(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to MashTalk,
the show where we catch up
with the most interesting people in tech.
I'm Mashable tech editor Pete Pachal.
So it's been ten years since Indiegogo launched,
changed crowdfunding forever.
I am super excited to introduce our guest.
Welcome to the show David Mandelbrot, CEO of Indiegogo.
How you doin'?
- I'm doing great, Pete.
Thanks a lot for having me.
- Cool, can I call you Dave?
- Yeah, Dave is great.
- Is Dave alright?
- Yeah, Dave is super.
- Nice, so you're the man in charge
of the whole operation there.
How did you get there?
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Where did you start getting involved in crowdfunding
and then how did that sort of transition
into Indiegogo and then the CEO gig.
- Yeah it's actually a nice story.
So earlier in my career I spent
about seven years at Yahoo,
starting in the late 1990s,
so I've been working in online tech for over 20 years now,
but the way I got involved in Indiegogo was,
I was at a start-up before Indiegogo call Tynt
and we had a board member who was also on the board
of Indiegogo and he was based here in New York,
we were based in San Francisco,
Indiegogo was based in San Francisco,
and every time he would come to one our board meetings,
his name was Lewis, I would say,
"Hey Lewis, what else are you doing
while you're here in San Francisco?"
And every time he would say,
"Oh, I just had a meeting over at Indiegogo.
That is the most amazing business.
So exciting what they're doing,
the way they're empowering entrepreneurs."
- So he's inspiring you?
- Every time.
- He was like damn I need to get on board with this!
- Every time he would come he would be like,
"Alright let's talk about Tynt, but let me
really tell you about what's going on at Indiegogo."
In the end Indiegogo got acquired and then,
I'm sorry, Tynt got acquired,
and then Lewis introduced me to the founder of Indiegogo
and things just progressed very rapidly from there.
- Well one of the founders,
wasn't there like three people?
I forget.
- Yeah there was three cofounders of Indiegogo,
one is named Slava Rubin.
He was at the time the CEO of Indiegogo.
We also had two other cofounders,
Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell.
Danae and Eric were both business students
at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley
when they had the original idea for Indiegogo.
- Are any of them still involved?
- Yes, actually both Slava and Danae
are both still very active members of the board
and Eric Schell is our head of product at Indiegogo,
overseeing all of our product development.
- So how did you get convinced?
You keep hearing about how what a great place this is
and they're just changing the world or whatever,
and you know what was it that sort of persuaded you
that this is the place you wanna just like,
"I got my stake in the ground here."
- Yeah you know it's interesting for me
it's always been about working with businesses
that are doing something that's transformative.
So when I went to Yahoo in the late 1990s
I was actually really excited about how
the internet was gonna change the way
we consumed our media.
- That was the place to be in the late 90s.
- It really was.
- Maybe not a few years later.
- It's sort of sad, I know.
I wonder if at some time people will remember
you know that there was a time when Yahoo
was sort of at the center of so much of what was happening.
- Oh, that's where you went.
- It really was.
- You know like I remember first getting online
in '94, '95 and stuff and wanted to go
to that Yahoo homepage with all the categories.
That how people surfed the web back then.
- Right that was the way you found
the best places to go and I'll say it was actually
a really interesting time because it was the place to be
and attracted an interesting and diverse group of people.
It was actually in that period,
it was an incredibly exciting place to be.
So many people that I worked with
at that time at Yahoo are now doing
such interesting things now.
Jeff Weiner who is the CEO of LinkedIn
was somebody I worked very closely with at Yahoo.
Rob Solomon who's the CEO of GoFundMe
was somebody I worked very closely with at Yahoo that,
Yahoo people have gone on to do
really interesting things.
- It sounds like you've got that taste
of like wanna be around innovation
and things changing at that time.
- Absolutely, and I think that industries
are most interesting at the moment
when they're going through real transformation
and what was so interesting to me about Indiegogo
that I could see from the very beginning
was the potential that Indiegogo had to really change
the way entrepreneurs launched their businesses.
The typical way that entrepreneurs
always launched their businesses,
I'm going to overly simplify 'cause of course
each entrepreneur's journey is different,
but the typical way that entrepreneurs
used to launch a business is they would get an idea,
maybe they would start working on it a little bit,
and then they would go out and raise financing
and then they would develop the product
and then they would hopefully get a distributor
and get that product into retail stores
and then at the very end of this long process
that could last years,
that product would show up in a store
and only at the very end of that process
would you find out if there was an actual market
for that product, if there were gonna be customers.
- Right.
- What was so interesting about Indiegogo
was the way it was radically transforming that model.
