CrowdCrux reporter Brian Wong met with Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin on January 7, 2015, at the Consumer Electronics Show. In the below interview, Rubin speaks about personal crowdfunding, Indiegogo InDemand, partnerships, and 2015 looking forward.
With the launch of Indiegogo Life this year, how do you see that evolving and growing in 2015?
“Indiegogo has always been an open platform where anybody can raise money for any idea, and since the Karen Klein campaign a couple years ago, we’ve seen consistent growth in our personal cause business. Based on that, we thought it’d be great to create an experience especially for them, so we launched that in December.
We think it’s a great opportunity to keep supporting those customers and we’re proud of the fact that it’s totally free and there’s no Indiegogo fees for Indiegogo Life. “
Do you have any plans to expand on Indiegogo Life in any way in 2015?
“I mean we just launched in December, so we obviously have to learn as to what people like or what they want to see improved. So we’re constantly iterating to make it the best possible experience.”
How are you getting feedback from that?
“The feedback just comes through our different channels: through our happiness team, or we have different feedback emails, and sometimes we will just watch sessions of people using it, and they let us know how it’s going.”
In 2015, what type of crowdfunding do you see having the most growth?
“I think the entire industry is doing really well. We are focused here at CES with a lot of hardware, and hardware has been growing really rapidly for us – it’s probably one of our largest, if not the largest segment.
We’re really proud of the fact that just yesterday we announced InDemand, which is a brand new opportunity for entrepreneurs to be able to move from campaign to commerce. We piloted this for the last ten weeks, and it’s been going really well. We’ve even seen that some entrepreneurs have been able to raise more money InDemand than they have during their campaign. So now given all of the success off of the pilot, we’re now opening it up to the world starting yesterday, and it’s super exciting.
We also added in the hardware space a partnership with Amplifier today which really creates a more robust offering for the entrepreneur. Amplifier helps with creating, manufacturing, and inventory management of different perks, which can really help out in the fulfillment process.
So I see 2015 being really exciting with Indiegogo Life and also with all of the advancements with InDemand and Amplifier. Also we’re doing a lot of great stuff in creative with film and music so it’s pretty exciting.”
And InDemand is the one where it changes your campaign site into an ecommerce site right?
“Yeah you shift from campaign to commerce. Instead of having to walk away, you get to maintain all of your SEO, you get to maintain the promotion that Indiegogo does for you, you get to keep all of the communication and all of the feedback going, and it’s great to keep on making revenue.”
In 2015, how do you see equity and debt crowdfunding impacting any of what Indiegogo does and how they conduct business?
“We’ve always been very proud of wanting to move into equity crowdfunding. You know, we were part of the Jobs Act in April 2012. We were the only platform invited.
Actually, we had a customer on stage with President Obama – Samantha from Emmy’s Organics. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but at the end of last year the SEC said they’re going to delay the confirmation about Title III until at least October or November of 2015, so I think we need to really understand where that’s going first before we can take action.”
Do you have any extra features that you’re looking to implement in 2015 or any new markets you’re trying to get into?
“I mean we’ve been doing so much so recently just in the last 2 months. We already had our iPhone app, but we added Apple Pay, and then we added our Android app, and then we added Indiegogo Life, and now we added InDemand and also Amplifier. I mean that’s a lot of stuff, right? We’ll see what’s next, but right now we’ve got to keep on focusing on all of those things we just added, which are pretty exciting.”
What are your thoughts on companies using crowdfunding to launch their products vs entrepreneurs getting their foot in the door with crowdfunding?
“Well here at CES we have nearly 80 companies representing over 20 million dollars on the platform. It’s pretty astonishing, the growth of how quickly people are using Indiegogo. We’re also starting to see in 2014 we saw Marvell technologies, we saw Phillips, we saw Google, we saw Honda, these are large Fortune 500 companies that are starting to use Indiegogo.
I think in the next 5 years you’re going to see a lot more large companies using Indiegogo to be able to take advantage of not only the money raising because that’s not the only thing you get – but the market validation, the connection with the customers being able to test your marketing. There’s a lot of benefits beyond the money, and I do see it shifting from just entrepreneurs launching to entrepreneurs using it as part of their lifecycle and big companies figuring out how to use it for R&D and connecting with their audience.”
A lot of the people I’ve talked to at CES who have used Indiegogo are really, really big Indiegogo fans that would never think of doing Kickstarter. What are your plans on staying ahead as far as maintaining that audience and capturing new people?
“We launched this industry and created crowdfunding in January 2008 and we’re innovating very rapidly. Whether it’s adding like I said the Android app, whether it’s adding Apple Pay as the first partner on Day 1, you know, we added Stripe already months ago, and this is something that people talk about now for other companies. We did Indiegogo Life totally for free which is cutting edge.
We now did InDemand – cutting edge. We’re partnered with Amplifier. These are all things that customers like, but I think the reason there’s so much love for Indiegogo is because we treat everybody with a ton of love, and we really care about people and the way they get treated – not only themselves but also their funders, and we try to make sure everybody has a great experience.”
One last question: If you had one thing to say to a new entrepreneur, someone trying to get into the space of crowdfunding, some kind of advice, what would it be?
“My advice for an entrepreneur is ‘think big, start small, and iterate quickly.’”
About the Author
Brian is a DC-based writer who spends too much time at the office and too little time writing on the side. Despite being warned, he drinks the black office coffee every morning. Brian is interested in covering technology, gaming, food culture, and start-ups. You can reach him on twitter or at his email.
