I know several people who have had experience with both Kickstarter and Indigogo. Both sites are getting too big for their britches and more and more people are getting their projects lost in the bunch. Kickstarter has over 5000 other people running a project and to find them you have to wade through 400 plus pages.
Indigogo has much less but the way they show the sites is buggy. I had friends with projects that showed up beneath EXPIRED projects!
If you are going to use Kickstarter or Indigogo you must understand that they play favorites.
1) They bump projects to the top that are making money and bury other projects far below.
2) Your project won't even show up in the newest projects area until you have had a pledge. Talk about wanting to make money!
3) Kickstarter has a reputation for favoritism and it even started as an elitist site that only let "invited" people create projects. Even though they are open to all now they still strictly pick and choose which projects to accept. And they also have a STAFF RECOMMENDS part to the site. I checked on several of my friends projects and it seemed the same pet projects were always hogging the front page or getting interviews of facebook messages about them.
4) Kickstarter takes 5 percent. Indigogo takes 9 percent.
5) The user interface is messy. It is like staring at a Redbox machine and having to look at 400 pages to choose one.
6) There are 12 projects on each page. You better have a good picture if you hope to get noticed.
There are success stories, that is for sure. I just noticed a lot more failures.
7) Indigogo lets you keep whatever money you raise, Kickstarter won't hand over a dime if you fall one penny short of your
project goal.
8) Donors names are public. I myself wish they were anonymous.
All said, there have been people who have used them. And there are some great projects that have made money. Several of my friends made money with them. The last had a very hard time because the kickstarter site buries you and it was hard to find even when in the right area.
What would I change about them?
Expired projects should be removed and the staff recommends list SHOULD NOT be recommending projects that have already made their goals.
Both sites try to present some "indie" flair but a close check will show you that Kickstarter is run by Amazon.com and Indigo is run by Craigslist. Don't believe me? The Kickstarter IP is owned by Amazon and a google earth check of the address for Indigogo in San Francisco brings you right to same address for Craigslist. Big Business and for people looking to earn money they should expect to be just one of thousands of other users.