The way an entrepreneur could determine
extremely early in the life cycle
of their product or their business,
whether there was gonna be a market for that product
and I could see early on what we've now come
to see over the last ten years,
which is it that it would have a really
transformational impact on the way entrepreneurs
brought their products to market.
- Yeah, definitely.
There's been a lot of products that have been funded
through crowdfunding and then
become these massive success stories.
Not just on the platform,
but they go on to like get venture capital
and maybe even get acquired or their own company,
you see that time and again,
(laughs)
not every single thing is that's the story
for everything but it's definitely very possible
and I guess if you're a VC or a bigger company
you can sort of have that confidence
when you're thinking about what's the next thing
and when you look at these projects
and like oh okay this thing made 400% above its goal,
that's a good sign.
- Absolutely, you know what's interesting
is almost every party that's sort of
part of the entrepreneurs journey,
every third party that the entrepreneurs engaging with
whether it's an investor, a distributor of that product,
if they're a product entrepreneur,
the retailer, they're all basically making a bet
essentially on whether there's gonna be a market
for that product in the end.
You know the VC is anticipating
there will be a big market for this device
and the distributor is thinking a lot of retailers
will be interested in this device.
The reason that crowdfunding and Indiegogo
in particular is so transformative
is it makes that part of the analysis so much easier.
So what's exciting about Indiegogo
is in part that so many entrepreneurs on Indiegogo
have been able to go on
and raise venture capital financing.
Entrepreneurs on Indiegogo have raised
over a billion dollars in venture capital financing
after their Indiegogo campaigns.
- Nice.
- But what's also exciting is the way the entrepreneurs
have a much easier time getting their products
into Target stores,
into Amazon, into Brookstone,
into many retailers that otherwise
might have had more questions about those products.
They can look at the success on Indiegogo,
say I can see that there's a market for that product,
I wanna carry it in my store.
- Nice, it's definitely from everything you've said,
it's very clear how like crowdfunding
changed a lot in the entrepreneur process
particularly with products,
but how do you think crowdfunding itself has changed
since it started getting very popular
about ten years ago?
I know at the beginning
there was no equity type of crowdfunding,
still is usually very perk based,
it's like the PBS or NPR model
where you get this level and you get the bag,
and at this level you get the thing and whatever,
but now I know recently,
I think it was a couple of years ago,
that certain laws changed or security laws
and you can do equity crowdfunding?
- Yeah, actually.
- So that seems to be a big change in what's happened,
but how else has crowdfunding evolved?
What are the main ways crowdfunding has evolved
over the past ten years?
- Yeah it's a really good question.
There's a few ways it's evolved.
For one thing the landscape has changed
a lot over the last ten years,
so when Indiegogo launched
a little bit over ten years ago,
Indiegogo was actually the first crowdfunding platform.
There was no Kickstarter then,
there was no GoFundMe then,
if you count Patreon there was no Patreon at that time.
Indiegogo was the pioneer of crowdfunding
and over time other companies
started to focus on crowdfunding.
Kickstarter jumped in I think about a year later.
GoFundMe a few years after that.
The main evolution in the landscape
has been that as crowdfunding has evolved,
different companies have developed
their own individual areas of focus.
So for example GoFundMe now is exclusively focused
on personal causes and non-profit fundraising,
and in fact Indiegogo earlier this year,
we actually sold off the portion of our business
that was focused on non-profit
and personal cause fundraising to a company
called YouCaring that was subsequently acquired
by GoFundMe so that's part of GoFundMe's business now.
Kickstarter has really maintained a focus
on what they call creators.
So those are filmmakers, musicians,
the fastest growing category actually on Kickstarter
over the last few years has been
tabletop game developers.
- Oh really?
Like these kind of like handheld things?
- No not handheld things,
like actual tabletop games, like Monopoly.
- Yeah, wow.
- And then Indiegogo in particular
over the last three years has really developed
a focus on product entrepreneurs
and helping those product entrepreneurs identify
if there's a market for their product,
and really take their idea all the way
from an idea in their head all the way to
a manufactured product that's getting
into the hands of their backers.
- Nice, so you mentioned Kickstarter
and I feel like you know you guys were first,
and then they came in and then they kind of swooped up
all the attention and the glory in a lot of ways.
Why did that happen?
Is that just my perception?
But I did look at some stats before this
and it seems like collectively they raised more money,
I think it was something like 2.8 billion
to I think Indiegogo's about a billion.
- Yeah we've actually raised now
over 1.6 billion dollars in our history.
- Gotcha, but why was there this perception
for a long time that Kickstarter was the place to be.
- Yeah, it's a really good question.
You know things changed a lot around,
I believe it was 2012.
