them. This is a huge benefit, just getting people to take a look at a project isn’t easy, and just do to the audience viewing the main crowdfunding sites on a daily basis.

There is also a psychological factor with timed crowdfunding campaigns that I don’t completely get, but it’s definitely real - for example our last KS campaign the last few days were bringing in around 5K per day. At the end of the campaign we put a big link on the KS page with a link to a preorder page. In about 30 days we’ve only received about 5K in new order. There is definitely something about being part of the “campaign” and getting in on it, that plays alot into whether someone will back it, vs just preorder a product.

With regards to KS vs IGG, flexible funding is a huge downside that hurts the credibility of IGG. Scams, frauds and inexperienced companies running campaigns is a major issue, and one that hurts everyone running campaigns. IGG has (at least IMHO), been worse at this than KS, so I immediately question the credibility of any IGG campaign more strictly than a KS campaign. That being said, both sites really need to do something about scammers and fraud campaigns from ruining their platforms. I understand why they have a completely hands off approach, however the diminishing credibility of their platforms will negatively impact all projects and their longterm future.

I could talk all day about crowdfunding :), but I have to call it quits right now. Look forward to everyone else’s comments.

Thanks!

Ken
TinyCircuits

I hear ya… we moved to the marketplace bc we can only really do 1 thing well. Competing with Kickstarter, Indiegogo, self-run campaigns, etc is a lot of competition.

However we are still the only marketplace for small-batch hardware

(testing that slogan over indie hardware…thoughts?)

Thanks Ken! Welcome to the party

Yep that nails it - for me it is also a belief that things should be priced at $X so how can I get Y orders. I tend to start a project with an idea and an idea of how low I might be able to push the price if I get enough orders. As we are able to scale as a company that also opens more doors that Kickstarter can’t always - like major capital equipment - which hopefully will allow us to drive even lower prices for even better projects.

I’ve always known the min was set to cover costs but I’ve never thought about it from the consumer’s stand point. It’s pretty interesting to think of it collectively driving down the price of a product for quicker access to the masses.

I think with the IGG vs KS its looking more like that KS is better for a customer and IGG is ok for customers but better than KS for the creator.

As for credibility its quite interesting. I have to say I don’t see the point in flexible funding. But you’re also forgetting that KS has potato salad and lots of rubbish due to them removing their review system.

Just another interesting data point, have we reached peak crowdfunding?

4778d89e9b0365c6c7da0d959a23fbb50c83d7cb007d.png1704×1006

As to why I use Kickstarter, I found it first and thought it was awesome. I just had to come up with something for that. At the time, I didn’t even know about IGG. Later I found IGG, but didn’t get a good vibe from the type of projects I was seeing. It compared a bit like Walmart vs Kmart (pardon me if we have international readers who don’t have experience with both stores). Since I had good luck with Kickstarter (eventually), I just kept going with Kickstarter. I didn’t do much to drive traffic to my projects and it just came in organically on its own, so I was pleased with that. For the record, I’ve run four Kickstarter projects and applied for five. One was unsuccessful and another was not approved. The other three were of small success, which worked for me as I did all of the work to make the rewards by hand. I didn’t have to outsource (except having PCBs made). The rest of the work was just me and my mad tweezers skills to place parts on boards and bake them.

I’m in the middle of reworking another future Kickstarter campaign today by taking that one project that was declined and making it better. I may have been knocked off my horse, but I’ll get up and try again after making some improvements.

-John

I use Kickstarter over Indiegogo because the average quality and reliability of products on Kickstarter is much higher, at least in my perception. Flexible funding campaigns and Indiegogo’s lax attitude towards probable scams puts me off, and I believe it does the same for potential funders.

I use crowdfunding full-stop because I can’t afford to invest the amount of money to do a minimum viable production run out of pocket. The Re:load Pro, for instance, would have cost me £20k out of pocket to make at qty 500, which I couldn’t afford. If I’d done a smaller run, my fixed costs would make up a larger proportion of total, and all the components would cost more, leading to a higher retail price that nobody would want to pay.

Ryan has pushed this a recently on the value Tindie Fundraisers filled as a simple way to get X preorders in place so you know your manufacturing costs are covered without needing to do a full Indiegogo/Kickstarter campaign. I’ve been crunching on that more and more.

Simple question - if we tweaked backorders to allow for simple preorder campaign, would you use it?

I don’t think we’d replace (or even try to compete with) Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but for smaller projects it was the perfect use-case and it did work well.

Few people mentioned that multiple units are forbidden on Kickstarter, what do you mean by that? I can’t find anything related in the Kickstarter rules. I would like to kick start something with multiple units of something as a reward.

I found that they changed it to you can only do a bulk of up to 10 items.

If its multiple unique items I don’t see why not.

I would appreciate a pre-order option. I’ve used Tindie for this a few times on my Kickstarter projects. It causes my days to ship on every day products to go sky high though. Usually, there are a few stragglers that come bumbling along right after the Kickstarter project closes and say something like: “I missed your project, can I still buy one” or “hey, can I buy a few extra for my friends”? Since I usually have about a 3-6 month time between closing and shipping, I would need something fairly lengthy to avoid getting on the bad side of Tindie. This would be a great tool to pair up with Kickstarter project owners who need a web shop after the project is closed.

interesting how the IGG mooltipass campaign wasn’t mentioned here… we still made $110k

I just started my Kickstarter Campaign for SMD soldering trays.

Just the thing I need

I also agree crowdfunding is a good way to launch a product but it takes practice so its always good to start with the smaller gadgets so when you finally create the next big thing you’ve already nailed it with how to do the best crowdfunding. You’v built your network and get great publicity.

As to why choose Kickstarter over Indigo… We chose Kickstarter because of the easy interface and other raspberry Pi accessories that were listed.

We launch on 14th November 2016 www.caphat.io