The Ledger
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Rubin: Indiegogo missed owning crowdfunding by obsessing over unit economics
“We were in the position to own all of them, and, you know, we decided that we had to think too much about unit economics and profitability, and I think that's a shame.”
Rubin: Indiegogo board replaced him as CEO after growth debate
“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”
Rubin: Replacing founders too early handicaps a company's potential
“If you take out a founder too early, I do think you handicap the potential of the future of that company. And I think you see that with some of the results of Indiegogo.”
Rubin: Kickstarter did not scale as rapidly as it could have
“Kickstarter comes out, they have a good design experience, they have a curated product, so it's easier to just have upfront positive stories, but they definitely don't scale as rapidly as they could either.”
Ringelman: Traditional gatekeeper financing locks out audience demand
“And that was the moment that I realized that there was
A huge room of people that wanted this thing to happen, yet they didn't have the power to make it happen, and it was all dependent on one person to say yes. And that was the inequity that drove me to even…”
Rubin: Bootstrapped founders have no runway except willingness to push
“The way people think about running out of gas is they actually look at their gas tank and they actually look at the meter go down. So eventually the meter is at zero. So they now have no gas, but if you have no meter, nothing gets to go down. You only get to d…”
Ringelman: Curating campaigns would violate Indiegogo's open platform mission
“Philosophically, we couldn't become the gatekeeper. Otherwise, what's the point of all of this?”
Rubin: Indiegogo received 93 investor rejections before first check
“Yeah, we got 93 no's before we got a yes.”
Heath: Bombas emailed 12,000 scraped Gmail contacts to launch crowdfunding campaign
“I found a way to download my entire Gmail contact database. And I don't mean like just the people that are like in my contacts. I mean, every single person that I'd ever emailed with ever in my Gmail, you can like find a way to do this in Gmail. And I remember…”
Indiegogo co-founders each committed $30,000 of their own money to launch
“I remember each of us committing 30,000 dollars of our own money, which was a big chunk of our savings, or at least for me.”
Ringelman: Indiegogo initially explored equity investments and SEC exemptions
“We also did explore, is there any SEC loopholes we could get around? So at the, and when we were first starting, we were actually, we're thinking investments, like full on investment.”
Rubin: Indiegogo always planned expanding beyond film, copying Amazon playbook
“Since day one, the idea was to democratize it for all funding ideas. We just started with film because trying to take a, you know, page out of the playbook of Amazon, you know, starting with books only and then expanding to other stuff.”
Rubin: Most Series A partner meetings resulted in same-day term sheets
“In the same day, most of them will come back with yeses and term sheets, et cetera.”
Walker: Fans crowdfunded her debut book tour via Indiegogo
“They actually did an Indiegogo fundraiser to send me on tour to get to go and meet all of these people when this book came out, because there was no marketing budget for it, and there was no PR budget for it.”
David Heath had $18,000 in credit card debt at Bombas's launch
“I think by the time we launched on Indiegogo, I had about, I don't know, 12 to 18,000 dollars of credit card debt.”
Rad Power Bikes raised $320,000 in pre-orders in 30 days on Indiegogo
“Within 30 days, right, we had done, I think over 300 people had signed up, so we did 320,000 dollars in pre-orders.”
Indiegogo turned down early pre-launch investment offers at low valuations
“We got offered some money and we turned it down. We were like, we don't need your money at a low valuation.”
Indiegogo operated without raising outside funding for three years
“We actually didn't raise a dime for, was it four years? Three years.”
Bombas founders spent three months writing their Indiegogo campaign script
“It took Three months for us to write that and something today that would take, you know, three hours for a copywriter to do, but it was putting all of our ideas down on paper in the right way and getting our storytelling, you know, around this product that we …”