2011 or 2012 was when the people really started
to notice Kickstarter and the main thing
that transformed things was that Kickstarter
had a single campaign on Kickstarter
that was very successful which was a campaign
for this product called the Pebble Watch.
- Oh yeah.
- You might remember that,
and at that time that became the most successful
crowdfunding campaign of all time as of 2011 or 2012.
It raised over 10 million dollars
and so what happened was Kickstarter sort of
opened up people's eyes to the potential
of crowdfunding and for a while their name
was somewhat synonymous with crowdfunding.
- So did they just get lucky then?
Basically they got that one super success story
because I think in addition to the perception
of Kickstarter sort of being the bigger brother here,
that there was a perception that like Kickstarter,
the standards are different so that
you know there's a certain bar that needed
to be met there that maybe didn't exist on Indiegogo
and maybe the perception that it's Indiegogo,
anything goes there.
Is that wrong?
Or is that actually a strength perhaps of Indiegogo,
that it's like maybe your dreams are a little more harder
to see but you're welcome here still.
I mean what is the correct way to interpret this?
- Yeah that's a really good question.
Yes for a long time and even now in some ways,
Kickstarter has had and continues to have
a very different approach to how
they accept entrepreneurs onto the platform.
For, you know, Indiegogo has not only tried to be as open
as possible a platform but a also very flexible platform.
So on Kickstarter there's basically one way
to offer crowdfunding campaign.
You need to provide your product to Kickstarter.
Kickstarter actually evaluates
who can be on their platform,
and who can't be on their platform.
To Indiegogo, we take a different approach
in part because when the company was founded
the goal was to essentially eliminate the gatekeepers
so rather than, our idea was why should the VCs
be the only people to determine
what products get funded and what products don't,
and it's our feeling that if we evaluated
each product for whether it was acceptable or not
to our platform we would just
be inserting ourselves as the gatekeeper,
and with Kickstarter doing that,
in our mind they're inserting themselves
as the gatekeeper rather than letting the public
essentially decide what products get funded.
So Indiegogo has always been a open platform
where any entrepreneur can actually
run a campaign on Indiegogo.
What we have changed in the last couple years though
to make the opportunities much more clear to backers
is that we now require entrepreneurs
to be very direct about which stage
they're in, in development.
So if you just have a concept,
but you haven't actually developed
a working prototype of your product yet,
you need to disclose that to backers on Indiegogo.
If you have a prototype,
we actually verify that you have a working prototype.
If you say that you're in production
we actually ask for a production version
of the product so that we can validate it.
So we're actually a more open platform
but also with a set of rules
to make sure that backers that back campaigns
know what they're in for.
- So yeah, there's more nuance to it, I guess,
but it's more democratic in that simple way
like what you said about like
oh if we simply wait listed every single thing,
then we're throwing our own biases in there
and why not just let the people decide.
- Absolutely and what's wonderful about Indiegogo
is that because we have this different set of rules
it enables products that might not have gotten
the opportunity to launch on other platforms
or be successful on other platforms to be successful.
One example that comes to mind
was a campaign that ran I believe about three years ago
on Indiegogo was for a product called the Flow Hive,
and the Flow Hive was a new type of beehive actually
and apparently there had been no real innovations
in beekeeping or beehive development
in the last 50 years.
- Don't tell Apple.
- (laughs) And a father and son team
from Australia came up with an idea
for a better beehive.
They put in on Indiegogo,
they needed $50,000 to be able
to set up a manufacturing facility in Australia
to be able to manufacture the first beehives.
Now at that point when they hadn't quite gotten
to real manufacturing of the product yet,
they might've had a hard time being able to launch
on Kickstarter, they launched on Indiegogo.
They raised, within two months,
they raised 13 million dollars to make beehives
from an evolving and emerging beekeeping community
all over the world,
and at Indiegogo we've got thousands of stories like that,
of entrepreneurs who you might never have thought
would have been successful but the public
actually got this democratic opportunity
to identify what they were really interested in
and directly communicate that to entrepreneurs.
- 13 million, wow that's a market I didn't know was there.
That's gotta be an impressive size for beekeeping.
So Dave, I gotta ask you.
How do you guys make money?
- (laughs) I'm glad you're asking!
You know we actually just announced this morning,
we just had our first profitable quarter in Q3.
- Nice.
- Indiegogo makes money in a few different ways.
The first thing, and the primary way
that we make money is that we get fees
that are a percentage of the amount of funds
raised on our platform.
So our standard fee is a 5% fee,
and so 5% of whatever the entrepreneur is able
to raise on Indiegogo goes to Indiegogo.
The entrepreneurs on Indiegogo,
and we really like that fee structure
because it means that we have a shared interest
in the success of those entrepreneurs on Indiegogo.
