Most entrepreneurs who consider using crowdfunding to raise money for a new product choose between Kickstarter and Indiegogo, two of the most popular platforms out there. Both of them have pros and cons, which we covered in a recent blog post.
But, you can only learn so much by looking at the pricing and feature differences between the two platforms. Instead, we’re going to compare the top 100 campaigns on each of these platforms to uncover which platform is the best fit for your product.
We conducted a search looking into the most funded projects Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Here are some of the numbers we’ve discovered.
- Kickstarter has hosted 115 campaigns, which raised over a million dollars. All of the top 100 projects are in this category.
- On Indiegogo, 41 campaign raised $1 million plus (including Ubuntu Edge, which was a fixed funding campaign and didn’t reach its goal). The rest of the platform’s funding leaders have raised between $336,000 and $993,311.
- The most funded campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo raised $20,339 (in thousands) and $12,814 (in thousands).
You’ll be surprised to find out that there is an interesting trend, which suggests that Indiegogo is growing at a higher rate than Kickstarter. Below is a graph representing the number of campaigns in the top 100 group, by years.
Indiegogo has also had an impressive growth of the $1 million plus projects:
- 3 in 2012
- 6 in 2013
- 20 in 2014
- 12 in 2015 (7 months)
The area where Kickstarter has proven its leadership is in the average number of backers per project. For the top 100 campaigns, it is 24,928 people compared to 11,468 on Indiegogo. It is also worth mentioning that among the top 100 Kickstarter projects, 16 were launched by serial creators. The platform had a great blog post about the benefits of running serial campaigns.
Speaking of the most popular categories, on Indiegogo, 64 projects belong to the Technology category, followed by 7 projects in Film category and 5 projects in the Design and Web/Video categories. Kickstarter is dominated by Games (43 projects), Technology (31 project) and Design (15 project).
What surprised me the most is the geography of the project creators. Considering that Kickstarter has location limitations, its data cannot be considered reliable because many entrepreneurs from overseas use “agent” accounts or create a US based company just for the crowdfunding campaign.
The top countries of the Kickstarter creators are:
- USA (83 campaigns)
- United Kingdom (7 campaigns)
- Japan (3 campaigns).
Indiegogo is open to creators from everywhere in the world. This is why I was amazed to see that its top countries are:
- USA (79 campaigns)
- Canada (5 campaigns)
- United Kingdom (4 campaigns).
Final Thoughts
The numbers describing the most successful campaigns on both platforms are fascinating. Looking at them, many potential creators come to us with an idea of raising “just a half a million, to start with”.
But, you need to remember that these campaigns, while creating most of the buzz about crowdfunding, represent less than 1% of all projects. To join this category, you need to work hard for several months prior to launching the campaign and to have a strong team and efficient plan of actions.
Unfortunately, it also requires a significant budget for PR, marketing and community building BEFORE your campaign goes live, as well a lot of time and funds for promotion during the campaign. So, my best advice is to learn from their experience, but to set your expectations, according to your own resources and expertise.
About the Author
Elena Mikhaylova is a serial entrepreneur with twenty years of experience in diverse industries including crowdfunding, PR, and social media marketing. She is an internationally published author of hundreds of articles, several research papers and two books.
