Indiegogo

Indiegogo is an international crowdfunding site that was founded in 2008 by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell. The website is operated by San Francisco, California from.

History

In 2002, Danae Ringelmann was, who worked at the time as an analyst on Wall Street, co-producer of the reading of a play by Arthur Miller. Although the performance was well received by the audience, she brought financially very little, and Ringelmann looked for other ways to generate money. Originally planned Ringelmann a collaboration with independent filmmakers and theater producers, after a filmmaker she looked at JPMorgan and asked them to finance his film. 2006 Ringelmann went to the Haas School of Business to set up a business that fundraising should democratize. There she met Eric Schell and Slava Rubin, had made similar experiences in fundraising. Schell had worked for The House Theatre Company in Chicago, while Rubin charity events organized for the benefit of cancer research after her father had died of cancer when she was a child.

Ringelmann, Schell and Rubin developed their concept in 2007 under the name Project Keiyaku. The website was launched in January 2008 as Indiegogo at the Sundance Film Festival. The focus was on film financing. In June 2010, Indiegogo entered into a partnership with MTV New Media. In September 2011, the company is launching a funding campaign over 1.5 million dollars with the help of Metamorphic Ventures, ff Venture Capital, MHS Capital and co-founder of Zynga Steve Schoettler. In February 2012, initiated by President Barack Obama campaign Startup America entered into a partnership with Indiegogo to allow interested parties from the United States access to crowdfunding.

In June 2012, Indiegogo launched a " Series A round " with a volume of $ 15 million and with the help of Insight Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler.

In April 2014 Indiegogo opened an office in Berlin.

Crowdfunding

In an interview with Film Threat Rubin said that the site is to give anyone the opportunity to collect money for any idea. The site is designed so that users can create to a page for her campaign and a PayPal account, create a list of " perks " for different heights and donations to set up a social media -based public access. The user publicize their projects through Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms. In successful campaigns receives Indiegogo 4 % fee. The failure of a campaign, so the user can choose whether he returns the money to the donors free of charge or whether he still retains, in this case receives Indiegogo a fee of 9%. Unlike similar sites like kickstarter.com Indiegogo pay the money immediately after the receipt of funds from on the user's PayPal account. Moreover accepted Indiegogo payments credit card payments through their own portal. These funds shall be paid two weeks after the end of a campaign. According to The Wall Street Journal to October 2011, more than 45,000 campaigns have been launched, made ​​millions of dollars every month. Indiegogo is also used by existing projects in order to attract attention or to find new donors.

Examples of Indiegogo campaigns are "Lets Give Karen -The bus monitor- H Klein A Vacation! " With earnings of $ 703,833, " Stick -N- Find" with earnings of $ 931,870, "Bug ​​-A- Salt " with earnings of $ 577,636 and "Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum " with earnings of $ 1,300,000.

On July 24, 2013 Canonical Ltd. launched. a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to collect $ 32 million for the development of Ubuntu Edge, a smartphone with an Ubuntu operating system. This is so far the highest goal that was set for a crowdfunding campaign. With a profit of around $ 12 million on its goal was missed.