If they're not successful on our platform
then they don't need to pay us
and if they're extraordinarily successful
on our platform then they pay us more.
So that's the primary revenue stream.
- So if it's 5%, and you've raised over the years
1.6 billion, what is that, 800 million?
- That's 80 million.
But that's just the primary way.
In addition, as more entrepreneurs are using Indiegogo
as a platform to go direct to consumers,
which is really the big movement
that Indiegogo is a part of.
Now entrepreneurs are bypassing traditional retail,
traditional distribution mechanism
and they're selling their products
directly to consumers online and as we do that,
there are more and more services
that those entrepreneurs need.
If they're marketing their product on Indiegogo,
the often need help with marketing.
Critical to a successful campaign on Indiegogo
is having a really good video that demonstrates
the benefits of that product.
Indiegogo now offers solutions to entrepreneurs
to develop a really good video.
- Is that like you have an in-house staff
of editors, shooters?
- Yes it's a combination of both expertise
in house and in outside video...
- Tara's ears there are perking up.
- It's actually really an exiting time.
It used to be that if you were a product entrepreneur
and you wanted to raise interest in your product,
you know say 15, 20 years ago,
the only way to do it was with brand marketing
and by creating a television commercial.
Most of the entrepreneurs on Indiegogo now
are able to produce a video
for somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000
or in a lot of cases less.
The most most successful campaigns,
those videos are watched by millions of people.
- Oh, they're just fun to watch.
I feel like the crowdfunding formula
is almost like the reality show thing plus cool gadgets.
I mean it's like this sort of addictive format
you can watch them one after another for hours.
- They actually really are fun to watch,
and they're fun to watch because it's fun to see
the most innovative products that are coming to life,
it's also really exciting to see
the entrepreneurs behind those products.
When we're marketed to during the Super Bowl,
there's paid models and actors
that are demonstrating that product,
there's something actually really rewarding about getting
to see an entrepreneur actually explain this product
that they have dreamed of
and how they are trying to bring that product to life.
You know part of why Flow Hive was so successful
is that the backers on Indiegogo just fell in love
with the founder and wanted the founder
and his dad to be successful with this campaign.
Earlier this year we had the most successful campaign
on Indiegogo on any platform
over the last two years
for an electric bicycle called Mate X
and the founder of that company is a female entrepreneur.
She is a mom with three kids
and backers get excited about supporting
an entrepreneur like that.
So yes, there's something about the videos
that's just fun to watch,
in part because it creates a better connection
between the backers of those products
and the entrepreneurs that are building those products
and providing them to users.
- Well congrats on your first
profitable quarter, by the way.
- Thank you.
- So I understand as going forward,
first of all Indiegogo is international,
in a lot of countries.
How many countries now?
- About 230 countries.
People back projects and offer products
from over 230 countries and I'll actually tell you
one of the most exciting things about Indiegogo
is that last quarter 48% of all of the transactions
on Indiegogo were cross border.
- Oh wow.
- So what we've created is a true world wide marketplace
for entrepreneurs to be able to reach new customers
by going direct to consumer.
- Why have you had so much success
in terms of being international so quickly?
I think you've been in a lot of countries
for a while now but it feels like that's sort of
a weird tough nut to crack for a lot of services and stuff,
but do you use a middleman?
Is there a secret to doing that?
- It's a really good question.
You know you asked earlier about how
the crowdfunding industry is changed
over the last ten years.
As we at Indiegogo got really focused
on product entrepreneurs,
people are recruiting new products
and wanted to learn if there was market
for those products and go direct to consumers
with those products.
Our worldwide strategy became much more clear,
the most clear example is China actually,
needless to say, not only is a lot
of product manufacturing happening in China
but now there's been manufacturing in China for decades.
There's a lot of great product innovations
that are coming out of China.
- I bet you could go down to the Shenzhen market,
grab all the components you need
and if you're an inventor, you know, bam,
see if something works
and then all you need is Indiegogo to help you out.
- It's absolutely true,
and so what we did, part of why it's worldwide
is that Indiegogo really invested in
making Indiegogo a worldwide platform.
In the beginning when I first joined Indiegogo
a little over five years,
we used four different payment processors,
in part to ensure that we could support
transaction processing in those 230 countries.
We've since been able to streamline it somewhat,
but we have a real commitment
to being a worldwide platform from the beginning
and then in markets like in China,
where there's a strong base of entrepreneurs,
we've actually hired people that are dedicated
to that Chinese market and so you mentioned Shenzhen,
we have dedicated people working for Indiegogo,
there's a little bit of a complicated legal structure
to be able to do this in China,
but that are based in Shenzhen
to create a streamline way for China-based entrepreneurs
to be able to reach a US market with their products.
- Well it's huge.
I think that could open up a lot of stuff for you guys,
but the thing is that we've seen this
before a little bit, not exactly this,
but I know Amazon has done a lot in the last couple years
to sort of open up its market place
to international sellers, a lot of them out of Asia,
and they've received a lot of backlash for it
because some of these are knockoffs of American
or just other products and they're either not as good,
or even if they are as good,
they're really undercutting the innovation happening here
because of the rapid commoditization I guess
of some of this stuff.
Do you see a similar backlash possibly on your side
and are you doing anything to guard against that?
- Yeah that's a great question also, Pete.
We did see that.
One of the things that's still so exciting
about working with a relatively early stage company
is that we can be really flexible,
so we did see that.
We started to see a lot of knockoffs on Indiegogo,
we also started seeing a lot of distributors
or resellers that were using Indiegogo
as a way to just distribute products...
- I feel like this is your fake news problem.
It's nice to be democratic and be hands off
but at the same time you have to take
some kind of active roll in ensuring some quality control.
- Absolutely, and yes we're democratic
but part of being democratic
is also being hands on to ensure
that we don't have fake news
so it's a policy on Indiegogo that you need
to be the original entrepreneur of the product
and we have a dedicated trust and safety team
that reviews the successful projects on Indiegogo
and ensures that is the actual entrepreneur
that is running that campaign.
We don't allow distributors or resellers on Indiegogo
and of course if we get notice of copyright violation
or patent infringement we're fully compliant
with the DMCA rules and in a lot of cases
we'll take campaigns down if there's any type
of IP infringement happening on our platform.
So we did start to see that,
we responded very quickly and there shouldn't be
any products on Indiegogo that are not products
that are being offered by the original entrepreneur
behind that project.
- So this may be old news,
but I do remember there was a big story,
it was probably like five years ago now
but it was like I remember the Kickstarter guys came out
and basically wrote a blog that went pretty viral,
like this isn't a store.
I think they were getting a lot of bad press
for various things not really
living up to snuff at the time,
but I feel like obviously it is a store,
in your case in some ways
with the marketplace and direct to consumer.
Was that an overreaction do you think?
Has it gone into more this is a store with caveats
or how should people look at these today in 2018
and going to a crowdfunding thing,
what is my expectation or do I just have to be
really sophisticated about it?
- Yeah that's a really good question.
So it's interesting, we've done plenty of research
with the backers of projects on Indiegogo
and while people have many reasons
for backing a campaign,
maybe they know the entrepreneur,
maybe they wanna make sure that product gets built,
what we learned from engaging directly with our backers
is that the primary reason that backers back campaigns
is because they want to get the product.
That's why they're doing it.
So when you're in a situation
like Kickstarter had a few years ago
where they had this project called the Coolest Cooler...
- Oh yeah, infamous.
- Yeah it raised 13 million dollars
and even with the 13 million dollars
was not able to deliver that product to the backers.
That's a bad experience for users.
You know frankly Kickstarter can say
we're not a store but when people
spend 13 million dollars on a product
that they don't get, they're going to be very unhappy,
regardless of what you say.
So what Indiegogo, you know, recognizing that this
is a risk with entrepreneurs,
we started working closely with companies
that could help the entrepreneurs
that the most successful entrepreneurs
on Indiegogo manufacture and ship those products,
so a lot of entrepreneurs went into trouble because,
and I think this was the case for Coolest Cooler,
because they haven't really thought through
all of the components that they need for that product
or how much manufacturing is gonna cost,
so on components, Indiegogo has formed
a partnership with Arrow Electronics,
one of the largest component distributors in this country.
Arrow, for free, will actually review your bill of materials
if you're an entrepreneur on Indiegogo
and make sure that you thought through
every single component that you need
to manufacture that product.
They will make sure that those components
are not close to the end of life,
requiring you to re-engineer the product.
We formed partnership,
if you're a successful entrepreneur on Indiegogo
and say you sell 10,000 of your product
or you get 10,000 backers for your project,
you've gotta figure out how to ship to 10,000 backers,
so we formed a partnership with Ingram Micro
to make sure that entrepreneurs have a solution
for doing the logistics of literally shipping
10,000 products.
- That's a lot of stamps.
- (laughs) It is a lot of stamps!
And as a result now backers are much more likely
to get their product than ever before
because we know that for backers
to be truly thrilled with the experience that they have
on Indiegogo they need to get their products,
regardless of what we say.
So whether they receive the products
that'll make them most happy
and I'll add on that,
in our marketplace we do guarantee
fulfillment of the product,
and of course the customer satisfaction level
is much higher in our marketplace
than it is for overall crowdfunding.
- 'Cause that's stuff that's already been created
and gone through these difficult humps I guess.
- Exactly, for now those are projects
that are further along
and where we can have much higher confidence
that the backer will ultimately get the product.
- So one of the things that I think
has changed a lot in crowdfunding,
it's not that new anymore,
but is the established companies coming in
and like oh this is actually a great place
to sort of try out new,
like part of their development process,
I'm thinking specifically most recent thing
I can think of is Bose with their sleep buds...
- Yes.
- Had a campaign, I think it was early this year
or late last year.
- Late last year.
- 'Cause I went to their launch event,
I think was summer or the spring,
and they told me all about the Indiegogo experience
and it was really interesting
because it always a very different product for them,
they're usually speakers and headphones and stuff,
and this is like a sleep masking thing
and it was a different experience
and they were like well we could develop this
on our own and just put it out there
and hope for the best,
but given the nature of the product
which wasn't a giant thing,
it was a very personal product too,
it's like they concluded we should do crowdfunding
and they partnered with you guys
and I tried it out, it's a nice product,
but that whole idea seems to have really caught on
and has it exploded lately or has it held steady?
- It has, yeah, within Indiegogo we refer to this
as our enterprise business
but we're really talking about really well established
companies that are using Indiegogo
as a platform for product validation.
My favorite example most recently,
just last quarter was Gillette.
So Gillette as I'm sure most people know,
you know Gillette of course is in a competitive business
in the razor business,
and particular with some recent
direct to consumer brands that have come along,
and Gillette is of course always innovating with razors
and Gillette developed a new heated razor,
and the old model would have been to get
all the way through development
and then do a big marketing campaign
for their new razor.
What Gillette is realizing,
which is what most great direct to consumer brands
now are doing that it'd be worthwhile
to get out to consumers earlier.
So Gillette actually launched
their heated razor on Indiegogo,
they launched a project actually for their heated razor
and they're doing it in part to get their first customers,
but of course Gillette has a very
robust distribution system,
drug stores and all kinds of stores all over the world.
What the enterprises are really using Indiegogo
for is similar to what Bose,
like Bose launched a campaign on Indiegogo,
is to connect with consumers early,
and get their feed back and figure out
if the price point works for consumers,
to figure out which features
are most important to consumers,
to get consumers to test that product.
That Bose campaign, Bose did something pretty amazing.
Bose actually sent an early prototype
to all of the backers of that campaign
that bought the headphones to get feedback.
They collected that feedback
and then after they got that feedback
and they made some modifications to the headphones,
they then sent all the backers
the actual commercial version of those headphones.
- Right, that was pretty sweet.
Like a big company can sort of afford to do that too.
I don't know if every start-up
can model their campaigns after that, but...
- Exactly, but for them it was a great way
to connect with customers.
- Oh, and establish so much goodwill.
- Absolutely, and if I'm Bose,
or Whirlpool has run two campaigns on Indiegogo,
I love the Whirlpool example.
Whirlpool, known for their washers and dryers,
launched a kitchen appliance
that was a composting machine on Indiegogo actually,
and they did it primarily so they could connect
with early adopters and get feedback on the product
and I asked when I was in meetings with Whirlpool,
I asked them how would you connect directly
with consumers before Indiegogo,
what would you do if you couldn't do it on Indiegogo?
If they're selling products through Best Buy,
Best Buy doesn't tell them who the customers are.
If they're selling, for any of the other enterprises
that are selling through Amazon or Walmart,
they hold that information very close to the vest.
So what Whirlpool told me is that the primary,
before Indiegogo, the primary way
that they would find out who their actual customers were,
was from people sending back those warranty cards.
- We're not doing it online now.
It's all about data.
- It is, so the enterprises on Indiegogo,
they not only get their first few thousand customers
but those first few thousand customers
become their focus group and the benefit to backers
is that they get to have a voice in those products
that are created by those great companies.
- I have to ask though,
I know with this idea there's been a bit of a backlash
from sort of the true Indies,
like oh wow this is supposed to be,
like you're letting these guys in.
This is supposed to be our place for start-ups
and people just starting out
and how do we stand out when there's
these bigger fish swimming in our pool.
Now I remember, I think this was Kickstarter,
but it was again years ago,
but when the big films or stars started asking,
like Veronica Mars and there was Zach Braff
had this thing, I think it was Zach Braff
that got the most heat for it,
but they're like hey this is,
get out of here established people,
this is not your pool.
What has been the reaction on Indiegogo
to some of this enterprise stuff?
- You know honestly, directly we've heard very little
negative backlash from the entrepreneurs
on our platform and you know we've had
over 800,000 people that have raised money
for different things on Indiegogo
and we've had almost no negative feedback directly,
and the main reason is that the entrepreneurs
recognize that these established brands
bring a lot of new users to the platform
and while they may come to see
that big enterprise campaign from Bose
or Whirlpool or General Electric or Lego
or some of the other big brands
that have used Indiegogo,
while they're there they tend to browse around.
- I was looking at some stats.
There's something like 22% of your users
back more than one campaigns?
- Absolutely and if they back one of these
large enterprise campaigns then they often elect
to join our email lists
and they're getting notified regularly
of the latest and greatest innovations on Indiegogo.
So what those large enterprises do actually
is they really help build the community
of early adopters on Indiegogo
that then get turned on to innovative projects
from small and large entrepreneurs alike.
- Nice.
So what's next for you guys?
- So a lot of things.
You know the big things that are coming up for us
is continuing our worldwide expansion.
We've been thrilled to see the tremendous growth
that we've had in China
and we'll continue to explore
how we enable entrepreneurs from all over the world
to reach audiences elsewhere in the world.
We're also continuing to implement to form
new partnerships to help entrepreneurs
be more successful in manufacturing their products
and shipping those products
so you'll see over the next year more announcements
of partnerships to enable entrepreneurs
once they've raised a lot of money to be more successful.
You'll also see us rolling out even more services
to make the whole crowdfunding experience
easier for entrepreneurs.
You know the entrepreneurs on Indiegogo
are often great at having innovative ideas for products,
at developing products,
they may not have great experience
in running a digital marketing campaign
to make that project successful
and building a large community,
that may not be their strength,
so you'll see us doing more there,
and you'll start to see us
in the beginning of next year
exploring more and more with guaranteed shipment
of products as we have more established
entrepreneurs using Indiegogo,
they're less reliant on the funds
that they raised in their campaigns
to be able to ship their products
and they're able to actually guarantee that
that product will ship.
For example Lego launched their first toy
aimed at adults on Indiegogo a couple months ago
and of course Lego...
- Aimed.
- What's that?
- (laughs) There's a lot of adults
I know that are into Lego.
I'm asking for a friend.
- The reason I say that is that I've learned
from experience not to say that Lego
is launching their first adult toy on Indiegogo.
- That would be really off brand for them.
- Exactly and at Indiegogo we're actually
in awe of Lego the way that they inspire innovation
and creativity from young people.
There's so many entrepreneurs on Indiegogo
that have told us about how they started developing things
actually playing with Legos as children,
but Lego knows that they're gonna ship their product.
Gillette knows that they're gonna ship their product.
Indiegogo's having a lot
of repeat entrepreneurs on our platform.
Mate X, which I mentioned earlier,
which was the most successful campaign on Indiegogo,
this was their second campaign on Indiegogo.
They know how to manufacture an electric bike,
and while we didn't do it for this campaign,
they're in a position to guarantee that
that product will ultimately ship.
So you'll see more guaranteed shipping
as a way to build back our confidence in our platform
and ensure that we have a really happy community.
- Sounds great!
So if you don't mind I would love to transition
into some fun time questions.
- Fun time!
Okay, let's do it.
- Fun questions, okay.
So it's a bit of game.
- Uh oh.
- Now we have five questions
and the first three are part of a guessing game
and the other two are,
well they're are kind of a guessing game.
- Uh oh, okay.
- But the first three are you have to guess
whether this project is funded or not funded.
These are all Indiegogo campaigns.
- Oh really?
Okay.
I've got a little bit over 800,000 to think through.
- I know you have to scan real quick.
- Okay, let's do it.
- Okay so the first one...
- Sorry just one clarifying question,
is it whether the campaign existed
or whether it got funded?
- Whether it got funded.
The first three are all real campaigns.
Did they reach their funding goal or not.
- Okay.
- Alright, the first one is the Candwich.
'A pocket sandwich in a self-heating can.'
- I'm guessing yes it reached its funding goal.
- It did, you got the first one.
- Yes, okay.
- It was funded.
Alright second one, Bug-A-Salt.
'A miniaturized shotgun effect is generated
through this ingenious design for killing flies
and other pesky insects using only ordinary table salt.'
Was that funded or not funded?
- Yes, funded.
- Oh wow, the great confidence.
And it was, it was in fact funded,
so two out of three so far.
- Okay.
First of all isn't this a testament
to the Indiegogo platform?
That these amazingly unique projects
could actually get fully funded.
- Especially the amazingly unique names.
- Imagine the Bug-A-Salt people showing up
at Andreessen Horowitz and trying to get funding
for the Bug-A-Salt.
- Bug-A-Salt, it's like the guy
that would leave dejected from Shark Tank.
Like I didn't get a vote, what?
Alright third one, Aliens and UFOs.
A small business 'making gray alien dolls
and selling UFO/alien related products.'
Started by a retired grandmother.
- Oh, did it get funded?
On that one I'm gonna guess no.
- It was not, you are correct.
- Wow.
- I feel bad for the grandmother.
- Yeah.
- But what are you gonna do?
- It's okay, she was able to do early product validation,
I'm sure she moved on to something.
- You did great, you got three out of three so far.
- Okay.
- We're going into advanced stuff now though.
- Oh boy.
- So this next question,
I'm gonna read three campaigns to you,
one of them is fake.
The other two are real Indiegogo campaigns
that were on the site.
So you're not choosing funded or not funded,
these are just three campaigns, which one's fake.
First one, a new tooth.
A YouTuber raised money for his broken tooth.
He broke his front tooth in half one weekend.
He said it was 'gross'
and that it was 'nearly impossible to eat sandwiches.'
He has no dental insurance
and it's gonna cost him 'an insane amount of money,'
so of course he turned to Indiegogo.
Second one, or do you wanna make a judgment right now
on whether that's true.
- No I'd like to hear all three.
One is not true of the three, correct?
- Correct.
Second one, a self-declared lifelong introvert
got a notification that it was the birthday
of a high school classmate who he hated.
He set out to create an app
that would help you mute all birthday notifications.
Where the app couldn't just mute them for you,
it would recommend turning off certain notifications
in apps or deleting certain calendars.
Birthday notification muting.
- Okay.
- And the last one is the Audiopill.
You swallow this pill and it starts beating
at a certain number of beats per minute.
It's a techno party in your stomach
that you can't escape.
The creator says that 'the beating
within your abdomen induces a unique feeling
of restlessness, amazement, and elation.'
The battery lasts for only ten hours
but it can be switched off after you swallow it.
- Wow.
- One, two, three.
So those are three campaigns.
Which one's the fake?
- Which one's fake?
- Is it the new tooth,
the birthday muting idea, or the Audiopill?
- I'm gonna go out on a limb,
I'm gonna guess the birthday muting is the fake one.
- And you would be correct.
That is the fake campaign.
- Wow.
- Very confident.
Did you know the other two?
Have you even heard of those?
I feel like the Audiopill might have gotten around.
- I vaguely remember the Audiopill.
There may have been Food and Drug Administration
concerns (laughs) played into that one.
- I believe that,
I could see how that could happen.
- Yes.
- Okay so you got four out of five.
- Wow.
- We're going to the bonus round.
This is it, the last question.
So this is the tough one.
- We can't just stop right now.
I can't just take my money...
- (laughs) You can bank it.
No we gotta go, we gotta do this.
- Alright.
- We're on this journey together now.
- Okay.
- Okay, which Indiegogo campaign,
of these three that I'm going to mention.
Which Indiegogo campaign did I back?
- Oh, that's a great one!
- Me, which one did Pete Pachal,
host of MashTalk, back?
Was it the Banana Phone?
A yellow, 'banana shaped, Bluetooth enabled,
mobile hand set that connects to your smart phone.'
It's 'a phone with appeal.'
Was it the Morpher folding bicycle helmet?
It is said to be the 'world's first fold-flat helmet.
Morpher folds and unfolds quickly and simply
so it's perfect for cyclists who wanna carry
a helmet more easily,'
or was it Super Troopers 2?
The 2018 sequel to the 2001 film Super Troopers.
A cult comedy from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe.
It's all about the high jinks
of the Vermont State Troopers.
Which campaign did I back?
Was it the Banana Phone,
was it the Morpher folding bicycle helmet,
or was it Super Troopers 2,
which came out early this year.
- Oh, Pete I'm gonna go with a testament
to you on this one.
I'm gonna guess, you look like a fairly fit guy to me,
I'm gonna guess that you are somebody
that travels to work by bicycle
and you went with the Morpher foldable bike helmet.
- And it was the Morpher!
- Wow.
- Dave, you got five out of five!
You nailed it, you aced our test.
- This is amazing.
Where do I claim my prizes?
Is that somewhere just outside the studio?
Or do they have to be shipped to me?
- Yeah we're gonna need some help with that shipping,
I think you guys...
- Alright, so I leave my address?
- Exactly, maybe we need to get plugged
into your marketing and all that stuff.
- I can do that, I'll leave our address
so our whole team can share.
- Yeah we're gonna need some help on that,
but congratulations.
Thanks again for coming in
and answering all our questions,
including the silly ones,
and letting us know about what the future's in store
for Indiegogo in crowdfunding.
- Okay, sounds wonderful Pete, this was great.
Thank you.
- Alright, thank you.
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